Managing my personal knowledge base • Hacker News Board

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#71

Post by twknotes » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 8:45 AM UTC

bnj wrote: 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…

Twinkle Notes (currently in beta) is close to what you just described. It has a local encrypted sqlite3 database. You need a host (paid) to sync across devices, otherwise it's free to use on any device: https://twinkle.app Please reach to us at support@twinkle.app if you need a free token to try syncing.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#72

Post by tkainrad » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 8:47 AM UTC

travolter wrote: post #65

Why would you store all of this valuable information in a proprietary tool? What happens when notion shuts down, jacks up prices, makes feature changes you don't like, etc etc? Make some attempt to migrate all this data? It's gonna be hard to do this in an automated way, if they even have an (export) api for this. I'm using (vim)wiki/gollum and I feel much safer about my data.

Obviously, you have a point. I am indeed a little bit worried.

Some things that ease my mind:

Notion's export and backup features are quite good. You can export everything in various formats, markdown being the most relevant for me. This only becomes messy with complex databases that use formulas and are related to each other. You would not have these with local solutions in the first place.

Notion is already profitable and growing rapidly, I do not see them shutting down in the foreseeable future. However, the other concerns are relevant.

The API is supposed to be released soon. I intend to either build a backup workflow myself or use other tools that will get developed then.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#73

Post by tkainrad » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 8:52 AM UTC

Xunxi wrote: 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 am sure that there are things OneNote is even better at than Notion.

However, some of the most important concepts covered in my post are databases, relations between those databases, and editing workflows (markdown, slash commands). As far as I can tell, OneNote does not even attempt to do these things.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#74

Post by dross » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 8:55 AM UTC

A little surprised that after 64 comments I've only seen 2 instances of Evernote mentioned. I recently went back to using it and have been making use of the clipper fairly often. https://twitter.com/dalevross/status/1214257684863692806 https://www.evernote.com/l/AVVHBrGz_9BPMbh_Oxgp8qpibzVtX0tRn...

I also found https://dabble.me/ the other day which seemed like a nice slot in for quick thoughts with the ability to email to your journal. I've heard that journaling manually works better but I really dislike writing unless necessary.

One of my biggest gripes is with how many places I have my data in currently, and as a dev, I should have done something already but that's another story.

I'll definitely have a look at Notion and org-mode having read the feedback here along with a few other mentions elsewhere.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#75

Post by tkainrad » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 9:02 AM UTC

bnj wrote: 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…

During my first weeks of Notion usage, I was repeatedly baffled that I never thought more about personal usage of relational databases, as they make so much sense for organizing notes, and many other things.

Having Notion, and also other alternatives, this does not seem viable anymore to me. For example, when I want to edit the "Post" column of my bookmarks database, where I relate blog posts to bookmarks, I just start to type and Notion will suggest matching posts. I can not think of any SQLite frontend that offers such usability features, which is not surprising, as they are clearly not built for using them as personal knowledge base GUIs.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#76

Post by tkainrad » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 9:04 AM UTC

missosoup wrote: post #49

Noumenon72 wrote: post #24

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 an…

I fully agree with this sentiment. It is very important to not have the feeling that you need to revisit all your bookmarks. In that case, you will eventually feel overwhelmed and a bookmarks library will do more harm than good.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#77

Post by tkainrad » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 9:08 AM UTC

svnpenn wrote: post #21

Where is source code for this blog?

You can get the general theme here:

https://github.com/luizdepra/hugo-coder/

My blog itself is not open source. I thought about this for a while, but I think the pressure to keep everything cleaned up, documented, and organized is not worth the benefits in this case. If you have some specific requests, feel free to get in touch and I might be able to help you.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#78

Post by heavenlyblue » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 9:10 AM UTC

dross wrote: post #74

A little surprised that after 64 comments I've only seen 2 instances of Evernote mentioned. I recently went back to using it and have been making use of the clipper fairly often. https://twitter.com/dalevross/status/1214257684863692806 https://www.evernote.com/l/AVVHBrGz_9BPMbh_Oxgp8qpibzVtX0tRn... I also found https://dabble.me/ the other day which seemed like a nice slot in for quick thoughts with the ability to em…

Evernote was useful 10 years ago.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#79

Post by lloydatkinson » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 9:11 AM UTC

lcampbell wrote: post #56

fit2rule wrote: post #55

Don't bookmark. Instead: Print to PDF. I have every interesting article or web reference I've ever read since 1997, sitting in a PDF file alongside tens of thousands of others. It is so convenient to be able to "ls -l | grep subject" and find all the pages related to that subject, and then to mine the data out of the PDF's for further reference. Or, I just open the PDF and gain the knowledge again. This works very we…

I've always thought of PDF as an opaque format. How do you search and/or browse your collection? Does the subject show up in grep [e: without being diligent with filenames]?

I'd be interesting in knowing this too. It sounds like a good idea.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#80

Post by tkainrad » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 9:11 AM UTC

6nf wrote: post #20

Off topic sorry but why bother with the cookie agreement on the overlay footer like this? You are not giving users the ability to opt out so this just annoys people without making the website GDPR compliant.

I will soon disable this for non-EU visitors. A more sophisticated cookie agreement banner is not so trivial to do with static sites. As long as everybody is doing it this way, even big corporations, I will keep this approach for EU visitors.