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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3850 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 15, 2023

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.

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What type of note keeping app do you use, if any? I recently started using Notion for work and I'm slowly grasping the possibilities. I'm also looking at using Obsidian in my personal life.

Any thoughts on how to use these tools effectively?

In the spirit of "the best camera is the one that's with you", I'll pop open a web browser tab and search whatever I wanted to note down. This has the advantage of being in my face the next time I open that browser, which I do often, and I'm less likely to forget that I took the note in the first place. If it's worth expanding on or saving for future, I'll write it down as plain text or email later.

Apple Notes app. Previously nano/scp/grep/etc.

What type of note keeping app do you use, if any?

vim to take notes, git to save/distribute them, grep to search them, ssh to get to them from my phone if I'm away from a laptop or workstation.

Any thoughts on how to use these tools effectively?

In my case? Already be an expert with them for other use cases, so there's no extra learning curve involved.

I could go into more specific details, but I fear my readers might be less interested in "how to use these [particular] tools effectively" and more fascinated with me as a potential counterexample to the "opinion of someone with extensive life experience will carry more weight for me" heuristic @Southkraut just commented above. Sometimes "life experience" just means "figured something out from scratch decades ago and too stubborn to start over from scratch now", sometimes "children of his own" just means "short rations of free time".

Ahh to be a programmer. You truly are the ubermensch of our times.

Everything he mentioned sounds less like programming and more like "slightly more advanced than average power-user/admin/console tools".

Also, "tools which aren't very good for taking notes". git is useful for programming but using it to save your notes is jamming a square peg into a round hole. And vim shouldn't be used for anything ever (yeah I said it, fight me vi fanboys).

Within the past hour I installed git on a new machine. I made sure to unselect the default editing choice of vim. It might as well have a default choice of getting a series of paper cuts.

As a fellow vim hater, you might like this talk. I don't agree with everything, but the general idea that "some things in programming are just relics of the past and we don't get rid of them because of inertia and sometimes machismo" is a good point to keep mind.

For me, vim squarely fits in that category. Yes I could learn how to do kung fu with my keyboard, but 90% of the time I am programming, I am googling or staring at the screen trying to figure out wtf to write, Real time savings could be achieved if I could come up with a solution faster, not type faster.

Is there anything stopping you? The closest thing I've ever had to a CS class was the "Matlab and Fortran for Dummies" they made all the engineering students take, but by that time I'd taught myself BASIC (which was easy; unteaching myself the bad habits it engendered was harder...) and C from books, plus Perl and C++ from websites. And that was back in the Bad Old Days, when BASIC still had an excuse for existing as an "intro language", even if it was unsuitable for large applications. Today if you ask "what's the best way for someone with zero experience to get started" the answer is "Python" and if you ask "what's this bleeding-edge research code being written in" the answer is often "Python", so the onramp has never been more gentle.

You still want a CS degree on the team for some types of work (I was able to help my niece with her homework, right up until she got to graph algorithms...), but most of my co-workers are engineering or math or both; lots of places need someone who thoroughly understands the application domain and can code a little more than they need someone who thoroughly understands programming and doesn't know what they're writing it for.

When it comes to the oodles of medical notes I need to take, I use GoodNotes on my iPad. It's quite polished, doesn't use a subscription system, and suffices for my use case. I can toss all kinds of PDFs and images in liberally, and expect it to Just Work™.

For other things, I usually use Google Keep, it doesn't have much in the way of bells and whistles, but it's convenient, especially since it syncs painlessly across platforms.

May I ask what you intend to use the notes for? I write down notes when I read on physical note cards and this helps me a lot to retain quotes, notes, and take aways from the book.

Quotes writing random thoughts etc.

Don't use OneNote that's for sure. I am deeply embedded in the OneNote ecosystem and am finding it impossible to move out. None of the note-taking apps other than OneNote support free-form drawing :(

Lmk if you find one with good inking support during your app searching exersize.

I'm right there with you, but, uh -- "this one program has the killer feature that none of the other ones do, so whatever you do don't use it -- you might become habituated" seems like kind of a weird approach?

The cons of one-note are just too irritating to me

  • Doesn't support common markdown

  • Can't share notes with granular access (It's 2023, what's up with that? It is rhetorical question. I used to work with people in the office team, no one cares enough to solve it )

  • Doesn't sync collaborative notes instantly

  • Everything except the windows app is a terrible way of interacting with it

  • Taking quick notes is pain in the ass

  • Search is meh

  • Tagging is non-existent

No one is as good as Microsoft at providing mediocrity across the board. The app will tick every feature box, but none of them will be quite excellent.

