My experience of digitalization of myself and my family

Introduction

At different times I have tried to somehow organize my notes, files, work and free time.
It’s not that I’m such a master of self-organization, but some details seem not entirely obvious to me, and if someone had told me this a year ago, I would have been very happy.

What was my work or merit? Nothing. I just bought certain gadgets, installed certain applications on them, configured them so that they were convenient. That is, any person from IT will not see anything special in what I did for myself. In fact, the reason for writing this article is that people sometimes ask me how they can configure everything the way I have. And explaining (and even more so, configuring it for them just “because I'm a programmer”) is an unsuitable option. That's why I'm writing. That's why I ask you not to judge strictly.

I apologize in advance if the “architecture” I propose does not work completely for someone due to sanctions. We currently live in the Netherlands and can pay for purchases in the Google Store. If you do not have this opportunity, the scheme can still be used quite productively (because I used it in the free version for a whole year).

What I tried at different times – you can skip right away if you are not very interested in it.

1. A pile of notebooks, with the first two or three sheets filled with writing, and a bag for 3.5-inch floppy disks. The tradition of ruining notebooks, in the hope of getting a “well-deserved” notebook filled to the end in a year, has been with me since I was about 8 years old. (To be fair, I have an order of magnitude more notebooks filled to the end than started and abandoned ones).

2. A bunch of CD-R blanks, on which I saved everything, on the computer there was a Far-manager with a “cataloger” plugin, which created a virtual copy of all my blanks locally, but this copy stored only paths, names and file sizes. That is, in essence, it was a virtual file system in which you could search for files by name, but to open a file, you had to insert the desired blank into the CD-ROM. By the way, the solution was very good for its time. At some point, notes on the Internet were added to the notebooks, which I made following some work (for example, emb-linux.narod.ru And lego-mindstorms.narod.ru) – unfortunately, narod.ru has been ordered to live long, now it is based on some ucoz and I don’t even have a clue how to access these once my sites via FTP.

3. A laptop hard drive (mechanical) with 100 GB, in a case-adapter from SATA to USB. Regular flash drives at that time were 128-256 megabytes, so I was very proud of my hard drive and called it a USB flash drive. Files were stored there in directories. That is, to add something new, you first had to figure out where to add it. I tried to add tags.txt files to directories so that I could quickly find the necessary information by searching only in text files, but I did not have the discipline to mark everything with tags. And after some time, the disk crashed along with all the information that was on it.

4. Evernote (I switched to it around 2013). It seemed great. You could do a lot of things even in the free version. You could tag notes. You could take handwritten notes! The annoying thing was that it was all in the cloud in some format. I switched to a subscription pretty quickly and had no problems, but my wife didn't switch – and one day she lost everything.

5. At some point (around the same time as Evernote, I bought myself a notebook with 4 steel rings, into which you could insert A5 sheets of paper – they were sold separately, colored ones (just in case, there were only 4 colors, not 6, and the laws at that time were not so strict). It seemed convenient – after all, you don't have to carry all the sheets of paper with you. You only carry the notebook, sometimes you take the sheets of paper out of it and sort them into folders (also A5).

   But all these tools were not so good. That is, there was always some inconvenience. If you write on paper – then you need to convert it to electronic form at some point. If you write in Evernote – it is in the cloud. What did you want? Well, like in the future. So that there was some kind of device – a communicator. And so that it had everything – at any time. Regardless of whether there is Internet or not.

   Currently, regarding work with information, I have some tactics and I stick to them – in connection with which I decided to write this article. I do not claim to be a guru of self-organization. It's just that usually all the convenience of gadgets ends inside the advertisement listing their useful features. In real life, most people use alarm clocks to remind themselves of events, and a smartphone, which can be used as an ideal communicator, is used only to surf the Internet and share memes with friends. What I ended up with changed my life to a certain extent and I want to share it.

Description of what happened in the end.

1) You can store any files, tag them and have access to them from all your devices.
2) You can write notes (with a stylus), tag them and have access to them from all devices.
3) During Zoom calls, you can draw on your laptop or tablet screen what I am explaining so that those I am talking to can see my artwork.
4) You can set some tasks for yourself, break them down into subtasks, track the phase of completing the subtask – almost without straining yourself, even from your phone.
5) You can take into account some regular achievements or events (whether it is healthy food eaten, if you are tracking healthy eating, or unhealthy food eaten, if you want to track something unhealthy)
6) I now spend no more than 1 minute searching for the things I need if they are lost at home. If they are lost somewhere outside the house – it depends on luck. But so far everything that was lost outside the house has been found (2 times).
7) The whole family has a single online calendar, where we post everything we learn immediately at the moment of learning. Many of you know that this is possible, but when trying to set it up, many run into the problem that the calendars are not of the right system, that for some reason they do not see each other, etc. … and in the end you forget about it.

