[EE]: How do you organize your 'notes'
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[EE]: How do you organize your 'notes'
 
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The 'hiring firmware people' thread got me to thinking about asking this
question: How do you organize your notes so you can find them later for reference? At the moment I have about 7 years worth of notes with code and links and other references kept inside Emacs and org-mode (it's text base so I can look at it with any editor). I use a lot of features such as links (URLs and local file links and same file links), block mode (usually executable code fragments) and notebooks pointing to notebooks pointing to notebooks. Problem is that I'm beginning to find that I can't recall some detail that would lead me back to the specific notes. Lots of my projects have odd names or worse geek-code (letters and numbers - not as bad as UUIDs). I have attempted to use MS notes but find it annoying and limited (no lisp ;-) ). So I tend to take my org notes and print them out to a nice format MS Notes can use and stored them there. But Note's search is worse than my gigs of org files. I do have Unix tools on Windows and I have been using grep -rn . -e 'whatever' which helps but as the data grows the time it takes is getting worse. -- Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry [hidden email] http://www.linuxha.com/ Main site http://linuxha.blogspot.com/ My HA Blog Author of: Linux Smart Homes For Dummies -- http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist |
Re: [EE]: How do you organize your 'notes'
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I've been using emacs in text mode for a few decades. A single file
for work and play. New stuff is put at the top. I've macros for inserting the date and time. I link out to the filesystem for code greater than a line or two. My current file was started 2009-11-03 when I joined OLPC, and is 112597 lines as of today. That's about 30 lines a day. Whenever I've struggled to find something, when I do find it I add the keywords that I had expected to find it with. This tunes my search practice to compensate for normal memory loss and reassociations. Failed searches are inserted at top of the file; they are an activity after all. The file is not under change control, but there are multiple backups. I'd call it a journal, or an engineering notebook. Some projects have their own file, which ceases to be maintained once the project becomes idle. Usually no more than a few hundred lines each, and about 132 of them on my system today. I've keyboard macros that open selected string as a URL, or as a file in a new buffer. -- James Cameron http://quozl.netrek.org/ -- http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist |
Re: [EE]: How do you organize your 'notes'
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In reply to this post by Neil Cherry-3
I saw Russell's when I visited him, and in the interest of improving his
security, I'll share it here (you're welcome, Rus). He has tons of nested folders where he downloads everything from PDFs to web pages with important research and images of circuit diagrams. They are all filed in a hierarchy under project names, research topic, or year, whichever is most relevant to the collection. He then uses shell commands to quickly browse through the folders of files and something like irfanview to popup images to show people. Years of practice has made him quite efficient at this, and his monitors are "bloody huge" in physical size which helps with all the text. Additionally, he supplements this with nested bookmark folders for active research and links he wishes to keep live (Rus, feel free to clarify this distinction). Am I close? As for me, I just remember everything by keywords that I later type back into google (yes, for the last 10 or so years of information, our brains are awesome). It's surprisingly worked for me, except for in private intranets at work where I have to use browser bookmarks. On Wed, 18 Nov 2020 at 12:10, Neil Cherry <[hidden email]> wrote: > The 'hiring firmware people' thread got me to thinking about asking this > question: > > How do you organize your notes so you can find them later for reference? > > At the moment I have about 7 years worth of notes with code and links and > other references kept inside Emacs and org-mode (it's text base so I can > look at it with any editor). I use a lot of features such as links (URLs > and local file links and same file links), block mode (usually executable > code fragments) and notebooks pointing to notebooks pointing to notebooks. > Problem is that I'm beginning to find that I can't recall some detail that > would lead me back to the specific notes. Lots of my projects have odd > names or worse geek-code (letters and numbers - not as bad as UUIDs). > > I have attempted to use MS notes but find it annoying and limited (no > lisp ;-) ). So I tend to take my org notes and print them out to a nice > format MS Notes can use and stored them there. But Note's search is worse > than my gigs of org files. I do have Unix tools on Windows and I have been > using grep -rn . -e 'whatever' which helps but as the data grows the time > it takes is getting worse. > > -- > Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry [hidden email] > http://www.linuxha.com/ Main site > http://linuxha.blogspot.com/ My HA Blog > Author of: Linux Smart Homes For Dummies > -- > http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive > View/change your membership options at > http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist > http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist |
Re: [EE]: How do you organize your 'notes'
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In reply to this post by James Cameron-2
On 11/17/20 6:47 PM, James Cameron wrote:
> I've been using emacs in text mode for a few decades. A single file > for work and play. New stuff is put at the top. I've macros for > inserting the date and time. I link out to the filesystem for code > greater than a line or two. > > My current file was started 2009-11-03 when I joined OLPC, and is > 112597 lines as of today. That's about 30 lines a day. > > Whenever I've struggled to find something, when I do find it I add the > keywords that I had expected to find it with. This tunes my search > practice to compensate for normal memory loss and reassociations. > Failed searches are inserted at top of the file; they are an activity > after all. > > The file is not under change control, but there are multiple backups. > > I'd call it a journal, or an engineering notebook. > > Some projects have their own file, which ceases to be maintained once > the project becomes idle. Usually no more than a few hundred lines > each, and about 132 of them on my system today. > > I've keyboard macros that open selected string as a URL, or as a file > in a new buffer. > Thanks Look into org-mode, it has all the above and quite a bit more. But be careful it's a rabbit hole. I can't quite ignore the projects, they come back again and again. They're the thing I most need to find. I have projects dating back to 2016 at this point and they're consuming 88M of text. My home machine is a bit better in that I have the notebooks a bit more organized. I can also convert them to HTML and post them to my web pages. I can use google to search those (no proprietary information there). I can't do that with my work notes. Right now the notes system works well but I am failing at organizing them. I may need to do better with keywords though a lot of my work covers multiple keywords. I also have all my notebooks linked at a main notebook so I can find them. But it is the specific information inside that's the difficult part to find now. Mine isn't under change control yet either (I won't go into why, grumble grumble grumble). -- Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry [hidden email] http://www.linuxha.com/ Main site http://linuxha.blogspot.com/ My HA Blog Author of: Linux Smart Homes For Dummies -- http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist |
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Hi Neil. Long time lurker etc...
On Wed, Nov 18, 2020 at 9:07 AM Neil Cherry <[hidden email]> wrote: > Look into org-mode, it has all the above and quite a bit more. But be > careful > it's a rabbit hole. > . . . > Right now the notes system works well but I am failing at organizing them. > I may > need to do better with keywords though a lot of my work covers multiple > keywords. > I also have all my notebooks linked at a main notebook so I can find them. > But it > is the specific information inside that's the difficult part to find now. > > I have customer service requests in 10,039 HTML files on my employer's Omega. It's a search engine based on Xapian (xapian.org), running on Ubuntu Linux, and it does a good job of locating stuff in that huge pile. I have a Python script that checks for changes every three hours and creates new HTML pages as needed. You could probably set up something similar by exporting your org files to html. I use org-mode for my day-to-day journal; I should take my own advice and put those files into Omega. /Joe -- http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist |
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