Cracking Magic—Part 3: Tools

A quick look at my usual archive work­space. Everything you need for a prac­tical archive is here.

Now we will dis­cuss two tools that are use­ful for build­ing our archive. These are few and may dif­fer from what you are already using. Again, very few and simple categories:

Com­puter
Note taking
Storage
Exercise

Almost every­one has a smart­phone, tab­let, laptop or other com­puter. Stor­age is easy, and the capa­city and pos­sib­il­it­ies are almost end­less. One reason most of us have more stuff on our devices than we ever need. Maybe it is the greed to own all that inform­a­tion and “valu­able” PDFs, DVDs, etc. This greed is a hindrance, and with all this stuff comes con­fu­sion and clutter.

Some might say: “Yes, but maybe I need it”. Maybe you will, but not at this stage of build­ing the archive. What we need now is a blank canvas.

I have met magi­cians who have a NAS server at home, and they have shown me how they can con­nect to it from any­where (in fact, they showed me this dur­ing a break in a lec­ture). They were proud that they could access all the ISOs and PDFs. But what for? Is it essen­tial to have access to all this at all times? I don’t think so.

What we need is a very simple digital stor­age sys­tem for our archive. I use an old 13″ Mac­Book. All my archive and work mater­ial is on it. All the magic and ideas that are rel­ev­ant to me. One place, one device. I back it up in the cloud and on an external hard drive. But the tool I work with every day is this simple old notebook.

I upgraded and installed a 500GB SSD drive and 8GB of RAM. That is enough speed and power to get the job done. But even a smal­ler net­book would be excel­lent, provided you can con­nect it to some sort of stor­age device to share the data.

The whole point is to have a sep­ar­ate device for archiv­ing that has noth­ing to do with your reg­u­lar com­puter peri­pher­als. The idea is to save time by not being dis­trac­ted by the func­tion of the main com­puter: the inter­net, social media, films, etc.

It should be small and handy, easy to under­stand and use, and (most import­antly) free of dis­trac­tions. And it should be small and port­able, yet have a proper key­board for typ­ing. The reason for this is that when I am read­ing a book or work­ing on some­thing, I have it next to me to take notes or jot down ideas. When I travel, I have it with me. So it should be small and light, but still work like a good typewriter.

The other argu­ment for hav­ing an extra device is to main­tain an over­view of the archive. I know that all my magic stuff is on the device, and I know where it is on the device. The aim is to have no other magic routines, PDFs or whatever on any other device. This makes my archive clean, search­able and effi­cient to work with. No time wasted look­ing for things. It is all in one place.

Software

I don’t use too much soft­ware for my archive. The most import­ant is the soft­ware I use to take my notes. I have found Sim­ple­n­ote to be per­fect for me. It is (as the name sug­gests) very simple in all respects: the inter­face is bare-bones, the text is without fancy styl­ing and extra fea­tures, it has full-text index­ing and I can tag the notes.

One of the main advant­ages is that it is fast. Cre­at­ing a new note is just one click and that’s it. Type in your con­tent and for­get about the rest. The moment you type it, it is saved. It is a work­horse designed for the real world.

I can store the con­tent in the cloud (although it is also stored loc­ally), which means I am pro­tec­ted against los­ing the data. Sim­ple­n­ote is free and a per­fect, straight­for­ward choice. Go to their web­site and see for your­self. Sim­ple­n­ote is freeware.

As my eBook col­lec­tion has grown over the years, I have bought Devon­Think, which is a very pro­fes­sional solu­tion. But you don’t need that to get star­ted. To start with, it is enough to put your PDFs in your file sys­tem (more on this in a later post).

One thing you will need is a decent text editor. I don’t use Word, but the free­ware altern­at­ive Lib­reOf­fice. This will do for almost any task. It is fast, ver­sat­ile and con­nects you to the Word world. But I don’t use it too much.

For typ­ing my scripts, I have been using the CeltX soft­ware for years. It is very use­ful. I can format all the scripts as I type, I don’t have to think while I write, and there are lots of other use­ful fea­tures (like note-tak­ing, index cards) that make writ­ing a play or script a breeze.

Now, with the advent of the Mark­down lan­guage, I use After­writ­ing (you can find it at www.afterwriting.com). It is open source, very easy to use and has now replaced the CeltX soft­ware for me.

And you need a PDF reader, like Acrobat Reader or some­thing, to access the PDFs. I have kept the require­ments to an abso­lute min­imum. Most mod­ern note­books and oper­at­ing sys­tems like LINUX have everything I need for my archive already on board.

I use my small archive com­puter only for

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

I have no fancy soft­ware installed. Just the basics, so as not to dis­tract from the main tasks of my archive.

So get that old note­book back from your kids (the one you gave them because it was ‘so good’ and enough for them). It is more than adequate for your archiv­ing task.

To remove any tempta­tion, delete everything on that note­book that has noth­ing to do with the archive. You want to start with an empty and vir­gin space for your archive.

But remem­ber that the com­puter is not the most import­ant part of the archive. But a use­ful and time-sav­ing one.