Crack­ing Magic (3) — Tools

Now we are going to dis­cuss a cou­ple of tools that are useful in buil­ding our archive. These are not many and may dif­fer from what you have been using alre­ady. Again, very few and simple categories:

com­pu­ter
note taking
storage

Com­pu­ter
In these days almost ever­y­body owns a smart­phone, tablet, note­book or other com­pu­ter. Sto­rage is easy and the capa­ci­ties and pos­si­bi­li­ties almost end­less. One of the reasons most of us have more stuff on our devices than we ever need. Maybe it is the greed for pos­ses­sing all that infor­ma­tion and “valuable” PDFs, DVDs, etc. That greed is an obs­ta­cle and with all that stuff the con­fu­sion and mess appear as well.

Some may say: “Yeah, but maybe I will need this some­ti­mes …” That may very well be, but NOT now in the phase of buil­ding the archive! What we now need is a “blank screen”. Not­hing more.

I have met magi­ci­ans that have a NAS ser­ver at home and they showed me how they could con­nect to that from ever­y­where (in fact, they showed this to me in the break of a lec­ture). They were really proud they could access all the ISOs and PDFs. But for what? Is it really neces­sary to have con­stant access to all of that per­ma­nently? I don’t think so.

What we need is a very simple digi­tal sto­rage sys­tem for our per­so­nal archive. I use an old 13″ Mac­Book. All my per­so­nal archive and working mate­rial is there. All the magic and ideas that are rele­vant for me. One place, one device. No more. Of course, the con­tent is backed up in the cloud and on an exter­nal hard drive. But the tool I am working with every day is this simple old notebook.

I updated and instal­led a 500 GB SSD drive plus 8 GB RAM. That is enough speed and power to work with it com­for­ta­bly. But even a smal­ler net­book would be fine, pro­vi­ded you have some WiFi and access to some sto­rage device, in order to exch­ange the data.

The whole point is to have a sepa­rate device for the archive, which has not­hing to do with your regu­lar com­pu­ter peri­phery. The idea behind that is to save time by not being dis­trac­ted by the fea­ture the main com­pu­ter has: inter­net, social media, movies, etc.

It should be small and handy, easy to under­stand and ope­rate and (most important) free of dis­trac­tion. And it should be small and por­ta­ble, yet have a pro­per key­board for the input. The reason for this is that when I read a book, or work on some­thing, I will have it right bes­i­des me, in order to imme­dia­tely take notes or write down ideas. When I tra­vel, I have it usually with me. The­r­e­fore, it should be as small and light­weight as pos­si­ble, but still ope­ra­ble like a bet­ter typewriter.

The other argu­ment for having an extra device is to retain the gene­ral view of the archive. I know that all of my magic stuff is on the device and I know where it is on the device. No other magic rou­ti­nes, PDFs or wha­te­ver on any other device. That makes my archive clean, easily searcha­ble and effi­ci­ent to work with. No time was­ted sear­ching for stuff. It is all in one place.

Soft­ware
I don’t use too much soft­ware for my archive. The most important is the soft­ware that is used for taking my notes. I found that Simp­len­ote is per­fect for me. It is (as the name implies) VERY simple in all aspects: the UI is only bare­bo­nes, text is wit­hout any fancy sty­ling and addi­tio­nal fea­tures, it has full text index­ing and the notes can be tagged.

One of the big­gest advan­ta­ges is that it is very quick. Making a new note is just one click and that’s it. Type your con­tent and for­get about the rest. The moment you type it in, it is auto­ma­ti­cally saved. It is a work­horse and desi­gned for real-world ever­y­day use.

The con­tent can be stored in the cloud (while it is saved locally as well), which means you are pro­tec­ted against loo­sing the data. Simp­len­ote is free and a really good, uncom­pli­ca­ted choice. Go here to their web­site and see for yours­elf. Simp­len­ote is freeware.

Because my eBook coll­ec­tion got mas­sive in the past years, I deci­ded to purchase the soft­ware Devon­Think, which is a very pro­fes­sio­nal solu­tion. But you don’t really need this now for the begin­ning. In the begin­ning, it is suf­fi­ci­ent to put your PDFs into your file sys­tem (more about this in a later post).

One thing you will need is a pro­per text edi­tor. I don’t use Word, but the free­ware alter­na­tive Libre­Of­fice. This is com­ple­tely suf­fi­ci­ent for doing almost any task. It is quick, ver­sa­tile and con­nects you with the Word-world. But then, I don’t use it to often.

For typ­ing my scripts, I have been using the CeltX soft­ware for years. it is very com­for­ta­ble and useful. All is for­mat­ted, I don’t have to think whilst wri­ting and there are lots of addi­tio­nal, useful fea­tures (like note taking, index cards) that make wri­ting a stage play or script a breeze.

And, of course, you will pro­ba­bly need a PDF-Rea­der, like Acro­bat Rea­der or some­thing else, in order to access the PDFs. I deci­ded to cut down the requi­re­ments to the abso­lute mini­mum. Most of the modern note­books and ope­ra­ting sys­tems like LINUX have ever­y­thing I need for my archive alre­ady on board.

My little archive com­pu­ter is used only for

sto­ring digi­tal publi­ca­ti­ons (PDF, eBooks, DVD, audio)
taking notes
wri­ting scripts
the inven­tory list
some research

I deli­bera­tely do not have any fancy soft­ware instal­led. Just the very basics, to not get con­fu­sed and dis­trac­ted from the main tasks con­cer­ning my archive.

So – get that old note­book back from your kids (that you gave them because it was “sooo good” and enough for them). It is more than ade­quate for your per­so­nal archive task … 🙂

Finally: in order to eli­mi­nate any tempt­a­tion, delete all data on that note­book that has not­hing to do with the archive. You want to start with a blank and mai­den place for your archive!

Howe­ver, remem­ber that the com­pu­ter is NOT the most important part of the archive. But a useful and times­aving one.