Life

Recently I've noticed I've been forgetting important things I'd like to remember.

I'm not sure if it's aging, the few years I spent binging (unspecified brain chemical) in an effort to forget the awfulness of human civilization, or just having a life with more important things to forget.

It could also be the case that I and most everyone else have always been forgetful but there comes a time when you are both able to accept it and spend some effort putting a system of note-taking in place to mitigate the problem.

Now that I think about it, I've always wanted to keep notes... mostly for technical-reference type things. The evidence is scattered all over my desktop, documents directory, home directory, and countless other poorly conceived file paths on my computer as text or markup files. Often they are not named well, and they have unrelated information in the same file.

The result of this old system is that I would almost never be able to reference the information when I needed it. I'd see it only when I'm cleaning up my filesystem, when I don't need it. This is data-hoarding, not note-keeping. And while it can be useful to data-hoard in this age of Internet bit-rot & revisionism, and increasing uselessness of Google search... i'd like to be able to get more utility out of my practice of information-gathering.

I've been reluctant to keep physical paper notes (especially journaling) for OPSEC reasons... As a result I hadn't done it at all, until now. I've finally found a system that works for me and have been using it for about a month so far. That system is Joplin.

Joplin is a free and open-source desktop and mobile note-taking application written for Unix-like (including macOS and Linux) and Microsoft Windows operating systems, as well as iOS, Android, and Linux/Windows terminals.

Joplin's feature set as noted on Wikipedia is:

- Notes in markdown format

- Markdown extension plug-ins

- Storage in plain-text files

- Optional client-side encryption

- Organisation in notebooks and sub-notebooks

- Tagging system

- "Offline-first", notes are always accessible locally, and can be synced on demand

- Web clipper for Firefox and Chrome

- Note synchronization with Joplin Cloud, Nextcloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, WebDAV, or (networked) file system

So far I have not used the terminal application, but it looks pretty cool. The desktop/mobile app is Javascript/Electron, which I have strong negative opinions about... however it seems to run alright on my hardware.

The user-experience of the desktop application is pretty good actually. Your notes live inside notebooks, which can live inside other notebooks. Importantly, notebooks can be given icons for easier/faster navigation through the notebook tree. Notes are written in markup, so you can use titles, subtitles, tables, and other rich-text stuff.

You can also tag your notes for later display by tag... though I don't generally like tags since it seems like a crutch for bad categorization in the first place.

You can also create To-Do lists but I have not fully exploited this feature yet. You can apparently set alerts on To-Dos which is nice.

I set up synchronization using Nextcloud which was relatively painless. I also enabled client-side encryption so that my notes in the "cloud" are not easily accessible to people and organizations I don't want having access to them. I have experienced sync conflicts a couple times, but I suspect these were due to using the application on a system with bad time, so that's something to keep in mind.

Another feature of Joplin is that you can drag and drop pictures, files (like PDFs), etc into it. These items are also synchronized to your other instances. This is really useful for me since the various projects I work on tend to have some number of reference PDFs I don't want to get lost.

I want to find some sort of calendar extension so I can start remembering events, I'll post again if I find something decent.