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Managing my personal knowledge base

tkainrad.dev

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Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#131

Post by pensatoio »

erikbye wrote: post #60
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…

> Don't bookmark. Instead: Print to PDF. I "print" to markdown instead, even though pdfgrep sort of works I much prefer text files.

That’s a great idea! How do you go about it?

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#132

Post by yters »

thanatropism wrote: post #119
nickjj wrote: post #97

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 tog…

I'm experimenting with a single 500K+ line-long flat text file for EVERYTHING, from dream journalling to work email drafts to blog posts etc. -- I've even copied math from my home whiteboard in latex -- screw rendering, I'll transcribe them back when I need them. At one point I was trying to do a Luhmann's Zettelkasten with one note per txt file, internal linking, etc. I concatenated every piece of txt content I had.…

I came to the same conclusion: a massive flat text file in emacs. I was using orgmode for a bit, but it was too convoluted. I have a very simple markup to identify TODO items with [ ], and I nest contiguous items with { }, making it easy to navigate chunks with emacs. I then have 3 keyboard macros to mark/unmark and move the TODO items into a DONE section. It's simple enough I can recreate the system from scratch in a few minutes when I'm at a new terminal.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#134

Post by mkl »

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 disagree completely. I wouldn't trust anything important to OneNote, and it's hard to get things out of it again, too. Your notes are basically locked in. You can sort of print to PDF, but it uses different pagination to the original PDFs you annotate! PDFs are inserted as bitmap images instead of vector format, and text is only sometimes searchable.

OneNote has a really scary number of obvious bugs, with pen input especially. Writing disappears immediately or jumps left and right, the document randomly stops updating the screen, the program gets stuck in a high-CPU loop making huge input lag and needs restarting, selecting writing doesn't select what you draw around but a smaller area inside that, etc. It's incredibly frustrating and difficult compared to the Android pen-based notes app I use, Squid (which has a much narrower focus, but is much better at it).

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#135

Post by nrjames »

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…

Devonthink[1] seems like a good personal database, but it's Apple only. I'm in a situation where I'm trying to coordinate a few academic projects with people from multiple institutions and I have yet to find a tool that supports our need. If Basecamp had better integration with Google Docs and Google Sheets, it might work. However, the need to have multiple people review and comment on MS/Google Docs leaves the team with project artifacts scattered all over everywhere. I'll have to take a look at Notion.

[1]https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonthink

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#136

Post by phreack »

nickjj wrote: post #97

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 tog…

Tangentially related, but after years of trying out (and struggling with) hundreds of calendar and schedule apps, in the end what was best for me turned out to be a simple text file that I keep updating and look at each day. A line on it represents a day and begins with (dd/mm), and events for the day are plaintext separated by commas. Each day gone by gets erased. Absolutely zero friction and I can see an entire month of stuff at a glance so I'm always aware of what to do. Can't believe it took me so long to go back to such bare basics, and now I strive to reach this level of brutal basic frictionless simplicity in my own toy projects.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#137

Post by nickjj »

phreack wrote: post #136
nickjj wrote: post #97

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 tog…

Tangentially related, but after years of trying out (and struggling with) hundreds of calendar and schedule apps, in the end what was best for me turned out to be a simple text file that I keep updating and look at each day. A line on it represents a day and begins with (dd/mm), and events for the day are plaintext separated by commas. Each day gone by gets erased. Absolutely zero friction and I can see an entire mon…

Brutal basic frictionless simplicity is a good way to put it haha.

That's basically what this script does except it uses separate files. You run `notes something really cool and important` and it creates a YYYY-MM-DD.txt file for you in a configured directory and appends the arguments to the file on a new line. So every day you get a new file.

Or, if you just run `notes` it opens your configured $EDITOR for that specific day so you can go free form.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#138

Post by bachmeier »

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…

I did. I created a simple html form to input/edit/enter queries, and I had an html index holding common database queries. It worked extremely well as far as that goes, and it only took 90 minutes or so to get it working, so really a trivial setup cost.

There were two things I didn't like about it. I realized that browsability is really important - an SQL database works well if you know what to query, but it's just easier to have an old Yahoo-style index. I went with a wiki approach instead. The other thing is that it's easy to use version control with a pile of text files, but not so much with a database.

These days I do have some things in a "database" but that is a big text file that I query using Linux tools like grep and sed. Does everything I need and plays well with version control.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#139

Post by yoran »

hohloma wrote: post #59
analog31 wrote: post #33

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.

Try Joplin, its a direct replacement for EverNote, can import its database, and has active development to add more similar function. The only one that I'm missing right now is OCR, not sure if its coming, though. I'm using dropbox to sync my phone with laptop clients. https://joplinapp.org/

+1 for Joplin. I've been using it for over a year now and I love how I maintain control over my notes because in the end, they're just Markdown stored on Dropbox. And you can change backend at any time.
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