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Unbundling Tools for Thought

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Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#161

Post by deafpolygon »

maire wrote: post #32

By coincidence I am moving off of Evernote right now. I broke down everything I used Evernote for right now to plan the roll off. I largely use EN for the GTD system. The first GTD step is just capturing info. EN still does this better than any other tool. EN used to be better at managing large data - but the last major release broke all that. For some reason they favored the new user over the power user. Some of the…

> EN seems to be the only tool that converts email to a note.

Do you keep the original mail format? As far as I can see (and I recall), Evernote just embeds the original mail and attaches an HTML copy as well (so you can view it).

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#162

Post by deafpolygon »

s3000 wrote: post #23

>How often, truly, do you find yourself wanting to link a task in your todo list app to a file in Dropbox Links are much more useful once notes and todo lists are shared and published. I am surprised that not all tools for thought have standardized on ActivityPub to enable their users to connect each other's notes. People with an account could correct mistakes or link to crucial knowledge that was overlooked. Like Wi…

> I am surprised that not all tools for thought have standardized on ActivityPub to enable their users to connect each other's notes.

Because most of my notes, and to-do lists are private. I don't want them to be shared, just available to me.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#163

Post by deafpolygon »

Ruq wrote: post #21

This fellow's system seems overcomplicated? For me, the benefit of linked knowledge is just that I tend to forget a LOT of things, including many details of things I've learned in the past. For me, the principles and concepts remain, but all the steps and "how to do X" vanish rather quickly. So having essentially a personal documentation database (using Obsidian) that I can quickly jump into to recall lost knowledge…

I do the same. Obsidian is just a pretty editor with a fast search/switcher, and everything beyond that is gravy. I find many people try to make it much more than it's capable of, and that's where we're running into problems.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#164

Post by [deleted] »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #62

I have a blog post that I've been sketching out in my head about this whole area of Tools for Thought, future of computing, cybernetics, etc. Basically I find that the thoughtleaders of this space seem to always claim that the true manifestation of their ideas is just out of reach (Project Xanadu, memex, object oriented programming, etc.), but then never deliver this true manifestation. Indeed it's rather remarkable…

[deleted]

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#165

Post by ElFitz »

jerf wrote: post #36
agileAlligator wrote: post #5

> Pointlessness of Organization: my Calibre and Zotero libraries are a mess. But is that bad? Is there any point to organizing them? I can always find what I need, either by searching or browsing, because I have a spatial sense of where each book is in Calibre’s big grid view. If I went through everything in Calibre and Zotero, and fixed the titles, added missing authors, publishers, publication years, fixed the cove…

About once every year or two, I remember something I read maybe 15 years ago and realize it would be absolutely perfect for some reason, but I can't find it. And being an engineer and an HN poster, my brain immediately leaps to "Oh, if only I ran a system that archived everything I browsed so I could build my own personal search engine that could search on just what I've ever looked at." Then I smack it down, because…

> "Oh, if only I ran a system that archived everything I browsed so I could build my own personal search engine that could search on just what I've ever looked at."

Well, that makes two of us.

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#166

Post by ryanfox »

ElFitz wrote: post #165
jerf wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About once every year or two, I remember something I read maybe 15 years ago and realize it would be absolutely perfect for some reason, but I can't find it. And being an engineer and an HN poster, my brain immediately leaps to "Oh, if only I ran a system that archived everything I browsed so I could build my own personal search engine that could search on just what I've ever looked at." Then I smack it down, because…

> "Oh, if only I ran a system that archived everything I browsed so I could build my own personal search engine that could search on just what I've ever looked at." Well, that makes two of us.

Hey, I’ve been building that. It’s called A Personal Search Engine: https://apse.io

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#167

Post by disqard »

keizo wrote: post #146

I've found most apps too slow or too complex. So much that I've spent the last 3 months building another one, kinda like the author. Maybe my use case is different than most as I only spend 20% of my workday on the computer, but I'm convinced there are others like me. Roam Research was compelling and I paid the $500 two years ago. But found the friction and 12 second load time too slow. I downloaded my graph and real…

Did you by any chance, also write the "grug-brained developer" (one of my favorite essays on SW Dev)? The artwork at that link looked familiar :)

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#168

Post by ljw1004 »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #50
Tomte wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Photos are the worst. I'm through at least three complete reorganizations where I even dusted off old backups and collected all photos (because I felt I was deleting photos too liberally last time), de-duplicated (and de-quadruplicated) them all, and built the new "forever" structure. It sucks that I just know I'll do it again at most five years from now.

Photos are a good example of why a filesystem hierarchy is insufficiently expressive. You might want to search for pictures of me at parties, or pictures with me and my wife, or pictures from 1999, or pictures of LA, and the same photo might belong in all of those searches. No single category will ever be a good place for a photo.

That's a good example because it leads to truth that NO up-front tagging will ever anticipate all the searches you might make in future. There are so many possible searches.

I figure that a combination of wetware and software is the current sweet spot. My brain usually has enough associations and context to turn every photo search into a time or place filter - "I think it was downtown last year" or "some time in summer at home" or "it had my wife in it". The photo storage system need only provide search/filter on date and place to narrow it down to a few hundred thumbnails, plus machine-learning to tag people. Which is basically what iOS provides, no more, no less.

Any other up-front categorization or tagging is basically wasted effort.

For me, I wrote a bulk tool that renames my photo file names by reverse geocoding the GPS information via Open Street Maps. That way I can do text search for place, as well as 2d map search. It's at https://unto.me

Re: Unbundling Tools for Thought

#170

Post by spccdt »

joe8756438 wrote: post #59

For a lot of things I agree organization is over-rated, but for some things it's essential. And, in any case -- collecting things whether organized or not is super important. I think the act of capturing notes, todos, bookmarks, and other things, all involve the same _impulse_ and _function_. Whether a great idea strikes, remembering a quote from a good article you just read, or capturing an important piece of data.…

Just wanted to say that Tap is pretty neat. It’s so close to what I’ve been wanting to build for myself as a mobile quick-capture solution.
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