Worth noting that this is written by a 15 year old.
This looks interesting, nice integration with Elasticsearch as well. However, I see and have tried tools like this several times in the past (tiddlywiki, org-brain, etc.) and haven't been able to stay on it, always reverting to paper, or, more recently, reMarkable tablet notebooks. Is it just me or it requires quite a bit of motivation and dedication to stick to it?
It's funny because I used to be more obsessive about storing my knowledge when I was younger. I kept track of tidbits of information using various systems (emacs wiki mode or OneNote), but as with you, I always reverted to paper, not so I could "look up" information again, but as a way of sketching out ideas. I might refer to the notes a few weeks later, but beyond that, likely not.
Now that I'm in my 40s, I don't care as much about recording information I encounter (other than for work). If it's worth knowing, I can look it up again. If not, ignorance is bliss.
> Now that I'm in my 40s, I don't care as much about recording information I encounter (other than for work). If it's worth knowing, I can look it up again. If not, ignorance is bliss.
I tend to keep a notes file precisely because it's such a pain to look up some things. If I want to know the exact set of qemu options that I want, for instance, I would have to piece things together from the man page, and/or try things from a half-dozen different blogs, most of which will be incompatible with each other or the version of qemu I'm using (in fairness, qemu networking options have changed a lot over time as they improve things; this might be an extreme example). Or, I could open my notes file, type /qemu<cr>, and grab one of a handful of commands that I already have composed and be done.
Same here, 40 and not very information junky anymore. But it probably has to do with the fact that anything is nowadays searchable online and also that there is so much information (even here on HN) that if you save it even selectively it is a sea of information. I use the "one tab" plugin and rather than closing the tab I save it to the one tab archive. Most of the time I never look at it again
I noticed this was the case when I used tools that made it hard to search through my archives. But once I switched to tools with better full-text search, I actually find myself using my archive all the time. It turns out just knowing that I have it and that its easy to search lets me rely on it a lot more when doing research on things I've read about before.
It could be and you're probably right, I just personally lost interest in preserving too much information. Of course once in a while I come across a piece of info that I do save but whatever I slap into some text files is enough to me, most of the time I don't need to look it up anyway or I forget it even exists. And regularly I purge it and that feels good. Maybe I've reached my limits... But I do understand the need if one's line of work requires to or there's a need to for research, these tools can be very useful.
Same, went through a wiki and onenote stage. Didn't last. It piles up, and becomes a chore.
Paper outlasts everything. Easy to organize spatially, sketch things, recompile notes, put many pages visible at once, decorate the walls... Unimportant papers end up on archive stacks with little effort.
Recently started using a synced folder with plain Word documents, though, alongside the paper. For writing the more elaborate drafts, and mobile note taking.
I went through approximately same stages, and eventually found that the knowledge base is mostly useless. What it matters turned out to be my own words: my personal notes on the subjects, my worklog, my emotions etc. These bits are something you can't easily reconstruct without a right context, and keeping the context is getting harder and harder as you are getting older.
I think the key is to make your knowledge base accessible from anywhere.
I have my tiddlywiki hosted on a server that I can reach from any computer ( work, home, phone, etc. )
So the only barrier to use it, is opening a new tab and typing some notes. The bigger the barrier between brain thought and writing something down, the lower the likelihood of usage.
To be fair, sometimes I'm even too lazy to open a new tab and add an entry in my wiki. I haven't solved this problem yet.
Yeah. The idea of paper notebooks that could use ocr to export the paper notebook to a digital notebook would be really cool because digital is more flexible but paper feels more natural.
I don't understand the saleing point of whitelines. Their app just takes a picture and converts it to a PDF which is the same thing Adobe Scan, cam2scan, and probably a million other apps do except those apps don't require you buy special paper.
I enjoy it greatly! Since using it in the spring semester of university I have not used a paper notebook, and it's definitely led me to read more books and papers. There's also a great hacking element to it[0], since you get root access out of the box.
Do you know if there is a way to treat the remarkable as almost a paper screen connected to my computer? I'd like to be able to seamlessly "print" a PDF to it.
This looks interesting, nice integration with Elasticsearch as well. However, I see and have tried tools like this several times in the past (tiddlywiki, org-brain, etc.) and haven't been able to stay on it, always reverting to paper, or, more recently, reMarkable tablet notebooks. Is it just me or it requires quite a bit of motivation and dedication to stick to it?