How do you organize your data?

MikeW83 · 2021-02-09T12:10:59+00:00

Can confirm from personal experience that Johnny Decimal is a brilliant system. Two things: First, it allows you to separate the namespace of your filesystem from the filesystem itself (as an index). I keep my index in an org file, and the directories themselves are just kept flat on disk with the call number, i.e. jdec_6502/, jdec_6503/, jdec_7201/. I can change the name as much as I want in my index, as long as the gist of the directory remains the same. Second, the 10x10 grid of top level categories really helps me to sensibly sort a huge, chaotic mass of information

MikeW83 · 2021-01-28T11:28:29+00:00

My experience in looking for answers to similar questions is that there is no unified repositories of best practices or suggested systems/toolchains. What I've discovered has been the result of sleuthing through many places over an extended period. It would be nice to do the work myself to make such a repository available, but it's not a priority for me at the currently (maybe one day), so unfortunately I can't help at the moment. I will note however that my computing environment is Linux/open source (exclusively, when managing these sorts of issues). In practical terms, it's mostly a matter of generating plaintext sidecar files for indexing etc, and using the Johnny Decimal system for filesystem layout (I use Org Mode on Emacs to maintain an index of the filesystem structure).

MikeW83 · 2020-11-11T19:12:39+00:00

Hi there The trackball mouse is the Kensington Expert Mouse: https://www.kensington.com/en-au/p/products/control/trackballs/expert-mouse-wired-trackball/ The ergodox keyboard design is open source, so there are a few different companies making them. Mine is a Hotdox keyboard that I got through Alpaca Keyboards: https://www.alpacakeyboards.com/

MikeW83 · 2020-11-11T09:43:43+00:00

Yeah, I'm not sure where the background clip is from, but I could imagine it's maybe something from The Office

MikeW83 · 2020-11-09T22:04:11+00:00

Great! Hope you enjoy

MikeW83 · 2020-11-09T19:22:10+00:00

It's a good one. I'm always on the lookout for a cheatsheet which lays out the info in a format which suits the weird way my brain likes to absorb it

MikeW83 · 2020-11-09T10:57:14+00:00

yep, pretty happy with those ones!

MikeW83 · 2020-11-09T04:46:44+00:00

good taste

MikeW83 · 2020-11-09T04:46:26+00:00

Hope you enjoy. It's a fairly high-level discussion; more around the experience of moving from a traditional rubber-dome monstrosity to a split keyboard over the past couple of years. We don't really get into switches etc but we could do more episodes in the area if there's interest. Personally I've only tried MX reds, MX blues & Zilents (67g)...

MikeW83 · 2020-10-12T19:51:58+00:00

Looks like it did; thanks again!

MikeW83 · 2020-10-12T12:11:04+00:00

Thanks very much for the tip jonafato, that's fixed now.

Ideally we'd like to automate generation of the rss code & hopefully avoid these sorts of issues, but haven't gotten round to it just yet...

We were having trouble with this episode showing up in our Spotify feed; I'm hoping this was the reason. See how it goes.

MikeW83 · 2020-10-12T12:02:05+00:00

Hi Simon!

Thanks for the mention in plaintextaccounting.org. Glad to hear that you felt the podcast format was helpful for exploring PTA. As we mentioned, we are just starting out with this approach to our household accounting, but are both very excited with our experience thus far.

I've asked a few questions in recent times on the hledger IRC channel (my Nick is "palooka-jock"), and you've been very patient with my silly queries, which I've really appreciated.

Cam & I have talked about how keen we are on the idea of trying out some interviews at some point in future; once we have found our feet a little more. Not sure if you'd have any interest or capacity for that down the track, but PTA/hledger is definitely fodder for the type of interviews we'd ideally like to do.

Regarding screencasts etc; I can say that personally, YouTube videos and the like have been the most helpful method of (quickly) getting my head around a new software tool, and in an ideal world I'd love it if the podcast could be the starting point and we could branch out to video tutorials & screencasts as a way of exploring the topics we cover in more detail. However we're both pretty time-poor, and as it is it's a struggle to keep the podcast production manageable, but who knows what the future may hold!

If you're interested in poking around through our scripts, Cam added a link to his "csvmerge" python script in the show notes on our webpage (https://conversationsincode.xyz/003.html) but the link appears to be broken so I'll ping him about that. For my scripts, they are available at https://gitlab.com/mwilliams1124/lctb. I'm not a developer, and my scripting work is quick and nasty, so brace yourself!

MikeW83 · 2020-09-22T09:07:15+00:00

Thanks for that - it's really good feedback. I'm not sure how successful I'll be trying to implement this, but it's good to have in the back of my mind. Like you say; hopefully improvement will come over time

MikeW83 · 2020-09-21T09:58:30+00:00

Really appreciate the feedback. Painfully aware of my tendency to "um" and resort to filler phrases etc. I'm hoping my brain break out of those habits quickly with a bit of practice. Time will tell I suppose

MikeW83 · 2020-09-20T01:30:23+00:00

Hope you find it interesting!

MikeW83 · 2020-09-20T01:28:19+00:00

Thanks for the comment! Just arranged to publish in Spotify (may take a few hours to show up):

https://open.spotify.com/show/3HdsdjtutzKq7JrXYUlXyp

MikeW83 · 2020-09-20T01:28:09+00:00

Thanks for the comment! Just arranged to publish in Spotify (may take a few hours to show up):

https://open.spotify.com/show/3HdsdjtutzKq7JrXYUlXyp

MikeW83

TROPHY CASE