Solution

Material part

Now I use this set:

Software part

1. Obsidian
   – for PC
   – for Android
   – Some plugins

2. Google Drive for PC (plus I have a paid account for 200 GB for 30 euros per year, the free account gives about 14 GB, which is not a small amount).

3. DriveSync application is a utility for synchronizing data between Androids and the cloud (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ttxapps.drivesync) – I bought the full version of this program for 9.99 euros

4. Smart things app for Android (https://play.google.com/store/search?q=smart%20things&c=apps&hl=en_US)

5. Family Wall application (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.familywall)

6. ScreenStream application (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.dvkr.screenstream)

7. XRecorder application (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=videoeditor.videorecorder.screenrecorder)

Organizational part

In MS-Word I typed a page like this

I printed it out, cut stickers and used tape to stick them to cards, a phone, a tablet, a laptop, all documents. In most cases, what other people find is returned very quickly (almost immediately), so such stickers are 99% of the success in finding things and documents if you really forgot them somewhere.

How I set it all up

If you look at my infrastructure, Obsidian isn't even mentioned:

Therefore, if you create such a structure for yourself, it will already be a very convenient thing.
You will be able to put any files in your local copy of Google Drive, it will be synchronized with the cloud, and from the cloud it will be synchronized with all other devices. Therefore, first we need to discuss the details of setting up such an infrastructure.

Why do you need 2 cloud storage programs (Google Drive and Drive Sync)

If you look at the Google Drive settings for Windows, you will see this setting:

That is, you can see that the computer program can both mirror files on the local computer drive and stream them from the Internet. For the purposes described in this article, it is more convenient when files are mirrored (i.e. their local copies are stored). The problem is that Google Drive for Android does not have such a setting. It always downloads files from the cloud (i.e. only streams, but never mirrors). And in order to mirror files to the storage of your smartphone or tablet, you need Drive Sync! If you are not going to use Obsidian, then you may not need to mirror files.

Perhaps some of the readers tried to install Obsidian, trying to use the mobile version of Google Drive instead of the Drive Sync program. And nothing worked as expected and their hands dropped (that's how it was for me). Well, now you know the first secret.

Why do you need Family Wall?

For some reason, I couldn't set up Google Calendar so that both my wife and I could access it and create events in it and see them. So at first we used Samsung calendar (we both have Samsung smartphones and this calendar worked well). The problem is that this calendar doesn't work on other Android devices! On Windows too! Family Wall (even the free version) solves this problem. That is, now access to the family calendar is available on all devices.

How Smart Tag 2 Works

The tag connects to the program on your Samsung smartphone in one of two ways:
1) Via low-power Bluetooth (short range)
2) Via the Internet, which is provided to it by some other Galaxy smartphone, and it communicates with it via Bluetooth (at any distance, the main thing is that the Samsung smartphone is near the tag)
The tag can transmit its (approximate) location and play a sound signal when you are looking for it.

At first, we bought a car GPS tracker to track our son, who started going to school on his own (it's quite heavy, weighs about 400 grams, the battery lasts for a month). It was inconvenient. Then we learned about these Smart Tags. We tried them – they are much more convenient, although they only work when there is someone with a Samsung nearby.

How ScreenStream Works

The tablet and laptop must be on the same network (and neither of them must be on VPN). Then you launch ScreenStream, click the start stream button, and the program gives you the IP address of the tablet on your network. A small web server is launched on the tablet. You open a browser on your computer (for example, Google Chrome), enter the IP address in the address bar as in the picture, and see everything that is happening on the tablet screen in the browser window.

It is important to note that ScreenStream has a problem: when the application is minimized, it stops streaming. I solved it this way: I make Split Screen on the tablet. I launch ScreenStream in one half, then turn off Split Screen, switching completely to the second screen, where there is no program for streaming, but in this case the program continues to stream.

I used this solution before I bought a capacitive stylus for my laptop. It's a cool thing – I recommend it. But the laptop screen must, of course, be touch-sensitive for such a stylus to work. Therefore, ScreenStream is a good alternative for those who have a laptop without a touch screen.

Why do you need XRecorder?

A convenient program for recording something like video lectures. You launch this recorder, launch the program for recording notes, in which the entire lecture is already typed, and you simply scroll through it, underlining the necessary with a stylus, deleting unnecessary on the go, correcting incorrect. You comment with your voice. Everything is recorded – and the screen is captured and your voice is added to the video.

How to set up DriveSync

It needs to be configured differently for different devices.

Smartphone

Tablet

Regarding the tablet, I am very lucky that the tablet's note-taking program allows you to convert the note to PDF format automatically when you exit the editing mode.
Thus, all the notes that I make on the tablet are converted into PDF by themselves and, at the next synchronization, are sent to the cloud storage, and then from there they are distributed across all my devices.

A fly in the ointment

DriveSync in its free version allows you to set up only one synchronization (and there is also a limit on the size of synchronized files). But, frankly speaking, I used the free version for a whole year and everything suited me. The paid version is only needed for more flexible settings related to importing notes.

