On Forever Data
riffing a little on PewDiePie's wild minimalism arc (h/t Steve) as well as Mike's The mc tech stack
Some of my own thoughts, after consolidating 4-5 different personal note taking methods across Mac, iOS, and Win ("use the right tool for the job!" they said). It was too much. Time to Marie Kondo it.
I had been like the home chef with 8 different knives, and realized that professional cooks use 2 knives: "this one" or "that one".
better, but worse (1)
Apple Notes is better at everything, and you get decent cross-platform access via Apple apps, but not portability. And it's nearly impossible to resist the temptation to extend/enhance the text note container with vendor lock-in features like family collaboration, pasting in Numbers spreadsheets and Pages presentations.
Meanwhile, Markdown notes survive traveling anywhere.
better, but worse (2)
Tags/categories are better in every way than hierarchical outlines: multi/singular, flexible/infexible, dynamic/static. But every tagging system has its own implementation.
If you ever need to migrate, the export format needs to be coupled with the new import method, which is a major technical lift, even with the help of AI.
Meanwhile, everything can always be stored in folders.
better, but worse (3)
ctime and mtime offer cross-platform metadata, but they're fragile and modern UIs hide it more and more. Metadata is optional for software to respect the way you want it to respect.
Case in point: Google Photos strips EXIF metadata on export (Google Takeout), choosing to manage metadata with a different method. You need complicated software to restore it, and Google changes their format every few years, as is their right to do.
I've reverted to naming files with date and time before short stubs (sortable as yyyymmdd, not my preferred d Mmm yy !). I don't believe in structured frontmatter, for the same reason of avoiding future problems.
One Note Taking System To Rule Them All (Today Edition)
Having convinced myself I need to try every Zettelkasten system ever dreamt by anyone, this setup pleases me right now:
- Obsidian Markdown files
- Remotely Save Community plugin synced to S3, with simple password encryption. Storage can be easily swapped for any S3 provider, or OneDrive / Dropbox / webdav
- OpenSSL-compatible local-only AES-256 encryption [prod] [FOSS] for light secrets -- it only took 4 quick iterations for DeepSeek to write this in HTML+JS
- synced+backup'd KeePass for true secrets
- Drafts for mobile widgets and quick-entry
Everything is portable, and uses algorithms/apis/formats that will survive for 100 years.