This post’ll be more useful as more people chip in with their diverse methods, so here’re mine.
At home I almost exclusively take notes on my PC, where I use MediaWiki, although in retrospect MediaWiki’s probably unnecessarily heavyweight. (Everyday use is straightforward but it’s cumbersome to install & maintain.) Very occasionally I make & save computer algebra system notebook files.
In transit I don’t have an easy way to take notes, but I recently bought an e-book reader and installed a simple notepad application on it. I’ll see how that goes.
On campus:
marginalia on printouts of other people’s papers and my own preprints
semi-temporary mathematical scribbles and short-term to-dos on pads or loose scraps
project-specific text files in relevant directories on my office PC
computer algebra system notebooks again (more so on campus than at home)
titled & dated entries in hardcover lab books
LaTeX files for medium-to-long notes potentially expandable into papers or reports
occasional emails for things others might also find useful
An idea might grow & transmogrify into different formats as I experiment with it. In extremis, an idea might start as 5 or 10 words in the margin of a printout, become a clumsy stream of improvised maths on some scrap paper, get upgraded to a more systematic derivation over a few lab book pages, generate a few emails, then grow an abstract and figures as I turn it into the outline of a potential paper.
Do you take any notes on paper? If so do you scan them or otherwise digilatize them?
I don’t systematically scan or digitize paper notes. The nearest I come to that is manually expanding scrappy notes into better-written notes on my computer if I (expect to) try to rework them into a proper project.
Do you have specific strategies for deciding which information to write down?
Nah.
Do you tag your notes?
I use categories in my wiki entries, but that’s about it. For other computerized notes normal search tools usually suffice, and I manually search my lab book based on entries’ dates & titles.
how private are your notes? Would you allow friends to read in them? Your spouse?
Pretty much. The most embarrassing things in my work notes are little comments like “Oops that’s wrong”, which is no big deal. Almost all of my home notes are innocuous to the point of being boring, as they’re things like extracts or references from books. There is the odd blunt/rude comment about other people in there, though more about authors/public figures than people I know.
I chose MW as I knew it existed, I had the most familiarity with it, and I wanted to err towards a more featureful bit of wiki software in case I wanted features later. (Inline graphics & mathematics turned out to be useful, though I presume there are other wikis that handle those too.) I didn’t do much research to see whether other wiki software could satisfy those constraints, though.
I just want to clarify here—are you aware that personal wikis and server software such as MediaWiki are different classes of software? The most relevant reason to use personal wiki software rather than wiki serving software is, no server == no consequent security holes and system load, no need to do sysadmin type stuff to get it going. Personal wiki software is generally just an ordinary program, meaning it has it’s own GUI and can have features that it would be insecure to expose over the internet.
Personally I have found Zim a little lacking when I wanted tables (it doesn’t currently support them, except through diagrams), but it supports most other things I’ve wanted, including some rather exotic stuff
Anyway I mainly commented because using MediaWiki only for your own personal notes seems rather like cracking a walnut with a sledgehammer.
I just want to clarify here—are you aware that personal wikis and server software such as MediaWiki are different classes of software? [...] Personal wiki software is generally just an ordinary program, meaning it has it’s own GUI and can have features that it would be insecure to expose over the internet.
Apparently not! I didn’t realize “personal wikis” referred to wikis implemented as separate, ordinary programs; I’d thought they ran on web-server-plus-scripting-language stacks as MediaWiki does, just with smaller, simpler codebases and far simpler database schemas (or indeed a bunch of flat files instead of a full-blown database).
Anyway I mainly commented because using MediaWiki only for your own personal notes seems rather like cracking a walnut with a sledgehammer.
Yeah. Were I to do this again I’d look more deeply at the simpler personal wiki programs out there rather than just shrugging and going with the more familiar choice.
This post’ll be more useful as more people chip in with their diverse methods, so here’re mine.
At home I almost exclusively take notes on my PC, where I use MediaWiki, although in retrospect MediaWiki’s probably unnecessarily heavyweight. (Everyday use is straightforward but it’s cumbersome to install & maintain.) Very occasionally I make & save computer algebra system notebook files.
In transit I don’t have an easy way to take notes, but I recently bought an e-book reader and installed a simple notepad application on it. I’ll see how that goes.
On campus:
marginalia on printouts of other people’s papers and my own preprints
semi-temporary mathematical scribbles and short-term to-dos on pads or loose scraps
project-specific text files in relevant directories on my office PC
computer algebra system notebooks again (more so on campus than at home)
titled & dated entries in hardcover lab books
LaTeX files for medium-to-long notes potentially expandable into papers or reports
occasional emails for things others might also find useful
An idea might grow & transmogrify into different formats as I experiment with it. In extremis, an idea might start as 5 or 10 words in the margin of a printout, become a clumsy stream of improvised maths on some scrap paper, get upgraded to a more systematic derivation over a few lab book pages, generate a few emails, then grow an abstract and figures as I turn it into the outline of a potential paper.
I don’t systematically scan or digitize paper notes. The nearest I come to that is manually expanding scrappy notes into better-written notes on my computer if I (expect to) try to rework them into a proper project.
Nah.
I use categories in my wiki entries, but that’s about it. For other computerized notes normal search tools usually suffice, and I manually search my lab book based on entries’ dates & titles.
Pretty much. The most embarrassing things in my work notes are little comments like “Oops that’s wrong”, which is no big deal. Almost all of my home notes are innocuous to the point of being boring, as they’re things like extracts or references from books. There is the odd blunt/rude comment about other people in there, though more about authors/public figures than people I know.
Is there some reason you use MediaWiki rather than a personal wiki software (for example Zim)?
I chose MW as I knew it existed, I had the most familiarity with it, and I wanted to err towards a more featureful bit of wiki software in case I wanted features later. (Inline graphics & mathematics turned out to be useful, though I presume there are other wikis that handle those too.) I didn’t do much research to see whether other wiki software could satisfy those constraints, though.
I just want to clarify here—are you aware that personal wikis and server software such as MediaWiki are different classes of software? The most relevant reason to use personal wiki software rather than wiki serving software is, no server == no consequent security holes and system load, no need to do sysadmin type stuff to get it going. Personal wiki software is generally just an ordinary program, meaning it has it’s own GUI and can have features that it would be insecure to expose over the internet.
Personally I have found Zim a little lacking when I wanted tables (it doesn’t currently support them, except through diagrams), but it supports most other things I’ve wanted, including some rather exotic stuff
Anyway I mainly commented because using MediaWiki only for your own personal notes seems rather like cracking a walnut with a sledgehammer.
Apparently not! I didn’t realize “personal wikis” referred to wikis implemented as separate, ordinary programs; I’d thought they ran on web-server-plus-scripting-language stacks as MediaWiki does, just with smaller, simpler codebases and far simpler database schemas (or indeed a bunch of flat files instead of a full-blown database).
Yeah. Were I to do this again I’d look more deeply at the simpler personal wiki programs out there rather than just shrugging and going with the more familiar choice.