About using a stylus with a tablet

To be honest, the fact that our Lenovo laptop had a touchscreen was a surprise to me. We simply ordered a second-hand refurbished laptop. And we received a very convenient tool. And the touchscreen is good, but drawing squiggles on it with your finger is not very convenient. I really wanted a stylus, but it was not clear which one to take. My tablet stylus did not work with the laptop and I understood that not all styluses are compatible with the laptop. In the end, I found a stylus on Amazon, the description of which directly stated that it was compatible with the laptop. Later I realized that any capacitive stylus is compatible. This is what it looks like:

The little pancake at the end is not a bug, but a feature. You don't need to tear it off. It doesn't interfere in principle, although there are other capacitive styluses without such a pancake, but they are more expensive.

Obsidian

Anyone who has read this far probably already thought that I would definitely say that all this beauty was done in order to launch Obsidian on top of such infrastructure. And he was not mistaken in thinking so. Specifically for his own sake.

What is Obsidian?

In a nutshell, it is a browser (explorer) for files that can index them and maintain the integrity of links between files, even if you move these files from one place to another.

You can look at it from another angle: consider it your personal Wiki engine. That is, you want to have your own personal Wikipedia. Well, here it is. The pages of your Wikipedia are markdown files. They can link to each other, they can link to other files. You can mark some places with hash tags (to make them easier to find).

You could say that Obsidian is a personal organizer. your mom's friend's son. Thanks to him, he manages to do everything, instantly finds any information that at least once seemed interesting to him. He keeps statistics of all his achievements, does not forget anything. And your mother constantly gives you him as an example.

You could say that Obsidian is a really cool text editor. Remember that egghead from your class who defended his thesis on mathematical physics at 28? Since his school years, he was very much fascinated by some latex, which for some reason he called latex. Obsidian also supports LaTeX. At the same time, you don’t have to think about why adding some babel causes document compilation errors and why Cyrillic is not supported. In Obsidian as an editor, you just write text. And when you need to insert a formula, you use dollar signs just like in LaTeX.

You could say that Obsidian is a cool tool for documenting your code. You can add markdown files right next to your source code files. In these markdown files, you can add a bunch of stuff with plugins:
– track TODOs
– write documentation, including UML diagrams, Gantt charts, chemical formulas, and the devil in a mortar.
– you can write a shell script that will generate some simple markdown files itself.
In short, Obsidian is very open to cooperation. And I won't tell you much about him here, because so much has already been said about him in so many places.

I will only describe what tactics I use (as promised).

Firstly, I don't have all my files in one pile, as one might expect, because everything is easy to find in Obsidian. Why? Because the place in the directory hierarchy is also a certain piece of information about what kind of file it is, what its value is. And I just can't rely on Obsidian to always be there. If it disappears, I'll roll back to the time when I simply kept everything in different folders on a 100 gigabyte disk. In the root directory, there is a two-digit number before the directory name. This is so that when lexical-graphic ordering is used, these directories are always in the same place, regardless of newly added directories.
I add interesting information to the notes of the day and provide this note with the corresponding hashtags.

Conclusion

I don't think this is the last and best way to organize things. For example, I don't like that notes from my phone aren't automatically converted to PDF and I can't automatically sync them with Obsidian.
I don't like that in Obsidian you can't add hashtags directly to a file, but you have to (ideally) create a separate folder, put the important file there, add a markdown file to that folder, add a link to the important file to the markdown file and add hashtags. It's a bit long.

Maybe I'll write a plugin for Obsidian later that helps automate this work. In any case, the system I have now is a huge help.
With the birth of a third child in the family, there is simply no time left for any reflection, taking notes, reading books. The structure I described allows you to glue together quite significant chunks of time from those numerous 5-15 minute fragments, of which there are quite a few during the day, which can be spent usefully. Roughly speaking, if you always have a tablet at hand, then in 10 minutes you can listen to a podcast. Write something down in a notebook in which you write notes on your current educational activity – it doesn't matter whether it is learning a language or reading a book on mathematics.
The tablet with handwriting input turned out to be a godsend. Yes, it will take some time to master all its functions, but it is definitely worth it. And the entire ecosystem now works almost exactly as I wanted 20-30 years ago. That is, any idea is always recorded either on the phone or on the tablet. Watched a good video and wanted to take notes – no problem. Even if there is only this one note in the notebook! There is so much space on the disk that you can take notes. Wanted to read something – here you go.

Oh, by the way… It's important. Although this tablet has a function for splitting the screen into 2 parts and launching different applications in these two parts, I never use this function to read and take notes at the same time. It's not very convenient. If I need to read an e-book and take notes, I just print it out, bind it and read a regular paper book, taking notes on everything interesting in an electronic notebook. But I won't go into detail about the bookbinding machine and spring binder. Everyone knows what it is and how to use it.