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Managing my personal knowledge base

tkainrad.dev

41–50 of 187 posts

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#41
post #29

I’d like to look into the features of notion more, but I can’t help but wonder why it isn’t more common to see people using a local SQLite database, or any other self hosted database, to serve as a personal knowledge base management system. A lot of the paid solutions I’ve seen seem to bend over backwards to offer a limited subset of the features that are trivially available in an actual database. Has anyone tried ou…

I have a postgres instance running somewhere that has a history of stuff that I've recorded.

The reason why one might choose not to do this is that a) it takes a bit of work to get syncing across devices, and b) it takes a bit of work to get markdown, images, search, videos etc working.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#43

I'm a huge fan of Org-mode and so far it's been the most persistent way to keep track of my knowledge base. I have a single file called "engineering-notebook" and I store pretty much everything in it: - bookmarks to resources - personal notes - personal tutorials/step-by-steps - cheatsheets It works fantastically for me

It’s all I need, I have tens of thousands of lines of notes at this point, can search them (text, regexes, tags, whatever) essentially instantly, can export to html or slides or pdf or $format, will never go down or close down or disappear behind a paywall, it’s perfect

Accessible mostly everywhere, but really exploring, manipulating content across mobile devices and operating systems gets pretty frustrating. Love it in theory, but DynaList is just so simple to use anywhere without a second thought.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#44

What I would love is a full personal CMS type system, where I can have a subject like "cybersecurity" or "cooking" and I can add bookmarks, notes, pdfs, and they're all treated equally and as first class objects in the system. I would love a system that treats all media the same as just a source of knowledge instead of being hung up on the source type i.e. is it a video, or a book mark or a pdf....

DynaList?

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#45

What I would love is a full personal CMS type system, where I can have a subject like "cybersecurity" or "cooking" and I can add bookmarks, notes, pdfs, and they're all treated equally and as first class objects in the system. I would love a system that treats all media the same as just a source of knowledge instead of being hung up on the source type i.e. is it a video, or a book mark or a pdf....

I have been using a text file (actually an org mode file) since 2009. Before that I used a plain text file. It doesn't handle video/bookmark/pdf. If I have to save those, I put them in a separate directory and make a note of it in the text file. It's pretty well organized, thanks to org mode. It has a section that is by date, like journal entries, and a section that's by topic. Since it's just a single file, it's ver…

But really working on the go with Android or iOS is painful, no?

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#46
post #42

See also Roam ( https://roamresearch.com )

Interesting. Does anybody know more about the project and the organisation? How do they keep their lights on?

They’re going to a monthly subscription model when they get out of beta.

https://twitter.com/conaw/status/1214855473876201472?s=21

“Still working out specifics

Right now looking like it'll be $30/month - cheaper for annual - cheaper for students/non-profits/unemployed

I personally think unemployed autodidacts should always get student benefits - scam that they don't”

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#47

I've mentioned this before, but I'd love to have a note taking app as convenient as EverNote, but that lets me insert code cells a la Jupyter notebook. I can barely think without Jupyter any more. Maybe that's not a good thing, but it's sure handy.

What do you use Jupyter for? Feel like I'm missing out. :)

Not OP but I also use jupyter for almost everything.

Jupyter notebooks are great for capturing thought process and showing intermediate state of whatever it is you're doing, which means coming back to them even years later it's a lot easier to recall your own thoughts and not have to reverse engineer a monolithic block of code.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#48
post #30

I use Microsoft's Onenote. You can literally do everything in the blog as well as audiovisual captures. All text is searchable. This video covers some of the things you can do with it in an academic setting but relatable. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JQD5c8A_D2g 0:33 - Math equations 1:45 - Replay text 2:45 - Ink to text 3:20 - Research tools 4:39 - Immersive reader 6:01 - Web clipper browser extension 7:12 - Save e…

I would love to get a Surface and use OneNote -- especially because it has excellent support for hand-written notes (and I much prefer hand-writing to typing). However, I'm hit in the face with two problems:

1. Uncertainty about data export. I don't want to be stuck depending on a third-party proprietary solution for something so important to me. (That said, Microsoft is typically quite good about supporting products for a long time)

2. I actually find Windows unpleasant to use, and much prefer linux. (Arch linux + i3/KDE happens to be my preferred setup).

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#49

The problem with bookmarks is you're never going to have time to reread the whole thing. I make a summary and put the source as a hyperlink so that if I summarized wrong I can go read it again. Summaries are better because you can organize summaries and have everything you know about enums together in a few pages, rather than 20 bookmarks.

You don't need to re-read all of your bookmarks. They're basically a hash table keyed by some concept or some problem that you either list elsewhere or remember in your head, that you can quickly use to pull up the full detail content for the given key. Much like the actual physical bookmarks that are just quick jump references to content you already know the summary of.

Don't use bookmarks as a 'I might come back and read this later'. Use them as 'I will need this later'.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#50
post #10

For managing a personal knowledge base, I highly recommend Tiddly Wiki[1] It's a self-contained Wiki/Notebook/Journal with tags, it works instantly, and all of it is in a single HTML file with magic JS in it. Or you can use it with a server. [1] https://tiddlywiki.com/

I use tiddlywiki with noteself on a self-hosted server.

how do you secure it, is it a long obfuscated URL?
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