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Managing my personal knowledge base

tkainrad.dev

101–110 of 187 posts

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#101
For this I use Notable[0] with its data directory located in a GitLab repo. A combination of Markdown and Git with Notable's impressive UI. You can also use any cloud drive, Cryptomator vault, etc. for the storage backend.

Notable's categories (tags) for me include things like manpage snippets, code snippets, workspaces/scratchpads, thoughts, etc.

Of note, a lot of the things in my head that I need to jot down on my mobile, even at length, are usually stored in Simplenote[1] then transferred to Notable if they're important enough, via Simplenote's desktop app.

[0] https://notable.md [1] https://simplenote.com

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#102
It's too much for me, I couldn't be productive when using few services to store notes. Too much distractions.

For my personal needs I use https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki for notes, ideas, todos, articles etc. I used Buku for few years, but then I realised that I'm not using any bookmarks at all, so moved to native Safari Bookmarks. :)

At the end I'm using GIT to have complete archive of each change. :)

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#103

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?)

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#104
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 use emacs org mode which stores every thing in a text file.The text file is fully human readable even without emacs. Its has few rules that makes the collapsing the parts of the text file. One of the main rule is any line that starts with asterik followed by space ("* ") is interpreted as heading and the whole heading can be collapsed.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#105
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 kept having sync problems with OneNote so I had to ditch it and started using evernote instead.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#107
post #64
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to get a Surface and use OneNote -- especially because it has excellent support for hand-written notes (and I much prefer hand-writing to typing). However, I'm hit in the face with two problems: 1. Uncertainty about data export. I don't want to be stuck depending on a third-party proprietary solution for something so important to me. (That said, Microsoft is typically quite good about supporting products…

Re 1. I would really not recommend using OneNote. I recently closed an Office 365 Business account and tried to move my notes on similar topics, e.g. pros/cons and how-tos of using different tools, from a group OneNote page to my own and it was very difficult to do so. The documentation isn't very good (it's unclear which version) and I ended up having to install the local version on my Mac and manually copy/past the…

At that point Emacs- org mode must be optimal for the use case

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#108
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 profita…

Have you actually done an export of your Notion workspace? I looked at their options before using Notion and was happy they had a full export available - but then I actually went ahead and used it because they are putting zero focus into improving the performance of the apps - and the export format is a horrific mess! They split out code blocks from your notes in separate notes, the filenames are a mess and images ar…

Why save images inline? The src wouldn’t be human readable if it’s base 64 encoded.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#109
post #69

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.

Fully agree. I was turned off notion for the same reason and reverted back to self-hosting dokuwiki. A much more limited feature set, to be sure, but at least I'll still have my notes 10 years from now.

If there was an open source notion, where would you prefer storage to take place? BYOFS?
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