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Managing my personal knowledge base

tkainrad.dev

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Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#121

Post by hexmiles »

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…

Yes, but there are no good tool to do it. In my case i need to store a a lot of structured data and files. So i need a Document manager / Database. It's hard...

I started with excel a lot of year ago, migrated to access and now i'm trying nixoxdb for android (the only other acceptable alternative was mobidb).

The main problem is the ease to use, you need to create a table for everything you want to store, and nothing support an hybrid free-form AND structured data(while also been able to store files), so the solutions with good text editing are terrible at structured data and viceversa.

Other problem are the ability to sync or even open the database in more than a couple of platform and the ability to access the file embedded in the database from other application (there are others but this are the one that bother me the most).

I'm also evaluating notion, but i really don't want a cloud service since i store basically everything inside my main database and the ability to access years from now is a MUST.

Also i still not have a good solution for my email that are stored mostly in thunderbird and only some message are "exported" to my main database.

I'm thinking of building something myself based on sqlite, .net, dokan/fuse and something similar to syncthing. But it's a big project and i don't have a lot of time

edit: couple of fixes

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#122

Post by interfixus »

My note app hopping days ended the moment I first encountered Joplin, which I now use for almost all my writing.

Killer feature being the encrypted sync via more or less any kind of storage back end (where presently I use Box via WebDav, but that's easily switched). Seemless work across all my devices, all data in nice and portable markdown.

It fits my needs so well that I have taken the extraordinary step of allowing the desktop version on my pc's, even though it is Electron based.

https://joplinapp.org/

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#123

Post by agbell »

I like plain text backed in google drive. I use The Archive [0] but Notational Velocity [1] is popular as well. I don't have a bookmark system though. This book is an excellent explanation of a plain text knowledge base system [2].

[0] https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/

[1] https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

[2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1542866502/

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#124

Post by Pamar »

Terretta wrote: post #112
Pamar wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been perpetually sitting on the fence about Devon. My use case: before Google+ folded I saved all my history there, because 99% of this was links to pages on stuff I found interesting/fun/relevant. So now I have a large amount of urls (some will probably be defunct by now but it is not relevant). What I would like to do is to feed these urls to something (DevonThink?) that could access the article, and index i…

Maybe https://www.stclairsoft.com/HistoryHound/index.html or https://historio.us

Thanks a lot, I will check these which are totally new to me.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#125

Post by marvinblum »

We have build Emvi[1] to solve many of the problems when it comes to managing a long living personal or teams knowledge base. The idea is, just as you describe in your blog post with notions tables, that if you can remember a fraction of the information you're looking for, you can find it using text search, filters and sorting. A fixed structure won't cut it when you have to maintain it for a long time and I believe it's better to add meta data (like tags) to make it searchable. Emvi has a free tier with way higher limits than notion, so that should work for most personal knowledge bases.

[1] https://emvi.com

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#127

Post by w_t_payne »

HSO wrote: post #103
w_t_payne wrote: post #99

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 readth…

Sounds good. How do you handle cases where the same document fits multiple categories (ie belongs in multiple locations of your hierarchy at once)? Ps. Another question: can you tell which nlp libs are best for this purpose in your experience (and how do you eventually search the generated index?)

I can have multiple copies of the same document in the system. My notes are associated with documents via md5 hash, so it'll link them with all copies that are present. At some point I'll get the script to automatically hardlink or symlink duplicates. To be honest though, trying to decide which location best fits a document is quite a good way to engage with the document content -- so even though decisions are often suboptimal, it isn't really the final hierarchy which is the product here, it's what goes on in my brain during the process of trying to organize the papers. As far as the NLP libs question is concerned -- so far this is just an excuse for me to play with SpaCy .... I'm still at quite an early stage and haven't made much progress (my background is more machine vision than NLP - which I haven't touched since I was an undergrad 20 years ago).

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#128

Post by chacha2 »

tkainrad wrote: post #80
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.

It might as well not be there if there's no way to opt out of the cookie. It's not GDPR compliant either way.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#129

Post by dope9967 »

loriverkutya wrote: post #114
dope9967 wrote: post #98

Google Keep is pretty awesome for notes. Has a good search, supports tagging, can pin, manually order notes, create calendar reminders from them, attach images, colors. Supports plain text notes and checklists. Also, there's not only a web app but desktop and phone ones too.

And it’s all gone, when they shut it down.

True. There is an export option for notes in Google Keep, and I don't think they will just shut the service down instantly without warning. I guess there's no silver bullets, every option sucks in a way. You go oldschool with a text document or directory structure, you loose out on usability, if you use any of the services there's a risk of them being shutdown, or you host some service yourself and take on costs of doing so.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#130

Post by HSO »

w_t_payne wrote: post #127
HSO wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds good. How do you handle cases where the same document fits multiple categories (ie belongs in multiple locations of your hierarchy at once)? Ps. Another question: can you tell which nlp libs are best for this purpose in your experience (and how do you eventually search the generated index?)

I can have multiple copies of the same document in the system. My notes are associated with documents via md5 hash, so it'll link them with all copies that are present. At some point I'll get the script to automatically hardlink or symlink duplicates. To be honest though, trying to decide which location best fits a document is quite a good way to engage with the document content -- so even though decisions are often…

Very interesting, thanks for your answer. good point too abt using the rigidity as a forcing function for yourself.

I have quite a big system myself, using bibdesk as my interface to filesystem, and searchability would be very nice indeed. Atm i only use default system tools like spotlight (macos) or mdfind. More custom nlp solution, your post inspires me to think more harder abt that.

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