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Managing my personal knowledge base

tkainrad.dev

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Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#181

Post by benhurmarcel »

JoachimS wrote: post #165

I'm a bit surprised nobody seem to have mentioned Bear Notes. I've used Onenote, Org Mode in Emacs but I am very happy to have discovered Bear Notes ( https://bear.app/ ) last. year. It has really changed how much I document, work with text, store info etc. Bear handles images, lists etc inline. It allows for very easy tagging (creating hierarchies) etc. And it looks really nice. Even with good fonts, Org Mode never…

I'm looking forward to try Bear once they have a web client. I need access from Windows/Linux.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#182

Post by swah »

chrisweekly wrote: post #116
koevet wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just tried to sign-up on Roam. The sign-up page redirects to some tracking site ( https://trackcmp.net/redir?actid=66602... ), which is blocked by my pi-hole. Not looking good.

Bummer. I signed up a few weeks ago (free), and have been enjoying it tremendously. To the point where I'm glad they'll take my money bc it's more than worth it, and I want to feel confident I can rely on it as a customer.

It's going to cost around 30 usd/mo so it's something for people that depend on it.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#183

Post by erikbye »

pensatoio wrote: post #131
erikbye wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't bookmark. Instead: Print to PDF. I "print" to markdown instead, even though pdfgrep sort of works I much prefer text files.

That’s a great idea! How do you go about it?

I use markdown-clipper for Firefox, it does an OK job but sometimes requires a bit of fixing up. It does not save images, so I have to do this manually; I use VSCode for Markdown, which has an extension for copy/pasting images to Markdown, it inserts a link and saves the image in a subfolder.

A little friction, but if that's too much, then the article is not worth keeping. But yes, someone with the time on their hands could contribute to markdown-clipper, saving images locally.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#184

Post by fit2rule »

eitland wrote: post #58
fit2rule wrote: post #55

Don'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…

That sounds brilliant, and yet I can't remember having heard or read this idea before! It kind of amazes me that you've been doing this for two decades already.

I always wonder why nobody else does it, but its a very pleasing experience to have an archive like this - and it has proven very valuable in production crunches and peaceful moments of downtime, alike.

Another thing it allows me to do is generalise my reading in real time - I know I can always come back to the subject of the PDF in a few days time, or whenever really, without needing to know where to find the details: I just grep my file tree, and mine the data that way.

Key thing is, though, that when saving the PDF, I always check that it is named a decent subject, derived from the tags .. if there isn't one, I add it myself. This is the only place I pay attention to 'tagging an article' - in naming the file of a poorly-named page, but if the page title fits the subject, I don't change a thing. And it means I have a huge set of data also in the filenames, not just the contents themselves .. Periodically, I use 'detox' on my PDFArchive/ directory, also .. this helps with consistent-naming for regexes, and so on.

I keep getting the itch to put all this into a DB with proper indexing or whatever, but .. actually using plain ol' shell tools is turning out to be just as productive. Its a big set of data, but plain ol' files and pipes is proving to be all I really need to get the data mined ..

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#185

Post by rhizome »

AlanYx wrote: post #141
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…

...it's hard to get things out of it again, too. Export is really the weakest area of OneNote. As far as I can tell, there is no way of batch exporting that also exports embedded attachments (for example, if you embed a PDF or Word document into a page rather than "printing" to the page).

>Export is really the weakest area of OneNote

I'll give you two guesses as to why that is.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#186

Post by tkainrad »

romwell wrote: post #164
tkainrad wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love an alternative that is free/and or possible to self-host. However, I do not see how this compares to Notion. How do I edit this HTML file on my phone? How do I add bookmarks to it via a hotkey? What is the equivalent of Notion's databases? Does it have Slash commands? This list of questions could go on for much longer. I really don't want to sound like a Notion shill, especially since I also use other to…

I am not sure you understood how Tiddly Wiki works. >How do I edit this HTML file on my phone? Open https://tiddlywiki.com/ , click the pencil icon on any of the entries. Edit away. The edits can persist with a self-hosted solution. Or you can just download the edited HTML file. >Does it have Slash commands? You probably mean "keyboard shortcuts". Yes, a plenty. Get started here: https://tiddlywiki.com/static/Keyboar…

With slash commands, I do not mean keyboard shortcuts. The lack of customized keyboard shortcuts is one of my issues with Notion, but their slash commands are great.

It basically means that you can access all kinds of features by just typing ahead after a '/' without knowing a precise shortcut. E.g. if I want my text to appear blue I would type /blue. I would also get there with /color or even by just starting to type either of those words and Notion will make suggestions. Slack, Confluence, and others do it in a similar way.

I think I do understand Tiddly Wiki works, as I have quite a bit of experience with Wiki systems, didn't use TW in particular though.

Some of the features you put aside as not needed for personal knowledge management are actually very nice for personal knowledge management. You might want to look a bit into my post to see what those databases can do ;)

> How do you access your knowledge in Notion 10 years after Notion-the-company goes the way of the dodo?

This is a very valid concern, that was also raised by some other commenters. In my opinion, Notion's exporting capabilities are quite good and I use them regularly. However, I do hope that we will get more automated and sophisticated third-party backup solutions when they have an official API.

Re: Managing my personal knowledge base

#187

Post by w_t_payne »

j15t wrote: post #177
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.

So, renaming is done manually (forces me to look at the PDF). I use preview on OSX, or any viewer other than Acrobat Reader on Windows and Linux (Acrobat Reader locks the file preventing renames). Several Python libraries exist for extracting metadata. I'm trying a couple of different approaches. At the moment I just take the title of the PDF and do a search on Google Scholar using the scholarly python library -- but this is really very suboptimal and I want to replace it with something faster and more robust.
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