Managing my personal knowledge base • Hacker News Board

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#171

Post by qot » Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 11:10 PM UTC

josephernest wrote: post #168

thanatropism wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 use the same method for years: big single .txt file, with hashtags that are CTRL+F searchable, exactly the same! Among all the organization/notetaking methods I've tried, this is really the best. No fancy app in the browser, but really effective and fast. I've written a small article about it here: https://illdoitlater.xyz/t/plaintext

> Cons: no sync with a mobile device

How do you access your notes on your phone? How do you edit?

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#172

Post by romwell » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 12:33 AM UTC

shakna wrote: post #68

hydrox24 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just download the HTML file and open it to 'run' it. Then, once you've made changes, use your browsers "save as" feature to save a copy. Everything is in browser. Other options do things like public hosting. Personally, I just use the HTML file with the Timimi Firefox plugin installed for autosaving the current file.

> use your browsers "save as" feature to save a copy > Don't attempt to use the browser File/Save menu option to save changes (it doesn't work) It looks like TiddlyWiki doesn't recommend that exact method anymore.

Sorry for the confusion. There's a button you press in Tiddly Wiki that generates a new HTML.

You "Save As.." that.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#173

Post by jgalt212 » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 12:41 AM UTC

larntz wrote: post #150

mkl wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My biggest issue with onenote is that you can no longer use local notebooks with the new versions. I'm stuck on onenote 2016 or all my local notebooks become read only. One drive is blocked at work so onenote is effectively useless to me now. For now, I've started moving my notes to a static site using hugo. It's a bit less convenient, but until I settle on a better permanent solution at least I have text files I can…

seriously.

it blows my mind that there is no good migration strategy for pc base OneNote databases to cloud based ones.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#174

Post by jlroger » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 1:29 AM UTC

Thanks for the post. Will check out Notion for sure. Although I'm a little worried about the vendor lock-in - as others have mentioned as well. Although I think it is ok to surrender some robustness for the ease of use.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#175

Post by svnpenn » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 2:26 AM UTC

tkainrad wrote: post #77

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.

I mean yeah, people might want you to do that, but you dont have to.

Its your life, and your code. You can post it, and keep it messy if you want to.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#176

Post by kuzimoto » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 3:10 AM UTC

qot wrote: post #171

josephernest wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the same method for years: big single .txt file, with hashtags that are CTRL+F searchable, exactly the same! Among all the organization/notetaking methods I've tried, this is really the best. No fancy app in the browser, but really effective and fast. I've written a small article about it here: https://illdoitlater.xyz/t/plaintext

> Cons: no sync with a mobile device How do you access your notes on your phone? How do you edit?

What about using syncthing? There are decent text editors for mobile.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#177

Post by j15t » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 4:34 AM UTC

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…

What software do you use to rename PDF files and extract their metadata automatically? I have found this difficult to accomplish, despite trying multiple different tools. PDFs from Arxiv are commonly a problem.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#178

Post by scambier » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 10:34 AM UTC

The_Colonel wrote: post #140

I was jumping from one note taking app to another before realizing I have to develop my own to be fully satisfied: https://github.com/zadam/trilium

That looks like an awesome software, and the doc is top notch. I'll try it during the next few weeks.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#179

Post by benhurmarcel » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 2:01 PM UTC

mkl wrote: post #134

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…

Yes, lock-in is a big problem we have with Onenote in my company, since Microsoft decided not to offer offline notes anymore. Lots of people have their notes locked-in that format and we cannot store that data on a third party server.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#180

Post by benhurmarcel » Sat, Jan 11, 2020, 2:26 PM UTC

inakarmacoma wrote: post #43

sandinmyjoints wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dynalist hits the right spot for me to manage my current work (tasks, quick notes…). Simple but flexible, extra features not overwhelming you if you don't need them. But their mobile app isn't great.