[GTALUG] information storage ideas

[Stewart C. Russell]

On 2020-12-08 12:40 p.m., o1bigtenor via talk wrote:
> 
> Has anyone found a 'reasonable' system that would effect this less than simple
> 'idea'?

"Reasonable" is quite subjective. What's reasonable for me might be 
downright paltry for other people.

Things I've found out:

* indexing written notes is hard: you have to manually add metadata to 
find it again. The same goes for scanned photos. Digital photos are a 
little better, as at least they have a capture date.

* distributing your ability to "find stuff" across several 
computers/devices is hard. It will require work to upload it to one 
central repository. This will have to become part of your routine if you 
need to rely on it

* online tools don't necessarily stick. I used WorkFlowy (an online 
outliner) for a while, and I still have a useful project database there, 
but I keep forgetting about it. MindMup was quite cool too, until you 
really needed to start paying for it to access basic features.

* for me - an untidy person - what works is

-- file dates ("I worked on this in September")

-- side associations ("I listened to the album by The ___ when I worked 
on this, so it must've been around …")

-- saved shell histories (I'm not quite at the stage of aliasing cd to a 
command that appends to a local history file, but I'm close - the number 
of projects I've reconstructed through saved history is beyond countable)

-- the desktop's indexer (like Tracker, Spotlight, Windows Search). I 
can't live without this. A system without this isn't one I'd choose to 
use. Yes, they chew CPU and storage but they remember! everything! for! you!

Maybe my findings aren't worth much, though. I recently found two 
independent reimplementations of exactly the same project roughly two 
years apart on my system … as I was about to implement precisely the 
same thing for the third time.

  Stewart