notesutils VS notes

I should write this stuff up, but I haven't.

I do have some brief notes on the "Notes.app" format here:

https://github.com/dunhamsteve/notesutils/blob/master/notes....

But I didn't discuss my methodology -- Generic decoding of protobuf, building up a schema as you go -- the tricky part there is that a byte array and a substructure look the same, so you have to try to decode it, and if successful, try that schema on the next example.

Here is another fun technique - scanning through a disassembly of an Apple framework looking for assembly patterns that match the protobuf compiler output (this was dependent on which language was targeted by protobuf):

https://gist.github.com/dunhamsteve/224e26a7f56689c33cea4f0f...

So you find the serializer / deserializer code and figure out what the original protbuf spec looked like.

I've been doing something similar for ~20 years at: https://github.com/nickjj/notes

    - Running `notes` will open this month's notes for YYYY_MM.txt

I use a very command line focused approach with https://github.com/nickjj/notes.

Since about 2001 I used YYYY-MM.txt plain text files and have a shell script to help create notes in the most friendly way I could think of from the command line at https://github.com/nickjj/notes.

Totally works fine for a knowledge log when you're streaming high level details. I still use it today.

But when you want to really go all-in with in-depth notes it's tricky because in 1 month's time if you're hardcore deep in the woods of learning, applying and using something you're going to end up with hundreds of concepts from an assorted set of tools and it kind of stinks to have all of that info sitting in 1 file. Think about using something like Kubernetes. That's really Kubernetes, Kustomize / Helm, EKS, various cloud hosting details (networking, etc.), Terraform and ton of super useful commands / context. Details you for sure want recorded for later.

For this type of info I've been building up a knowledge base with https://obsidian.md/. It's really nice and I highly recommend it. It's been working well for keeping things reasonably categorized without wasting a lot of time on the details around keeping links and tags up to date. It also has Vim mode that's good enough where day to day writing feels natural.

Did you end up automating the entries?

For example, I have a command line note taking script at https://github.com/nickjj/notes.

It creates a YYYY-MM-DD.txt file and doesn't include time stamps but it would be a 1 line change to make each entry get timestamped. I didn't do that because personally I'm more interested in monthly notes not per minute.

But I do think removing the barrier of creating entries is an important step with jotting things down, this way you can focus on what you want to write and not the boilerplate.

A whole bunch of little things, mainly command line tools.

Most of them are open source and also have extensive documentation and a screencast video going over them.

In no specific order:

- https://github.com/nickjj/notes

- https://github.com/nickjj/invoice

- https://github.com/nickjj/wait-until

And a few recent little scripts to solve specific things:

- https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/using-ffmpeg-to-get-an-mp3s-d...

- https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/a-shell-script-to-keep-a-bunc...

- https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/bash-aliases-to-prepare-recor...

Along similar lines, nickjj also has a similar (but bash) notes script at:

https://github.com/nickjj/notes

While I don't use it personally there's: https://obsidian.md/

It's cross platform and works offline. You write markdown and it produces a visual graph of your data. It supports interlinking notes, tags and images too.

Plain text notes[0] work best for me but I'd probably use Obsidian if I wanted to see things visually. When I tried it out briefly it was really solid.

[0]: https://github.com/nickjj/notes