**The Future of Digital Organization: A Personal Perspective**

As I sit here reflecting on the state of digital organization, I am reminded of the amazing things that myMind (MB) has planned for 2022. Everyone is so excited about it, and rightly so. The prospect of new features and functionalities that will make our lives easier is exhilarating. However, as someone who values personal organization and digital curation, I couldn't help but wonder if there's anything comparable to what MB is offering.

**The Current State of Digital Organization**

Ryan has been working on a caliber server that's web-based, which offers a level of organization and annotation capabilities that are hard to find elsewhere. The issue with his setup, however, is that it can be a bit clunky. You're essentially using a web-based VNC-type solution to access your books and organize them. While this works, I'm not sure if it's the most elegant or user-friendly way to do things. There are commercial solutions like Microsoft OneNote and Office Lens that offer similar capabilities, but I think there's room for improvement.

**The Power of User-Generated Content**

One of the most exciting aspects of digital organization is the potential for user-generated content. We all have curated collections of books, media, movies, music, and more. The internet archive is doing an incredible job of preserving our collective cultural heritage on a civilization scale. It's heartening to see people working together to make these kinds of projects possible.

**The Challenges Ahead**

However, there are significant challenges ahead. Copyright holders and their ilk are always trying to limit access to information and control the narrative. This makes it difficult for us to collect and store digital extensions of our brains without worrying about censorship or loss of access. Take video games from my childhood, for example. Nintendo has essentially locked them up behind a cartel-like structure that makes it hard to revisit fond memories.

**The Importance of Tools for Personal Organization**

As individuals, we need tools that can help us organize and manage our digital collections on a personal level. While there are commercial solutions available, I think we're due for something more innovative and user-friendly. Home servers offer a great platform for customization and control, but often lack the polish and ease of use that we expect from modern software.

**Rethinking Digital Organization**

I believe that digital organization is not just about media serving; it's about creating a comprehensive system for managing our personal data. This includes everything from notes to photos to books to music. We need tools that can help us organize, annotate, and retrieve information quickly and easily. I'd love to see more focus on developing software that makes this possible.

**The Value of Simplicity**

In the long run, simplicity is key. While proprietary formats and complex software packages may offer some advantages in terms of functionality, they often become outdated and difficult to maintain. Simple formats and organization systems are timeless, and ease of use and functionality should always be a top priority.

**The Future of Digital Organization: Opportunities Ahead**

Ultimately, I believe that we can overcome the challenges ahead and create something truly remarkable. We need to persevere against copyright cartels and find ways to make digital information more accessible to everyone. By doing so, we'll unlock new possibilities for personal organization, creativity, and innovation.

**Getting Involved**

If you're interested in learning more about these topics or have ideas to share, please join me in the Level 1 forums. I'd love to discuss this further with all of you and explore ways to build something truly awesome together. Who knows what exciting projects we'll come up with?

