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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2804 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 20, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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If you do, how do you archive and process interesting ideas or information you find?

Like all of us I imagine, I consume huge amounts of information: Articles, books, twitter hot takes, charts, youtube videos, podcast episodes, etc. I tend to hoard the best of what I see and stash it all over the place. I have old word documents where I’ve saved good quotes, I use OneNote to store links to good articles (or comments), I have a huge archive of bookmarks on X. I do occasionally revisit what I’ve saved, but it is a haphazard skimming at best. I haven’t found the way to organize this 'best of' thinking. I'm considering some sort of organization by theme and writing key takeaways for myself to later review to aid my recall.

Does anyone else have this problem?

Obsidian is the platform I use*. Everything is stored locally (don't have to worry about google scanning your drive for wrongthink) and markdown files so you don't have to worry about proprietary formats. The concept you are looking for is sometimes called building a second brain (book by same name by thiago forte, but the videos should give enough of an idea) or a personal knowledge base. I have an extension that syncs my kindle clippings to my obsidian database, where I can review them, delete them, or otherwise organize them. Otherwise I just make notes for anything that occurs to me and search for it if I need to. A lot of people get more elaborate with their systems.

For quotes I've liked I have kept spreadsheets and in the past made screensavers. Currently I just make an anki flashcard which means I will be exposed to each quote more often and then less often. I haven't brought nearly as many things as I should into anki, however. I downloaded an app that can put a quote on one widget page of your phone, which sounds great but it doesn't have any way to upload new quotes in bulk so I don't actually use it anymore. I'm not going to phone keyboard retype my favorite quotes.

*In the past I used Notion, Evernote, Google Drive.

Damn. Speaking as a Joplin user who had never heard of Obsidian before, I really like the look of Obsidian and would love to use its additional functionality (compared to Joplin) but at $4 a month for non-local storage that's a no-go for me. A big part of my use case is the ability to make notes to myself on whatever device I have handy that I can encrypt end-to-end and automatically sync via WebDAV.

You can use any remote storage you want, you only pay obsidian if you use their storage. There are guides to sset it up with dropbox or google drive, for example. I choose to pay them because I want to be divesting from google.

I use it with Dropbox (I use Dropbox anyway for other stuff so no additional investment needed) and it works just fine for me. There are plugins for encrypting stuff too.

Thank you very much, that's excellent news! A cursory search has led me to an unofficial plug-in to support remote save; I'll give it a try and see if I like it better than Joplin.

It might not be a solution if you're not willing to host web accessible services, but I run an instance of wallabag for myself. I then have a bookmarklet to send any page I wanna keep to it. It archives pages in a way to focus on readability. It's also good for bypassing some paywalls (not all). Once in while I organize the pages I've saved to it by adding tags to them. You can also add annotations to the pages saved.

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