Evolution of Note-Taking,
Weening off the Data Giants,
Personal Website Digital Garden Design and Development
A few fundamental values have guided my digital being. These underlying constraints have guided my journey in developing digital habits and a suite tools for long-term and short-term storage of files and digital keep-sakes, collecting/reflecting/processing thoughts, and it has been a dance through time as technology and software is developed and hardware wears out and upgrades. Those values are:
sovereignty/autonomy/control forever
privacy
hack-ability
switch-ability
unlimited storage
2 second rule, it has to flow and be easy to use in the moment when inspiration strikes
…(in progress)
Oh has it been a journey. Here’s a rough timeline, with links to more in-depth project progress notes (coming soon):
NOTE TAKING
Originated with pen and paper journal in high school (inspired by a crush on a friend met during an exchange to Germany),
daily list of tasks written each night before bed to finish during lunch hour in high school,
Writing stream of consciousness in textedit/notepad brief summary of the day, what I was excited about in school, after school activities, sports, robotics, movie reviews (most notable, How to Train Your Dragon)
Tiny laptop specifically for note taking (get pic)
MIT, intense, stopped taking daily journals, instead started using Evernote which quickly transitioned to Apple Notes for collecting topic specific ideas (2012-2018)
2017 intense lucid Apple Notes multiple windows editing simultaneously, screen recording while typing to support many levels of abstract threading simultaneously (Rivian computer??? New Chinese computer company (like Xiaomi) making a suite of hardware/software to compete with Apple, founded by a ex-high school teacher)
Xiaomi Notes, 2018 April switched away from apple phone to Android Xiaomi 8
Markor 2020 December installed LineageOS 17 on Xiaomi 8 phone
Obsidian 2021 September setup git repo and gitcrypt to encrypt note files on the public repo, start seed of Obsidian Digital Brain, excited about zettlekasten note taking methods, and indie web, and digital gardens (link to examples) but never got my head wrapped around complex structures, instead starting slow and letting the structures develop
Obsidian Digital Brain 2022 March, slow grow becomes more intentional, investing commitment begins, git pull and push becomes regular habit
WEENING OFF THE DATA GIANTS
2006 File system organized in 5th grader while bored without internet in a car waiting for my Dad to do a consulting job. Used throughout middle school and high school, flash drives for transferring files, disk drives for backing up, stored in fireproof box safe
2007 Personal hand held camera, named Doofus, PICTURE folder begins on external disk drive
2012 first apple phone, iPhone 4, start accumulating lots of pictures in iCloud, using Dropbox Camera Uploads and ImageCapture to remove pictures off phone
2012 Dropbox syncing starting at MIT, 1TB free space because Dropbox founder is an MIT alum
2014 July (hardware test engineering internship at Apple) growing frustrations with Apple’s switching costs tactics growing ever stronger and more enticing, absolutely despising “Out of Storage” warning preventing me from taking more pictures in the perfect picture moments and not having the bandwidth/maturity to continue to free up storage space.
2015 July try writing bash scripts with regex to pull exif data for renaming picture names to Dropbox convention 2015-07-19 13:22:43.jpg, never finished to my liking or implemented completely
2016 lost Dropbox 1TB, down to 20GB, buy many 1TB hard drives, one for PICTURES storage, one for PROJECTS storage, keep lean Dropbox
2018 March finally get all pictures (200GB) out of iCloud and exported from Photos Album (two year battle of deep dive focused project sessions spread over months)
2018 August: wechat message history visualizations, iMazing iMyFone apple third-party software for extracting message data into spreadsheets.csv, MySQL, d3.js
2021 November bought Thinkpad, plan to use Linux once my last MacBook Air dies or OS upgrades beyond use
2022 Three phones: Phone with Google services, Phone with Chinese apps, Phone that is ME (FOSS and a hackable playground), Xiaomi 8 isn’t compatible with AT&T 5G (had bought an extra for backup when playing with rooting in LineageOS in 2021 September), stopped using AT&T, they send free phone that is compatible with 5G networks, use it for Google services (maps, banking apps etc. I still carry it with me daily so privacy is still a problem, but I have shifted from being as strict to accepting convenience in order to save time and mental space), switch to Verizon’s Visibly (spoiled on cheap data plans in China)
2022 WeChat database decryption, rooting LineageOS, getting 70GB of message history out of Shelter app work partition, VirtualBox Chinese Microsoft 8 for WeChat and china apps
2023 using ChatGPT4 to get 80% of the way to a working picture renaming script for real-time renaming, streamlining syncing between the three phones using a bash script consolidate pictures into one folder on Android system, then SyncThingbetween devices
2024 and beyond, 10TB-50TB NAS setup with solid state drives in RAID configuration, auto sync with phones at night
2024 and beyond, easy blogging (like selecting a few photos and writing a text message to a group of friends to share project updates, but in a form that gets compiled to my personal website to appropriate in-progress projects blog pages)
PERSONAL PORTFOLIO DIGITAL BRAIN WEB DEVELOPMENT
Html website for poem project in 6th grade
ASRA web dev module, CSS, w3schools, FileZilla
Kristeller Consulting database Microsoft Visual Studio,
Highschool computer science classes, NetBeans/Eclipse, Java
MIT Application www.kriste11er.com
MIT Sublime Text, python, www.kriste11er.blogspot.com
Moonshot javascript, Vue.js,
XiaoYaoYou GitHub pages, Jekyll, homesteading course on Hyperlink Academy (learn about various digital garden hosting and serving tools)
China Microsoft Suite, Teams, Pages for Makerspace website at Moonshot
Boston 2023 github pages.io hosting markdown files, Jekyll parsing md to html, live on personal domain, Visual Studio Code, ChatGPT4, indie web, noah Betzen, Obsidian publishing nah too public, inspiration for info dense bullet listed website How to Make (Almost) Anything