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Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

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Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#161

Post by dade_ »

DelightOne wrote: post #152
jasode wrote: post #55

>collected a large amount of ebooks, papers, articles, movies, pictures, etc. (all digital). Since you mentioned those specific examples, I see a commonality and so I'm going to assume you're primarily concerned about organizing files that are not authored/generated by you . (Except possibly pictures/photos since you might be talking about jpgs from your personal iPhone or digital camera.) This distinction is key bec…

> they do have very good "web clipping" functionality. Are there services for this where you can link in your own backend?

Joplin supports nextcloud, dropbox, onedrive personal.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#162

Post by dade_ »

inawarminister wrote: post #143
I_complete_me wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

zim-wiki for me, absolutely. Text-based, offline, decent plugins, cross-platform, easy. What I love is that if zim is not available I can use Sublime Text to view and navigate as a near replacement as long as the SidebarEnhancements plugin is installed. I stand by the supremacy of zim-wiki although it does lack "pretty".

Do any of you sync your Zim/open it from mobile, specifically Android? I've been using Zim for a few days now and it works well, but would be much better if I can access the database while on the go...

I used zim for a while, then switched to Joplin. Huge fan, cli, modern and mobile interfaces. Choose your own storage. open sourcen

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#163

Post by megous »

I'm not sure why noone in 150 comments recommended RDBMS yet, but it's great way to store information in general. I put a lot of personal things into RDBMS either imported from external sources, or added manually: invoices, double accounting, time tracking info/worklogs, bank account records, phone company records, passwords, email, irc/chat logs, things to download, things I bought in aliexpress incl. description and images, links I liked, scraped backups of my data from SaaS services I have to use...

It's replicated from SSD to HDD on the same computer immediately (I use PostgreSQL replication and run multiple servers locally), so if one of those fails I lose nothing.

If I ever want gui or cli tool it's easy to hack up electron app or PHP/node cli script in an hour or so. DB access is much easier than parsing text files. It's easy to extend (add columns/tables) without messing with some random txt format.

You can also much more easily answer questions about your personal data by just firing up a psql and writing a quick SQL query with a much better chance of finding an answer to wider range of questions without resorting to actual programming/scripting.

You have to write some schema, so that naturally brings some organization to your knowledge as you have to think about it.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#164

Post by dade_ »

ajmarsh wrote: post #86
bcheung wrote: post #81

Would help us to know more about the specific use case and goal you had in mind. For now, generically speaking, I use OneNote for keeping track of my own generated ideas and pasting in things from other sources. For larger media I recommend having a network drive or using Dropbox. I'm happy with OneNote. For my more technical ideas where I'm brainstorming I have a nice leather journal (no lines) that I use for brains…

I loved OneNote until I tried to put some code snippets into it. Somehow over time they become unusable for cut and paste into *nix systems. Did you find a way to overcome this? I have no time to dos2unix everything.

OneNote even has a code format, but it still messes with capitalization. I gave up when MS announced mobile only and the desktop app is done.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#165

Post by dade_ »

tmoravec wrote: post #21

I use OneNote currently. Dump (almost) everything in there. The UX leaves something to be desired - Evernote is so much better. Shame that Evernote kept losing my data. And Google Drive for the "larger” and better organized stuff like photos, e-books, or invoices.

Try Onetastic, the calendar feature has saved me countless hours. Desktop app only though.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#168

Post by bfirsh »

kepano wrote: post #138
justinnhli wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you say more about how you use Airtable? To me Airtable has a really appealing low/zero startup cost, but then I'm always tripped up by not being able to do arbitrary queries, joins, etc. to create new views.

I use Airtable for "quantified self" type things like logging workouts and health metrics, also tracking reviews of books and movies, planning travel, and anything that I would otherwise use spreadsheets for. By the way, you can do simple joins in Airtable by using the "lookup" and "rollup" field types, but I agree that it is relatively limited in that respect.

I use Airtable for this stuff too. Unfortunately it doesn’t work offline (not even reads!) so I’m very close to reverting back to spreadsheets.

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#169

Post by haney »

petra wrote: post #104
haney wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't had issues with synonyms specifically, my praise for it comes more from it copying the full text of websites when I clip them and parsing the contents of hand written OCR scanned notes and being able to search over those.

are you a paying or free user?

Paying

Re: Ask HN: How to organize personal knowledge?

#170

Post by minikomi »

lgessler wrote: post #20

Org-mode. Since it's a plaintext format it's easily searchable, and it's the most feature complete and ergonomic piece of software I've ever used for task tracking and knowledge management (including MediaWiki, TiddlyWiki, Google Docs, Evernote, plain txts, and more). One major pain point: no totally seamless mobile sync that I'm aware of. I just write things down in Google Keep and transcribe them when I'm on my lap…

I use termux, along with dropbox and dropsync, to keep my org folder synced. It required me customizing a lot of evil-mode commands to use the basic android keyboard, but it's working out great now. Heavy leveraging of org-mode templates is key.
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