I'd rather just rip the bandaid off and learn some new opinionated platform.

But, none of them properly support inking nor do they properly sync with another collaborative inking service which I can embed in them.

Ah, fair complaints.

To be fair to MS, the collaborative features are kind of a bag on the side, it was never in the original concept. (which I feel like came about as some sort of accident; not sure it was ever intended as more than a neat little personal repo that happened to showcase their new inking library)

I personally endrun the other issues by using the desktop windows version exclusively, and using it on a (more or less) dedicated windows tablet with stylus. I pretty well treat it as a physical notebook when I'm using it, then sync all the old notebooks on my desktop machine. (which I also use to snip relevant web content when I'm doing research/bug-stomping -- there's other tools that one could use for this, but it seems -- OK? and everything's in one place. This place could involve the cloud if I wanted it to, but I kind of don't)

The search is pretty good to me though -- to the point where I don't miss tags. I've tried everything I can think of to have searchable handwritten notes, including various smart-pens; if any of these didn't suck on the actual process of archiving the notes electronically I would be all over it (as having a physical copy is nice), but that seems not to be the world in which we live.

Onenote provides the dream of 'searchable archive of handwritten notes covering my work way further back than anyone should reasonably care' -- the ability to do some quick typing and come up with my exact notes from some meeting or quirky bugfix 5 years ago makes me look more organized than I have any right to; everything else I've tried (especially the ones designed for mobile devices) just seems like a toy in comparison.

So, I guess I'm, um -- kind of embedded, lol.

I personally endrun the other issues by using the desktop windows version exclusively, and using it on a (more or less) dedicated windows tablet with stylus

Yoo, surface pro represent ! I have the exact same workflow.

everything else I've tried (especially the ones designed for mobile devices) just seems like a toy in comparison.

It is well matched to real commercial users, I must say. My new team moved from onenote to confluence. So now I am at a point where I can move.

I want to be able to start publishing my notes and sharing them with people in a granular way. Right now that's my biggest complaint.

So, I guess I'm, um -- kind of embedded, lol.

Yep, that's me too. Too much knowledge in there.

Also, now that my one note (and by association my though process) is tuned to hierarchical structure, I can't move to obsidian or un-directed graphs anymore.

Yoo, surface pro represent !

Heh, I went with the HP knockoff because I like the extra $1000 in my pocket and the thing is actually screwed together -- which means I can replace the battery once it wears out. It's just find as a travel laptop, too.

I want to be able to start publishing my notes and sharing them with people in a granular way. Right now that's my biggest complaint.

Like, all of them? For the amount of notes I'd consider sharing, some separate cloud repo would make sense I guess. (if the amount were > zero ofc, which it is currently not!)

Also, now that my one note (and by association my though process) is tuned to hierarchical structure, I can't move to obsidian or un-directed graphs anymore.

Yeah, I can't understand why anyone would want this t.b.h -- seems more like lazy programmers ruling the world than "unstructured data is superior". (see also "the interface to gmail" and https://youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs )

"We received a lecture on how the offshore team was very sensitive to criticism, and we had to make sure that no one lost face."

"Maintaining face is very important in many cultures."

"In Software Culture, maintaining face is not hard. It's actually very simple. The rule of thumb is: don't formally submit code that looks like it was written by two cats copulating on top of a keyboard."

I can't breathe, this guy was amazing. Really miss that text to speech format, don't even know what it was called.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

Everyone knows that one starry eyed junior in the video. Jaded senior engineers politely answering pigheaded juniors is what true zen looks like.

Every senior engineer should get a monthly allocation of "bitch, be humble" sound bytes to throw around. They have earned that honor.

If use ios, there's GoodNotes, which I would recommend.

An android version is on the way soon-ish too if cross platform matters to you.

It's worse, it's windows (or better? if you are a laptop person like me).

I'll keep you posted. Obsidian has the canvas thing which... maybe supports drawing? Also they have a million plugins. Idk might be worth another look.

Edit: maybe this? https://medium.com/produclivity/editable-graphics-in-obsidian-notes-is-the-best-thing-since-plain-text-d8bd75454397

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