The Idea of Pocket is great - seems everyone needs a personal-knowledge-base. And the archival feature was/is cool (I added the same to my own PKB).
And Pocket for organizing, messy like the article says. I do tagging and SQLite FTS - works a treat.
<https://github.com/Pocket/pocket-ios>
And nothing server-side either, which I suspect is what you're referring to.
What is that? Do I need it?
Otherwise you're limited by what you can hold in your head - and as you get older and take on more ambitious work you'll find that's a pretty big restriction.
My version of that is spread out across way too many places now - it's mainly https://til.simonwillison.net/ and https://simonwillison.net/ for published notes, 700+ public GitHub repositories for code and issue notes, 100+ private repositories for private code and private issue notes, a Pocket account with 8700 items in it, plus the contents of my 15+ year old Dropbox folder structure, an old Evernote dump and a continually growing S3 bucket of larger things.
I tried to tie it all together with a unified search engine, but that needs some more work: https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/14/personal-data-warehous...
otherwise all the shine and chrome in the world won't make it superior to a filing cabinet and some free time.
that's the difficulty point for all of these personal PIM type tools, they all have their own biased view on things like file format and 'touchability' of stored data in the (unannounced) hopes of trapping a captive audience; no good.
Open standards, open formats, and a revenue stream that isn't user-hostile -- then i'm in.
When I produce images, it's nearly always in the context of a project, which has a wiki or other system. But that's outside of what I'd personally call "notes".
I believe that charts and diagrams convey a lot of information that cannot be easily reproduced with raw text. I guess it ultimately depends on the topic you are reviewing.
The main script is:
~$ cat share/bin/n
#! /usr/bin/env bash
cd $HOME/share # or wherever you want to put your notes
echo >> notes.txt
echo -n '# ' >> notes.txt
date '+%a %d %b %Y %T %Z' | tr -d "\n" >> notes.txt
echo ' #' >> notes.txt
if [[ $# -ne 0 ]]; then
echo $@ >> notes.txt
tail notes.txt
else
vim "+normal Go" +startinsert notes.txt # or nano: nano -R +-1 notes.txt
fi
More structured notes go into dokuwiki or just a LibreOffice file in the project folder.
All this is almost guaranteed to be readable in 20 years. The LibreOffice files may be at more risk, but at least there is more than one tool available to read them.
This frequency informed the design, in fact. Easy to write, easy to read the last couple entries, moderate difficulty in finding older entries (in exchange for lower cost of making individual notes).
I think for me this is why it's so important for the system to be almost zero effort, else I'll just kinda stop using it. Just having an ubiquitous default place to dump something out of my brain helps.
Of note. A very slightly modified version of this runs on an ancient Thinkpad in my bedroom for diary/mental health reasons. I find the separation helpful. Those I almost never ever read, but I think that's the point of those.
Edit: at work I didn't really use this system, it's mostly for my own life. At work I used the ticket tracker, wikis, and calendar. I found that taking personal notes at work was best substituted by making actual documents that my team could find and use. There were much fewer uncategorized tasks at work.
I use them for cooking. I refer to this one every time I want to make a Pisco Sour cocktail, for example: https://til.simonwillison.net/cocktails/pisco-sour
I see notes as a way of accumulating micro-skills - things I know how to do, but not well enough to remember off the top of my head.
I have a channel where my various IOT devices tell me stuff, a channel where my algorithmic trading bot notifies me, and a reminders channel that basically serves as an append-only, always-synched memopad.
I have ambitions to do this occasionally, and I tracked things and took notes a lot for a while, but I never found myself using it.
This feels like a comment without substance and in a way, it is. But I think it’s important to push back on this idea that if you aren’t managing a Second Brain while you’re GTD’ing a side project and Tools for Thought-ing your way through the western canon you’re wasting your life.
I don't usually need to scan back more than a few days, but one book lasts several months. You can use it standing up, e.g. in a SCRUM. It's resistant to having a mug of coffee spilled over it. It never crashes, and it doesn't need RAID or backups. You can attach post-its to the pages. You can use a stack of 4-5 of them as a monitor stand.
Downsides: you can't paste screencaps into it. And there's no search function.
Yes, it's a glorified grocery list. But it works better for me than any electronic solution.
https://til.simonwillison.net/linux/allow-sudo-without-passw...
Yup, I read that just a few weeks ago. Thank you!
For me it's a web-app tied to a PG database. But I started on SQLite. And it keeps notes, links (tagged), archive-page, put my own notes on it, etc.
Many folk use things like Evernote, Pocket, Notion, DokuWiki, etc for their "stuff".