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Julien Desrosiers

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Tools for thinking

2021-08-21

Fact: I need exo-brain (tech-)tools to help me make sense of complex
things.

Here are some of them:

1. Kinopio

Kinopio is quite fun to use. Here are a few examples:

For philosophy

kinopio for philosophy

kinopio for collecting concepts aboutphilosophy

For political sciences

political science with kinopio

For linguistics

kinopio for linguisticthinking

For collaborative brainstorming / moodboarding

A nice alternative to pinterest:

kinopio as a pinterestalternative

Credits to @tiff and @Liby: board's link

For mindmapping

clound nativemindmap

2. Big-Ass Text File

One big, always open, big-a** text file.

I use Notepad++ for this. Mainly because I don't want to use the same
text editor as I use for coding (VS Code + Vim, right now).

For me, it serves many purposes, among which:

 1. a paste board for easy-to-recover snippets of code
 2. a paste board for order confirmation numbers after purchasing
    stuff
 3. a more comfortable (multi-line) place to edit throwaway-code like
    SQL queries or javascript to execute in the web console, or long
    bash commands when I'm too lazy to create script files.
 4. a temporary place when someone gives me a bunch of
    project-related passwords, before properly storing them in my
    password manager.
 5. a place where I paste long stack traces that need to be unwrapped
    for easier reading.
 6. a place for writing long-form instant messaging responses outside
    of the non-standard web interfaces with inconsistent keyboard
    shortcuts.

Some examples:

metasploit session (a metasploit session for future reference)

code (some dumped ruby object and an SQL query for a WordPress site)

Note: I try to put the current date every morning when using it, in
order to find my notes by date later on.

3. Big-Ass SpreadSheet

It's a variant of the BATF, but for tabular data.

The key factor to consider here is the cost.

You see, when you want to quickly dabble with tabular data, you
normally...

 1. open Excel
 2. create a new spreadsheet
 3. (want to save it?) navigate to the right place on your drive
    where you want it to be saved.

Now, with the BASS (Big-Ass SpreadSheet), those steps are just one
click away: Click the + button in your (always-open spreadsheet
software) to create a new sheet.

Boom: Tabular notes are now cheap!

Create as many as you want.

Some examples:

All those times you're doing cross-multiplication calculations:

Cross products using excel

Ad-hoc comparison lists:

comparison lists in excel (what book should I read next?)

Health log:

BASS (As you can see, I have a somewhat non-existant sleep hygiene)

4. Joplin

Joplin is great for notes about specific topics and linking them
together, and grouping them by tags and notebooks. Pretty much like
Evernote.

But unlike Evernote, it has Markdown support and code highlighting.
And it's free.

I use Joplin as my personal Zettelkasten tool.

Learning (As you can see, I just started learning Vue.js )

Readingnotes (My reading notes of Good to Great)

Conclusion

In order for a tool to be useful, it must be handy (at-hand). And
I've found that the principles outlined in the book Atomic Habits are
pretty helpful for this:

 1. Make It Obvious (an always-open app is just that)
 2. Make it Attractive (Kinopio is kinda attractive, don't you find?
    ;-))
 3. Make it Easy (Stupid-simple to use, Obvious UX, Lightweight)
 4. Make It Satisfying (It must do the job of storing things in a
    satisfying way. And it's pretty satisfying when you eventually
    find info that you need, by just CTRL-F'ing for it.)

Tags

#lifehacks #meta #thinking

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