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis is handheld linux this is super old this is this is almost a 20 year old palm top that runs linux and the technology there the story is not really about technology it's about effectively using technology to extend your brain i get a lot of people have been following us for a long time and also following technology technology can change your life for the better technology can empower you to move laterally within the caste system that we have whether you you know want to see it that way or use those words to describe it i don't want to get into a debate about that but if you have the capacity and the self-discipline technology offers a lot you know even if you don't have the capacity you can carve something out for yourself your mind is your greatest asset you mustn't let it atrophy and even if you don't have a particularly good mind you can sharpen it into something that's better than it was before i really you know on the on the channel it might look like i'm a wizard sometime but really it's just janitorial uh janitorial perseverance it's like there's a mess nobody else wants to deal with this let's just clean it up and so i want to do a new series and this series is going to have some audience participation and it is finding the cool stuff that extends your brain that doesn't require a subscription and so that's going to touch a lot of things home server our internet of things series basically anything that lets you use technology to extend your brain and books i thought we'd start with books this is the the funniest simplest thing you know ever you know ever since i was you know it's like ah but having a physical book in your hand is not just about having a physical book in your hand one of the coolest things that you can do with a physical book is annotations and bookmarks and circling things and doing all that sort of stuff see i mean you can look assembly language for intel based computers this is old and very obsolete but you can tell that that this is something that i've been through a lot and have uh marked pages and done different stuff and the same is true with all of these books i mean look how dog eared this particular one is being able to keep up with those annotations is critically important nothing that anyone is building amazon or google or anybody is designed to let you hang on to this stuff forever without it just being a torturous level of upkeep for you the constant treadmill of changing devices is designed to corral you into using cloud services which you know you have to pay for and that might eventually evaporate if you no longer have them and so where you end up is well maybe i should store my information on a home server maybe i should build my own solution and so we've done a lot of videos over the years touching things like plex media server and next cloud and own cloud for file storage and other self-hosted stuff you know you basically uh don the role of web developer if you want to sort of build your own stuff and i still haven't found anything that's a good solution for you know note-taking extending your notes outside of the cloud or translating the physical annotations in these books into something useful i used to be a big fan of live scribe pens you could draw on the paper and then use the paper as a playback device this was a really cool thing so you would take handwritten notes but then you could touch a particular word and it would jump to the audio where you were writing that particular word so that helped me professionally and that helped me uh you know personally that helped me with projects and inside projects and otherwise and so just a little bit of technology leverage there i think changed the entire course of my life and some of you have said you know watching some level one videos and learning a little bit more about this or that or the other has changed the course of my career and so i thought that this might be a good start to the series to introduce this i created a series of threads on the level one forums to talk about what is the best home server what is the best note-taking software what have you learned for password management and some of the other stuff we've done videos on these things but we don't really have a comprehensive source of this kind of information and i want to build that in level one eventually i would love to have a lot more level one content that is able to help more people make the transition and it's funny when i say that because i don't necessarily mean transition from your existing career i mean transition into being able to use technology to solve the uh problems that you have in your career there is perhaps you know if we want to speak at the 30 000 foot view um there is perhaps a drive in large tech companies to capture all of the technical innovation and then sell it back to us add infinite imagine the promise of self-driving cars for a second you've got self-driving cars the tesla comes along and let's say the software is absolutely perfect it is far beyond any human software you can get from a to b solves the traffic problem the population density is such that you know the law basically requires self-driving cars if you live somewhere like new york or los angeles that has unbearable traffic you know just moving a few miles can take hours and that's really not acceptable in terms of the overall human condition maybe but imagine a world where the economic incentives from insurance companies like no one physically is able to afford the insurance on a non-self-driving car because there's just too much risk the insurance companies will effectively eliminate the ability to drive a car except for the you know vastly super ultra wealthy that can afford to do that that's sort of the the capitalistic trajectory that we're on and i don't really you know if you don't want that i don't really see a solution for that it's it's going to transform slowly whether you want it to or not because the economic incentives will dictate that as long as economic incentives are the most important incentives that we have so if the pursuit of knowledge and understanding becomes a personal incentive for a lot of people then perhaps our future is not so bleak in order for us to grow and do interesting things to just be better at whatever we want to be better at over time i think that involves the accumulation of knowledge and i don't think it's realistic to expect everybody to be able to retain everything in their brain being able to make notes in books and capture your information and really organize is a good thing but no no corporation is going to help you do that that's up to you that's a self-discipline thing if you're working on something and it's so incredibly boring that you want to do something else you want to listen to to music or watch a video while you do something else that doesn't have anything about it i think you kind of do yourself a disservice because you could be using your spare brain cycles to organize the thing that you're working on just even the little observations the little details things like the sherlock holmes notice the small details that stand out see what everyone else misses i see other people do this like swift on security on twitter it's like uh you know they often say i started on the help desk and then graduated and did a whole bunch of other stuff that was basically my career trajectory as well there was doing a lot of help desk stuff in college and i wanted to sort of organize it in my brain and even though i was just boring help desk stuff that was the same problem over and over again it was also what clues were left behind for this kind of behavior what else was there what sort of mental