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.