Brett Terpstra

This simple idea changed my life:

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I derived mine directly from a comment [1] on a writer (as in book authors) oriented forum. That one comment is worth a full blown website on its own.

I don't need tags. Willing to come across patronizing and say you don't either (not for personal knowledge management). Pretty soon you need to sort tags, find tags, cluster related tags, create tags of tags and other goofy gunk (see tiddlywiki to scratch this itch)

I keep things organized under 10 topics (so far used just 7). All plain text files. At the moment it lives in simplenote [2] (thats how I found the link above as a demonstration of its utility). I found notational velocity [3] and its alter ego NValt [4] useful when I had a Mac. Did not look for alternatives on windows. I just email myself these days. Look in my comment history for some tip around how I use that.

All of this is good for digital stuff. But for the deep, analog stuff that really matters, nothing, nothing beats the utility of taking notes in a 1 subject college notebook with a Pilot G2 ( i use a .38). I use the right side only (trade off for using cheap books). First page is the index. Each page numbered. I just make clusters of related words on each page. The main topic is circled to draw attention (4-5 per page). Anything related to it gets words around it. Details, references, long thoughts, go on the backside. Stacks well. I take pictures of good stuff. Don't fret if I lose any books…

My blog and podcast feeds go around these few main interests of mine: software, art, design, music and Apple.

Podcasts:

Varieties, science, design.

* This American Life. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/

* Radiolab. http://www.radiolab.org/series/podcasts/

* Planet Money. http://www.npr.org/planetmoney

* Stuff You Should Know. http://www.howstuffworks.com/

* The Infinite Monkey Cage. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00snr0w

* The Weekly Briefly (Shawn Blanc). http://feedpress.me/weeklybriefly

* Actuality (from Quartz). http://www.marketplace.org/topics/world/actuality-marketplace-and-quartz

* Anticast (for Portuguese speakers out there - the best Brazilian podcast I know). http://www.brainstorm9.com.br/anticast/

* 99% Invisible. http://99percentinvisible.prx.org/

Technology, programming, Apple, etc.

* Debug. http://www.imore.com/debug/

* Mac Power Users. http://www.relay.fm/mpu

* Accidental Tech Podcast. http://atp.fm/

* Overtired. http://www.esn.fm/overtired/

* The Vergecast. http://www.theverge.com/verge/verge_archives/show?mode=EntryGroup&slug=the-vergecast

* What's Tech (also from The Verge, fun show). http://www.theverge.com/whatstech

* Pragmatic. http://techdistortion.com/podcasts/pragmatic

* Iterate. http://www.imore.com/iterate

* The Changelog. http://5by5.tv/changelog

* Build Podcast (each post is actually a screencast about some technology). http://build-podcast.com/

* The Talk Show With John Gruber. http://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow

*…

I use a set of plain text files in a directory that is synced between all of my machines. This is flexible and basic enough that it can be adapted to any use case or productivity system as necessary. When I need a more specific workflow, I can develop something on top of it. Staying with plain text and having reliable file sync is just a foundation.

I access the files with a fluid interactive interface and full text search provided by Notational Velocity / nvALT (http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/), for when I'm in a graphical environment, or my own NV-inspired shell script(https://github.com/lfam/n) for when I'm in a console. My primitive script has Bash and Zsh completion and gets out of my way pretty well... could be improved a lot, though.

I use Syncthing (http://syncthing.net/) to sync this directory between my devices. Syncthing is a FOSS decentralized file sync program that works on Linux, OS X, Windows, FreeBSD, and Solaris. Plus there is a work in progress Android app. I recommend it highly if you are looking for a FOSS alternative to Dropbox or BitTorrent Sync. It works right now which is saying a lot compared to its competitors, and it is truly decentralized (no server / client architecture like Seafile).

If anyone here is an Android developer, they could use your help, especially with the filesystem.

I've been meaning to explore org-mode. Maybe next time I take a long plane ride.

I can strongly recommend Notation Velocity for these use cases (or rather, nvALT[1]). It's perfect for creating massive amounts of short snippets, stores them as plain text files, has a pretty novel full-text search and navigation interface (using basic vim bindings even!), and a whole bunch of other features that doesn't clutter things up (markdown, for one, as well as basic wiki-like linking between notes).

My current NV 'library' contains more than 1600 files, ranging from command snippets to journal entries to on-the-go wifi passwords to project meeting notes and lists and whatnot. On top of that I have two separate libraries that contain more sensitive data.

Oh, and using Dropbox or the like, you can sync the notes between computers, and with SimpleNote (as well as some other apps) you can access all of it on your mobile device.

[1]: http://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

I am very surprised nobody has yet mentioned Notational Velocity, or better yet the fork nvALT [1].

I hate any _friction_ to writing a note. I just want to get it out of my brain (or find it, if a previous thought) as quickly as possible.

With nvALT you start typing and it is searching immediately, but if there is no match and you hit enter you are now writing a new note.

Each note is stored as a text file, and so is findable via other search methods on your machine, and is easy to sync via your chosen technology.

I have tried a variety of approaches as I love the idea of linking between notes, and adding images, and tagging and all that stuff. But in reality all of that adds friction, and so prevents me from making the note (which is the critical part).

[1] https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/

I tried this years ago (it's been around for quite some time) and found better results with his Marker[0] bookmarklet. It only converts whatever is selected on the page. It eliminates 1 out of the 2 issues I had with markdownifier, which is it's inability to figure out what to keep and what not to keep on the page.

The second issue I have affects both. Neither locally downloads linked content. Not having the images come down with the article means if the article were to go away, your local copy would be worthless unless you manually saved those pictures and altered the links pointing to them.

[0]: http://brettterpstra.com/2013/12/22/marker-web-selections-to-markdown/