framework do i need to build in order to run through the scientific method in order to solve this and so it was very much a deliberate journey of self-adaptation that's why you know the adapted mind is here in in this stack which has some papers and some other stuff on that sort of general way of thinking but even just memory things like you building a memory palace in order to be able to better recall things and recall more detail but also setting up you know taxonomies and entomologies in your own brain for better retention and better being able to remember you know different things i tend not to think in words so doing these kinds of videos is really problematic because i'll definitely say the wrong word for things a lot of times i'll definitely say the wrong pronunciation for things a lot of times there's not a lot of carve out in my brain first for speech uh even because conversation is not really a not really a thing that i worry about a lot of the time so software is making this easier and i think that it is really important that we as individuals have a like a personal database that allows us to quickly and capture and organize information from our daily lives you know this this palm top was was in vogue before cell phones even had a fraction of the computational horsepower of something like this but now you know your modern cell phone this is a one plus uh has many many many times more horsepower than this i mean we've got ai acceleration tensor core acceleration all kinds of cool stuff on the phone but the software lags behind the software is not designed to be an extension of your brain it's more often than not designed as a source of endorphins and button pressing and it's like oh you're bored you don't have anything to do you know play pixel dungeon and there is there is a kind of catharsis in that i'm not saying that that's always bad i'm just saying that that a lot of the time you could be working on you know your brain and your organization and organizing information that has come in from the day so that it's a little easier to find next time it's a little easier to search maybe you annotate something that you read maybe you make notes or maybe you link to something that you saw here or maybe you just want the information to be searchable i mean that is one of the really awesome things about having books be more and more available in a searchable you know drm free format so there's a bunch of threads on the level one forums and i want to do a video series that covers different software for these kinds of things everything that i've described if you think about it in terms of like media collections and media organization some of you out there have incredible uh plex media server collections but i'm not sure that an ecosystem that consists just of plex is a healthy one there's also envy and i want to do videos and stuff on mb i understand that mb's got some really amazing stuff planned for 2022 that everybody's so excited about they just can't keep it under wraps so that's pretty exciting but is there anything as good as that for books ryan has his caliber server that's web-based but it's a little clunky because you basically use a web-based you know vnc type solution to get to your books and organize it and and that's on the web and then that's immediately available on your phone and everywhere else terabytes and terabytes of data potentially with all of your annotations an easy way to read a harder way to annotate but there are commercial solutions like microsoft onenote and office lens are great examples of capturing information on your phone and so i even want to look at those pieces of software there are a lot of people in the level one audience that have really curated their book collection and really curated their media collection and movies and music and and everything that is the human experience the internet archive is doing that on a civilization scale and it's honestly very exciting a lot of copyright holders a lot of a lot of stuff happening to make these kinds of things more difficult for people like us that would want to collect and store the digital extensions of our brains but i think we can do it i think ultimately we can we can win out if we persevere against copyright cartels that would basically lock everything down to the point where it's unusable uh i mean think about like video games that you played as a kid if you played any nintendo games nintendo's basically got that locked up as a cartel to the point that you know i'm no longer really interested in the nostalgia and nintendo has poisoned the well for me personally so completely moving against streamers and using excessive force i think against copyright violations etc etc that you know retroactively they'll probably delete themselves from from our culture which is unfortunate but that's the reality that we find ourselves in whereas authors the people the individuals that still write books because they're individuals they're perhaps a little bit less sociopathic in their behavior and so maybe their works will survive a little bit better into the future but we need tools to be able to organize that on a personal level um because i don't think that they exist in a central form i'm sorry this video is a little bit rambly but i'm just trying to convey some ideas that i have for content for organization and how you can add this kind of software to your home server or another dimension of functionality that you could get from a home server or a self-hosted lenod or a self-hosted server or something like that beyond just media serving because for me personally being able to take pictures with my cell phone and immediately add that to a wiki and annotate things and when i get mailed it's important or not important i can immediately scan it and organize it and you know have a database of you know daily activity going back to the beginning of time and the more time goes on the more i think that you know even the computer operating system makes a big difference there what i trust you know going back to windows xp what i trust windows in the march of being able to do these things to handle backup and replication and the transition from you know say own cloud to next cloud or to transition from just a flat file system to own cloud to next cloud but trusting the web a little bit more trusting software like sync thing to be able to do synchronization from here to there these particular software packages rise and fall over time so you never really want to capture all of the information in a completely proprietary format you know ultimately you want your files easy to get out on a file system you can have enhancements to that sure but you know on a 10-year 20-year lifetime scale simple formats and simple organization went out in the end but ease of use and functionality go for a lot too so this is going to be a little bit open-ended and i know a lot of you have some stuff that you really want to show off so please do in the level one forums so that i can make videos on it and and talk more about it you probably have some cool stuff that i don't even know about because the people that do that even if they've never really articulated it i think they're sort of thinking about things the same kind of way they have an instinct to sort of capture and deal with the information that way so i don't know interesting stuff i'm wondering this is level one and let's build some really awesome stuff for home servers and make it easier and more accessible for people to use their home server for something other than a super kick butt media server because a super kick butt book server is also just as exciting all right i'm signing out and you can find me in the level 1 forums you\n"