@═╦╣╚╗ A mazing engineer 22-Sep-2024 Keeping personal digital notes To overcome how my memory works to perform my personal and work-related duties at my best, I keep notes. Various types of. Quick ideas I want to jot down to think of later, quick thoughts to remember to buy groceries, tools I want to employ in my daily workflow, startup ideas, jokes I want to sharpen before telling my friends and so on. An article I want to read later. A new album that came out, but I won't have sufficient focus and time to listen to until I travel somewhere in a car or with headphones. Game announcements, Kickstarter campaigns, you name it. I used to write myself an email. Gmail is cool. No kidding. You can postpone emails, and they disappear from the list until some date. You can put tags on them. You can reply yourself and add more context. You can archive. Or delete. Or reply, and that would put it on top. Or mark as unread. Attach files. Structure the text, and use rich text. Basically all that a TODO app should be capable of. Even things like sending to other people, or keeping track of those together. It's not that I could reach Inbox Zero at any moment, no matter how hard I tried. The inbox was overflowing, and my approach at keeping it sane was to take things out and put in other places. Like, e.g. a list of articles to read in my browser bookmarks, or open tabs on my phone. And a list of tools to employ in a file toolset.txt in my private personal notes repository I regularly push to GitHub. But I don't use Safari on my laptop, so tabs and bookmarks don't sync between my phone and my laptop. In the past, I was journalling my life (until I realised this doesn't help coping with the bad parts), and I keep doing this, but in a tiny paper notebook. I was also journalling my working time each 25 minutes when I was working using the Pomodoro technique. But working like this is exhausting in the long run, and I didn't use the logged information. I was keeping track of the open-source contributions I want to do in a open-source.txt file. I recently rearranged it, and to my pleasure realised that I've completed (or abandoned) more than 90% items on this list. What appeals to me is that I can see the history of the changes in those files. But those Git-tracked ones were only available as read-only on my phone. I keep summaries and ideas I picked from non-fictional books I read in Apple Notes. And a list of words to use next time we play charades with friends. And a list of words I keep forgetting (like "entropy") that I want to make a tattoo on my left forearm to always be in front of me. But I hate to use Notes on my laptop. I keep lists of things to pack when I travel as a template in Apple Reminders. And a list of books I want to read (with no date set). Various tasks I want to do at a specific date in Reminders, too. Recurring tasks, too. Some future events in the Calendar (Google calendar does sync with Apple, but it's not perfect). A good friend of mine, Stas Katkov, wrote an article about the disappearing web, touching the topic of archiving valuable information, at least for yourself. Besides this main topic he described how he keeps his notes. And this sparked me into revamping my private notes workflow. Until today, when I started the revamping, I didn't realize how deep the chaos has penetrated, and how messy it all was. I just got used to all this. Goals - Most notes in one place - Equal read-write access to my notes from my phone and my laptop - Second brain: be aware of my past thoughts and notes when writing new ones - Zero bookmarks: remember where my first brain knowledge came from - Ingest all that I read and want to remember - Let the computer to provide references to source - Suppress the overwhelming internet information noise - Use my favourite editor Tools - Obsidian: an Markdown editor with plugins, also from the community. Even without plugins it's a really good Markdown editor. One of a kind on iOS. - Apple iCloud for the sync between the mobile and the laptop. I trust them my photos, my email, my chats, and I keep their microphone nearby at all times, so why not trust my notes, too? I'm not a Wallfacer against alien invaders) - Obsidian Web Clipper to save web pages and clips on my laptop All of that is zero cost. Alright, I already pay for iCloud, but 10 MB of text files compared to 100 GB of photos is less than a penny a year. Step-by-step - [x] turn on iCloud Drive in settings/Apple ID/iCloud on my laptop - [x] turn off the "Access iCloud Data in the web" setting because of my paranoia. That real paranoia of data being stolen by a malicious party, not the corporate surveillance once - [x] turn on the iCloud Advanced Data Protection (and the recovery key) - [x] install the Obsidian app on the laptop - [x] install the Obsidian app on iOS - [x] install a Web clipper bookmarklet on my laptop (howto) - [x] soft-linked the vault to my home directory slash notes for git backup and easier access from my editor ln -s ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/iCloud~md~obsidian/Documents/MyVault ~/docs/notes This setup also allows me to use my favourite text editor, too, and reuse the open window, which I try to keep a bare minimum open. TODO Generative AI I run a (relatively) large language model locally with Ollama, and I would like to benefit from using it with my notes. It's good when I need to ask a simple question without leaving my text editor, when searching the internet is an overkill. I also talk with an LLM on my phone sometimes when all my friends are asleep. In general, my LLM suffers from two things: it lacks context of prior conversations, and it lacks context of what I'm working on. Two things left: - one is to get Ollama's output directly in Obsidian just like I can in my text editor with a plugin. - another is to grant Ollama the awareness of all of my notes with Retrieval-augmented generation. Structure When the number of documents will grow, I may experience problems with not having a structure. Known methods are Jonny.Decimal, PARA, Zettelkasten, Cornell notes, Mind maps and others. A tool some praise is the Obsidian Smart Connections plugin that helps you build connections between documents. Pretty sure I'll figure something out when such a need arises. Backup iCloud has some backup already. But I never restored it to a past point in time. Since I've linked my new notes vault to my old Git-tracked notes, I'll need to keep the routine of periodically committing and pushing the changes. As a safe backup, I would rather use rsync.net for backups of everything, including my notes, running from my laptop. I'll keep you posted.