- Knowledge Repository
– perhaps the most important aspect of my home server is that it is my brain outside my brain. I need a wiki to store stuff and keep track of things. I need something to store and keep track of my books BUT ALSO my notes in books.
– love something that integrates with all my old written notes that have been digitized. Used LiveScribe for almost a decade. The new pens don’t do it for me anymore, though.
What do you use? How well is it working? How do you organize your thoughts? OneNote from microsoft isn’t too bad and with OfficeLens it can work really well.
LiveScribe was amazing for making notes of meetings. You could make notes but also use your written notes as a playback device – touch a written word on the page and jump to the audio of the meeting where that node was made. Automagically Something was lost when it became too tightly integrated into your phone for this functionality to work as well as it had. I haven’t used LiveScribe in 5 years as a result.
First Update:
Do you Zettlekasten?
It would be worth reading the introduction for some more nuanced context for what I’m about to propose.
I have decided to organize the first topic in knowledge management for the level1 series around the Zettelkasten Method, and fancy editors like Obsidian (not fully libre), open source alternatives and EMACS org mode.
What I do could best be described as a modified Zettelkasten Method – what have been the most important parts for me have been capturing notes in my own words and by tagging link collections with keywords more aligned with how I might use the knowledge in the future more than the subject matter itself.
I haven’t seen anything, so far, that suggests one system can manage “everything” I want to do: Manage everything from Books, what I’ve read, bookmarks/notes/annotations, day to day life stuff, personal ToDos and basically everything outside work.
One-system-fits-all is likely not the optimal approach anyway because, taken to its logical conclusion, it becomes a question of does an infinite set contain itself? Meaning that one-system-fits-all can never be as good as one-system-links-to-other-specialist-systems.
OK enough philosophy. We’re here to “blue collar” get stuff done. What can we do today with what we have?
First, the file system. Don’t underestimate the file.
Make a directory, put stuff in there. Make another directory, put stuff in there. Zettlekasten’s original implementation was little more than a physical card catalog of notes. We can get a lot of mileage out of a directory.
Part of the physical process was collecting notes and capturing knowledge as it was generated. Don’t repeat verbatim and think about keywords more in the sense of what you’d need to find it when searching a topic more than the keywords in the material itself.
A second phase was taking the information from ingest area and deliberately organizing it where it needs to go. For me this is something I can do every few days or every week.
But it has to be super easy and low friction to take notes. For books, I want an annotation and a page number. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. I have an easy access document feed scanner and Microsoft Office Lens that I use regularly to capture information.
You can search files across a directory, but just organizing a directory structure leaves a lot to be desired. You can use it just like a card catalog, making a new directory for each drawer you need, and even using sub directories to group things in a given drawer.
That’s how I’ve done it since I was a teenager for everything from my notes to media. But it isn’t enough.
Enter Emacs Org mode. Ooops. I mean Obsidian.md
Imagine if in each one of our directories, we could put a readme file that has any extra notes about what we’ve collected. Well that’s obsidian. It can read across our whole directory structure and show us. What’s more is that we can link directories together to make it much easier to navigate.
With a directory structure you choose one way to organize your notes. But with hypertext links you can have cross-reference wherever you need to.
So with this graph you can see how your documents link to your other documents and so on. This is great to organize and curate your own knowledge in your brain outside your brain.
You aren’t limited to just one way to organize.
Beyond that, you can embed other file types. Media like Movies and Audio? No problem – embed it.
You can even embed PDFs including a specific page number. I wasn’t able to get that to work with epub and other book formats other than PDF, but there is probably a fix for that.
This goes back to the infinite set issue – Obsidian dosen’t need to also be a great ebook reader if we can easily embed in Obsidian links to other programs that do their thing well. And those links are links to data in our local system. Links to things on the internet have a way of not working after 5 to 10 years.
Obsidian has a huge number of plugins, so you can get very fancy with this. It supports git, image processing, and a Zettelkasten style time prefixer.
So as you organize your knowledge you can leverage your own wiring, keyword tags and external files reasonably well.
I’ve found this method useful as I work on a project intensely for a few months, life gets in the way for a few months, then I come back to it. It takes me a bit but I can get up to speed on it again really quickly.
Now the bad news – obsidian is free for personal use, but that’s about it. It seems like a reasonable approach to commercializing their hard work, so I am not going to fault them for that.
Obsidian has been on my radar for a couple of years and I’ve tried it on and off but I personally haven’t clicked with it mainly because my Zettlekasten far predates use of this kind of software. I find myself going back to old habits which wouldn’t be as good as if I’d started with something this good.
What’s great about this, though, is that it lives on top of a file system. If you use this, even though it isn’t free and open source software, you aren’t married to it or locked into proprietary formats.
It’s fast, efficient, compact and a really good product. And no proprietary lockin. I really can’t fault them for commercialization and it seems like software that would be safe to use for a decade.
If you want something that is been there done that, I would point out emacs org mode.
Emacs is a free and extensible editor. It does everything. It is worth learning. It has a mode called org mode which can offer a lot of the same kinds of features of obsidian, but in more of a unix afficionado greybeard kind of way.
A happy medium might be Foam Bubble:
This is a collection of VS Code extensions. VS Code is licensed under the MIT license, more or less, and is open source. VSCodium is a distro of VSCode w/o telemetry if you prefer.)
When you first setup Foam, it’ll pop up and ask you to install a bunch of recommended extensions.
The author says It’s currently about “10% ready” relative to all the features I’ve thought of, so keep that in mind as you use it.
There are some other great packages in the knowledge repository thread on the forum, and other great knowledge in this video series from level1, so be sure to check those out. If you’ve been using Obsidian, Foam or something like it for years and want to share your experience or show off your setup, hit me up on the level1 forums.
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