Henrik Carlsson's Blog

All things me.

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🔖 Read: Siri Shortcuts: Opening up Siri’s next chapter | Macworld

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I need your help with finding a system for note taking

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🎧 Listened to: Cortex #33: Cortek

I’ve been taken a lot of notes lately, for my masters studies. I take notes in class and, most importantly, I highlight passages in the books I read and also take notes around the reading. Some of those notes relates directly to the highlighted passages, other notes are more general thoughts as I’m trying to work things out.

As I was reading, highlighting and writing last week I realised that over the course of two years these notes and highlights would grow to a big mess of assorted thoughts that I could never have any hope of organising in my final thesis, or any written exams either for that matter. So I need a better system.

I recalled having heard one or more podcasts where CGP Grey talked about how he handled similar tasks around his research for videos so I googled and found this old episode of Cortex. Around the 44:00 marker he describes his main workflow. Here’s the gist of it

Read ebooks -> Highlight passages -> When done, screen shot the pages with highlights -> import screenshots into Evernote -> Make notes in Evernote

I need to do something similar, but two things

  1. I prefer to read paper books for this. Not a huge problem, but a small change.
  2. Evernote seems like the wrong way to go.

Grey (and Myke) was already upset with Evernote when makes this podcast (in July 2016) and in later episodes that has been mentioned again and again, so it seems like it would be dumb to actually start taking these kind of notes in Evernote today.

So basically what I need is

I’m thinking of maybe some kind of combination of Microsoft OfficeLens for the scan and Apple Notes for everything else, or maybe just Microsoft OneNote for the whole thing. Or maybe save the notes as flat text files (preferably in Dropbox or iCloud Drive) together with PDF scans from something like OfficeLens. In this later case I might not need the OCR on the phone since instead I can use PDFPen on my Mac.

What do you think? Any suggestions?

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Replies and comments

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🎧 Listened to: Episode 21 – Banning Mobile Phones in School – Fragmentum

This is some interesting food for thought for me, because I do think that banning phones in the classroom of kids can be a totally reasonable thing to do.

Thanks for your perspective Adam!

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🎧 Listened to: Micro Monday – Micro Monday Extra: Late Night In The Airstream with @aaronpk at XOXO

Aaron brings up some interesting points and I wholeheartedly agree with him that the most important thing about the indieweb and owning your content is to own your domain name.

My personal site (where you might read this) has lived on at least three different web hosts but the domain has always been mine. In my particular case there are probably some broken permalinks in old posts that I will need to fix some day but most things are easily findable on the site.

It’s also nice that Aaron points out that the indieweb is not like the web of yore, it is so much more with webmentions and similar tools.

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🎧 Listened to: Episode 22: On the Road Again – Percolator

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🎧 Listened to: This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition • September 1st – 7th, 2018

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🎧 Listened to: H.I. #59: Consumed by Donkey Kong — Hello Internet

Brady and Grey discusses follow up from their previous discussion on Guns, Germs and Steel and while the discussion itself is interesting, I think the main point can be found around the 39:50 mark.

If you here about a persons opinion and arguments and want to argue against them, make sure to go back to the source and check that the person actually thinks and argues what you’ve been told he/she is arguing. Don’t argue against someone else’s straw man of a person.

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Before I started to logg my podcast listening on my blog my ”system” for keeping track of important episodes and their content was to screen shot Overcast whenever I listened to something particularly interesting. I will use some of those screenshots to back-fill some data.

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Listened to 🎧: H.I. #107: One Year of Weird — Hello Internet

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🎧 Listened to: Cortex #74: The Biggest Challenge of Being a Human

Some interesting elaborations from CGP Grey on his decision to more or less leave social media for the rest of the year.

While I will not take as extreme actions as Grey, I do agree with him regarding the problem with screens everywhere, algorithms everywhere and the attention deficit society that it might lead to.

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