On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 05:35:27PM +0100, Srijith Nair wrote: > Hi all, > > I would like to pick your brains on how you organise and retrieve > information that you read in books (physical or ebook) and long-form > articles online. > [...] > I was wondering what you have found useful in solving similar > problems on your end. > > As I love to hack code, I have been working on a solution for the > last few weeks but it is far from perfect or complete. Before I go > further down this rabbit hole, I thought it makes sense to try and > understand if there are existing solutions out there that works for > you?
For stuff read online I mostly use org-mode, a special mode for notes taking, information organising etc in Emacs editor. I repurposed it into my personal wiki. It now exceeds thirty megabytes, so I had to increase Emacs's default max file size more than once. And editor with such biggie gets a bit slow sometimes. I put there all kinds of bookmarks, things to be read later, summaries of shopping lists and wish lists, extensive quotations and so on. Searching can be slow, too (big file, eh), so I started using standard Unix tools for certain cases (/bin/grep, /usr/bin/less work much faster, and /usr/bin/awk might come to the rescue a bit later, too). Emacs is "programmable" and I am not afraid of Lisp, so this approach has additional benefit of putting some of my code where my data already is. I also keep this wiki in version control (in this case, RCS, because it is relatively simple and does not require much planning). Having it all in simple text file has obvious benefits, at least to me. This kind of files can be read on most operating systems in use today and in foreseeable future. If necessary, it can be edited with most primitive text editors out there, too. So, I consider it to last long enough to be useful without having to hop tools and versions. And I would rather tug a computer with me than rely important stuff to online services. YMMV. (please note, cell phone is not considered a computer in this context, it is part of online system and thus unreliable). Few years ago I have also started to employ paper notes for various things, after some decades of relying mostly on computer based means. As it sometimes happens, as a teen I (re)invented the thing called "commonplace book" or "zibaldone". Since I had no idea such thing has this name, I named it with my own neologism in Polish. Then, many years later, I have learned about zibaldones. It seems that lots of people were writing their zibaldones during last five hundred years or so (at least in Europe). I guess it would be hard to invent something better. BTW, is there (or was there) a similar concept in other cultures/civilisations? I mean, a kind of personal encyclopaedia, collected from scraps of knowledge. In Japan, they have hobonichi, but as I understand it, it is more like daily planner and diary. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:[email protected] **
