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
Looks great, I really like the note map feature.
Managing my personal knowledge base
151–160 of 187 posts
Re: Managing my personal knowledge base
#152Don'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.
I'm also interested in how you go about this. Evernote and Notion have good clippers, but I'd rather not rely on them. I tried to use markdownifier[0] for a while, but images are hotlinked and will break if the site goes down. I should really just write my own clipper that does this, but I haven't found the time yet.
Re: Managing my personal knowledge base
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always thought of PDF as an opaque format. How do you search and/or browse your collection? Does the subject show up in grep [e: without being diligent with filenames]?
I (*nix user) use a script that basically does: pdftotext -layout -eol unix -nopgbrk $PDF | egrep ... Many PDFs have compressed content streams, plain text utilities only see metadata in that case. Cached, compressed text-only output is usually tiny, and can be zgrep-ed. pdfinfo shows document metadata (title, subject, keywords and more), but it's quite uncommon for these to be useful (Adobe and LᴬTᴇX-sourced PDFs te…
This great; thanks for sharing!
Re: Managing my personal knowledge base
#154Don'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…
I've always disliked pdfs - they just seem too, i don't know, obscure or scrambly/messy, maybe? However, i have recently seriously considered beginning to archive instead of bookmarking. I would prefer archiving as plain text (for easier searching and compressing, etc.)...but enough content that i consume (and wish to archive) contains media (mostly imagery, not really much video), so i guess printing to pdf is more convenient for the "capture" phase. The one concern i have is storage...I mean how much storage would bloated pdfs have to use up i wonder (as opposed to, say, leaner plain text)?? Legitimate concern, not trying to be facetious. I've also heard there's some sort of web archive file format - .warc or something? If so, i hope that becomes an established thing - maybe bst of all worlds...at least for this archiving use-case.
Re: Managing my personal knowledge base
#155What I would love is a full personal CMS type system, where I can have a subject like "cybersecurity" or "cooking" and I can add bookmarks, notes, pdfs, and they're all treated equally and as first class objects in the system. I would love a system that treats all media the same as just a source of knowledge instead of being hung up on the source type i.e. is it a video, or a book mark or a pdf....
I have been using a text file (actually an org mode file) since 2009. Before that I used a plain text file. It doesn't handle video/bookmark/pdf. If I have to save those, I put them in a separate directory and make a note of it in the text file. It's pretty well organized, thanks to org mode. It has a section that is by date, like journal entries, and a section that's by topic. Since it's just a single file, it's ver…
> It doesn't handle video/bookmark/pdf. If I have to save those, I put them in a separate directory and make a note of it in the text file...
I've used a similar system in the past (though not based on org mode), but was too brittle if/when "links" broke or were altered. For an over simplistic example, if the references that you made to a video within your master text file(s) breaks because the video's containing folder name has changed even slightly, well that becomes annoying. For a small number of references, types of destination media types, etc., maybe not an issue, but after some point, it can become too much maintenance/annoyance. Is this an issue that you encounter? If so, do you have mitigations for avoiding/resolving the broken links? Just curious.
Re: Managing my personal knowledge base
#156This has been a workflow that served me well for the last couple of years -
Most of my stuff is on dropbox/google drive for accessing them across different devices. I prefer tools that let me control where the data is and not the other way around.
For all academic papers, documents, I use Zotero. you can use your favorite pdf reader to annotate or take notes on pdf's and zotero will sync these. I also love the feature where Zotero can automatically extract all annotations from the pdf. (I some times save these as an org file)
If I am reading a longform web article or a blog post that I really think is useful and helpful, I also save these to Zotero. The push to kindle extension from fivefilters is an awesome tool that converts webpages to pdf.
I'm currently testing the memex extension from worldbrain to annotate and organize my browsing history.
For all notes, journals, random thoughts, ideas, (both work and personal), I use orgmode. (I recently switched from ZimWiki). Its been amazing so far. So many things are easier to do orgmode although the learning curve for emacs is pretty steep in the beginning.
On mobile, I use the orgzly app for accessing and taking notes! Its by far the best android app I use so far.
practices >> tools!
Re: Managing my personal knowledge base
#157A little surprised that after 64 comments I've only seen 2 instances of Evernote mentioned. I recently went back to using it and have been making use of the clipper fairly often. https://twitter.com/dalevross/status/1214257684863692806 https://www.evernote.com/l/AVVHBrGz_9BPMbh_Oxgp8qpibzVtX0tRn... I also found https://dabble.me/ the other day which seemed like a nice slot in for quick thoughts with the ability to em…
Evernote was useful 10 years ago.
Would you like to elaborate on what changed over the last 10 years to make it no longer useful?
Re: Managing my personal knowledge base
#158Does 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 orgmode and emacs for everything plain text!
Re: Managing my personal knowledge base
#159Does 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…
Yes; I've been using Notational Velocity for years. It gives just enough automatic structure (it's almost like a box filled with index cards, though the size of the note is unlimited) without having to actually fiddle with files. It's effortless to create new entries and incredibly easy to find things again later.
Re: Managing my personal knowledge base
#160I 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
This is seriously an amazing piece of software! Thanks for that.