Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>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 because software like Org-Mode, Evernote, MS OneNote, etc is better for personally generated note taking -- like classroom lecture notes, or brainstorming, or personal todo lists. Those tools are not suitable for saving and managing a terabyte of movie files. However, they have one exception to the "being bad at managing collections of the world's data that I didn't write" -- they do have very good "web clipping" functionality. Instead of saving url bookmarks that might suffer digital rot, you can use the web clip tool. (Personally, I prefer to save important webpages as .mhtml archives. This doesn't work for javascript heavy sites but for the type of informative webpages I want to save for later reference, this usually isn't an issue.)

Likewise, the software that's good at cataloging a "library" of collected files with capabilities for custom tagging (e.g. Adobe Lightroom for photos, iTunes for music, Zotero for pdfs, etc) are the wrong tools for archiving personal notes.

For a disparate collection of digital files, the best method I've found is to leverage the native filesystem in Linux/Mac/Windows. Create a hierarchy of well-named folders to build a sensible taxonomy and put all your pdf, epub, mp4, jpg, mp3 in meaningful locations. There is no good universal organizing software for organizing all the file formats that has the longevity and transparency of the native file system.

> However, they have one exception to the "being bad at managing collections of the world's data that I didn't write" -- they do have very good "web clipping" functionality. Instead of saving url bookmarks that might suffer digital rot, you can use the web clip tool.

Let me warn you: I tried to use OneNote this way. The web clipper is really nice and I used it heavily to clip everything interesting on the web from my desktop and my phone until my OneNote file reached 8GB. Syncing just completely gave up and there is no way to export everything in a usable format.

Since then I use a separate Firefox 52.5.0 instance with the old ScrapBook plugin. I can send sites to it from a current Firefox instance and from mobile. It works ok and, in case this setup should stop working at some point in the future, I still have all sites sitting on my local drive.

Unfortunately the browser makers don't give a damn about saving and organizing Websites locally, although I'd believe that this would be far superior to Bookmarks. I love scraping my local library for useful stuff and I've been bitten by link rot far too often.

For personal notes and todo lists I prefer simple text files with a few categories. Lately I'm also giving Boostnote [1] a try, which simply looks a bit better and allows me to add checkboxes and proper headings/separators.

[1] https://boostnote.io/

Sometimes the pages can still be found on archive.org, archive.is, etc. but I usually find out too late that a page I bookmarked wasn't actually archived. I've just found this Firefox plugin [1] that automatically sends your bookmarks to archiving sites. (one at a time, so unfortunately this won't immediately help with existing bookmarks, unless you visit them all again).

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/archiveror/

I wrote a little script that I run as a daily cron job which fetches all URLs I bookmarked/saved in Pocket and submits it to archive.org.

I wish more people would do that as link rot is a very real thing, certainly for technical information often saved in gists or github repos that are often harder to find back.

While I agree leveraging the filesystem is the way to go in order to sort binary data (ebooks, papers, movies, etc), it's not true org-mode is not suitable to organize those.

Since it supports hyperlinks to a wide variety of data, and Emacs is so easy to script, you can definitely do that. For example, org-ref has a lot of functionality implemented to organize academic papers, including the corresponding PDFs.

In fact, a personal org-mode wiki could easily have one or more files devoted to personal pictures, books, papers and hyperlinks to those plus whatever metadata. There are some examples around if you google for that.

I do keep my personal wiki very close to a zettelkasten, but implemented in org-mode. Nothing special. Very simple. Small files that mimic cards, plus hyperlinks. I search using ripgrep, and I version control using git. A key feature is that I keep my task list and calendar inside my wiki too, but not version controlled.

How do you mimic the desk feature (lay out a few cars on the table) in org mode?

You can do this in many ways. With dired and several windows, or a view like org agenda that let's you explore several cards concurrently.

Apologies for the naive question, but how are the native filesystems for metadata storage, like say if you wanted to store Author for a video, or Location for a photo? Do they have preset available fields, or can they store an arbitrary number of key-value pairs?

Well, there are several tag formats, ie Id3v1, Id3v2, Vorbis comments, APE tags, which have have most needed metadata keys already part of the spec and many can add custom pairs.

Thanks! Just had a look, aren’t those all reliant on the file type? There’s no standardized metadata scheme built into filesystems?

> 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.

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