nys

nys

@nys

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nys
@nys
NireBryce
@NireBryce
NireBryce
@NireBryce
filenine
@filenine asked:

i saw you made a post about using obsidian! it seems like a very powerful tool.

i want to start taking notes to keep track of things, and i want to improve my writing. what do you write about in your notes?

the problem with obsidian is it can be anything.

some people people take a more Getting Things Done (GTD) approach, or zettelkansen approach, but mine is just to have notes about things that I go back to and build upon, and any time some page gets too big I comb through it, separate things into their own pages, and then [[wiki link]] to them and build a surfable lazy-not-quite-wiki, with pages I update as I learn new things about them.

while I'm not as pretentious as to label this anything but 'going back to my notes', most resources on this style will be under the keyword evergreen notes if you want to learn more about other people doing it

But obsidian can twist itself to fit any given notetaking strategy, and moving yours to another type is easy enough, you just get new plugins and change some of your headers, in many cases.

so it's more about making obsidian fit what's best for you, and knowing where things can change if you want them to. Your goal is externalizing your memory to paper, so you can use the resources you would for active memorykeeping and recall for other things. Or as quick reference. But memory is fallable, computers are less so.

one of my favorite takes on this is: (warning: computer-toucher tier)

(Related reading: https://youtu.be/XUZ9VATeF_4?t=320 )

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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

filenine
@filenine

oh, wow! that's interesting. i guess i'll have to work out my preferred note-taking strategy as i go along.

(i've been hearing about Getting Things Done - maybe it'd be a useful book.)

i love no boilerplate's videos! i hadn't seen this one before. obsidian seems really, really good! i think i understand how notes are made and sorted now. starting with only the default plugins seems like a good idea.

i watched the "related reading" video several months ago. i remember thinking that taking notes was a great idea. but then i heard this:

Every wiki page I read, every blog, every article, if it could be relevant to my work, I copy and paste into my brain, for later linking and extraction.

and i thought that was too much for me to commit to, especially for something i'd never tried before.

i suppose i can start small. do you have any suggestions?

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NireBryce
@NireBryce

I don't do it for every thing I read, but I do it for things I think I'll want to reference later, so that when I inevitably can't find the thing i'll be able to find the excerpt I pasted in some random note somewhere even if I didn't label it right

otherwise, like, my actual note flow is Several Giant Notes that I then break into their own pages as sections get too large. so the seeds kinda grow in the large notes that look like, uhhhh, a mess, and then they become more organized as I have things.

back-links help a lot -- make empty links to concepts even if you don't have a core note. Eventually you will have accidentally mentioned a thing in enough places that even just copying all of those into a note is a pretty sizeable start.

the table of contents for my main note rn is (cleaned out like three-to-six months ago):

  • Nixos
  • fix stuff house
  • FIGURE OUT WHY NOTIFIER DOESN'T AUTH ON HEXE-RUNTIPI
  • linux problems
  • On Writing
  • idea: overlay MFD hud on desktop and terminal
  • Ansible
  • Setup backblaze b2
  • Optometrist
  • food allergies
  • Cheatsheets
    • Codeium AI cheat sheet
  • astronomy
  • todo:
  • books
    • management and communication
  • links for blog
  • Talon Voice
  • set up 3rd monitor with raspberry pi that just shows calendar and schedule and this note
  • Learn Rust
  • Latency Numbers every programmer should know
  • Learn more than basic javascript
  • projects
  • Tools
  • learning
  • Cyberdeck
  • dev environment
  • Links
  • Doctors / Medical
  • book notes:
  • misc
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filenine
@filenine

thank you so much for the advice!! storing references and making backlinks seem like useful starting points. i'm realising that this is a long-term task - i can start really small and slowly build it up over the months and years.

i assume your "table of contents" is just a series of headings in a huge markdown file? if so, that makes sense.

also, how'd you write such a clear (and lengthy) reply so fast??? (i'm working on improving my writing, and i'm looking for advice while i gain experience)

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NireBryce
@NireBryce

this is just how I like, talk. I guess. Keep in mind it looks longer because of the narrow column :)

This is sorta just my stream of consciousness -- I can type as fast as I think, which helps a lot with that. I've been Online for like 20 years at this point, and I'm a programmer so I get a lot of practice. It took some deliberate practice on and off for a few months to get that way though. But by 'deliberate practice' I mean like, 'mindfully think about finger positions' more than 'do practice drills or whatever'. I don't have much advice there -- be weird in public I guess. I read a lot of posts, and bloggers, and articles and journal papers, I suppose. It's the same skill, really, reading and writing.

and yeah, that's Auto Table of Contents' view of my heading map. Mostly just to show that I'm nowhere near as organized as it sounds, I just switched looking at reddit with rearranging my bookmarks and slowly accidentally building my notes on various topics into their own pages.

another good philosophy-of-notes post is https://doctorow.medium.com/the-memex-method-238c71f2fb46 which resembles what I do (piracy link: https://archive.li/Nf4qb )

also if you don't know about it, on your phone, look into the swipe typing options of your phone keyboard. I'm typing this on my desktop keyboard, but that's how I type way fast on my phone.

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filenine
@filenine

oh, yeah - fair point about the column width. it's still longer than the posts i make, and i try to make my posts longer and informative.

wow - you've been online longer than i've been alive! oddly enough, despite being in college studying computer science, it was only a few months ago that i taught myself how to touch type. "mindfully think about finger positions" seems like interesting advice. i'd ask you how it worked, but this comment chain is getting pretty long. how about discord?

(also: i liked doctorow's article. i'd heard about memex before, in alice maz's one with the machine, but this was the first time i'd seen it connected to blogging.)

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