Managing my personal knowledge base

I think Markdown does qualify as machine-readable. There are very good libraries to do all kinds of things with it.

Edit: I guess you meant human-readable as opposed to things like base64, and not as a critique against Markdown.

By now, there are several unofficial APIs at least, for read-access they are quite good apparently, did not yet use one myself though. E.g. https://github.com/kjk/notionapi

I have a single God ReadMe file in which I try to record all the facts that I should know and 'recipes' that I might need to follow again. Such as that shutting down windows does not dispose of kernel state whereas restart does. Or how to do a certain task on the income tax site or how to set up an odbc datasource in Windows. I've been keeping this file for years and I periodically read through it as much to remind myself of what's in it as anything else. It's saved me a lot of frustration when finding myself having to do things again that I know it took me ages to figure out the previous time but I have since forgotten.

I like the Plain Text Project's philosophy. https://plaintextproject.online/

A tool is great for collaboration, but how much do you really need for a personal KB? And how much effort do you want to spend migrating?

Then there's vendor lock-in, learning curves, etc.

A well-organized directory structure with plain text files gives you a data store that won't become obsolete and can be used on any OS. I use CLI tools to search (e.g., grep) and that's all the features I need right there.

Does anyone else use plain text notes for everything?

I've tried to optimize things so that while working, I can get things jotted down with close to zero resistance. If the barrier of entry is too high then I don't bother doing it.

That means often being able to spawn a new terminal, write a command and be done with it. Or to be able to pipe something from my clipboard into an auto-dated file.

I ended up putting together this ~15 line Bash script which seems to do the trick: https://github.com/nickjj/notes

I've been using plain text notes since 2001, although I only recently created this script. So far so good.

I've got a hybrid system.

Academic papers, standards documents, white papers etc... get downloaded as PDF and renamed according to a (human-readable) standard scheme that I use (year, title, [author(s)], [paper-type]), and stored in a 'meaningful' filesystem hierarchy. Podcasts and some videos are also stored in the same hierarchy.

Documentation for the software libraries and APIs that I use is downloaded from readthedocs (where possible) and stored in a parallel system that takes account of versioning. (So I can concurrently store differently versioned copies of the documentation for a single library).

I have a simple python script that iterates through my directory hierarchy and produces a sqlite database and a couple of xlsx files with a row-per document (one spreadsheet for reporting document-management metadata and another that allows me to assign labels and write precis notes). The script also extracts the content of the PDFs as plain-text and feeds some NLP tools that I'm playing with.

I use the spreadsheets to keep notes on the files, and the act of manually renaming and sorting the PDFs into the 'right' place in the hierarchy helps me to understand what's in them and remember what I've got. (I'm constantly reorganising the hierarchy as my understanding develops and evolves. My python script keeps everything -- notes and documents and other metadata - in sync).

So far this has scaled OK to around 26,000 PDFs.