Environmental Heresies Stewart Brand article, oft cited, regarding forward changes in environmentalism (tags: politics stewartBrand CoEvQ energy) Distracto: Tutorial:…

“Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge.”

“Certainly.”

“You say that a man’s first job is to earn a living, and that the first task of education is to equip him for that job.”

“Of course.”

“Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position.”

>>Thanks for a great blog.

From that point of view, I think DEVONthink would also make an excellent dustbin. (Although I’m not sure that’s an endorsement they’d wish to use on their website.)

Can you tell me how can I find the “import droplet” you were talking about. Is it a Pro feature?

Thanks!

I’ve been a DT devote for a couple of year now. It has grown as my needs have expanded. However, I’ve never been able to quite describe it. Your piece is wonderful and I’ll probably end up sending this url to a number of people over time.

I’ve been using the Pro beta through several incarnations and find it excellent. I too have used Tinderbox and loved its sophistication but, too, have wished that it took more advantage of the built-in goodies of OS X as well as handled a wider range of file formats. I even chafed against the same shortcoming is Circus Ponies’ Notebook and AquaMinds’ Notetaker that you mention.

In short, you have beautifully articulated what I’ve been trying to say for some time. Thank you.

I do would love to see the author’s take on the new Pro version (and whether it offer significantly more than the Personal edition)

As a soon-to-be switcher (I have an iMac at home but don’t get to spend a lot of time with it; I’m planning on buying a Powerbook as a writing machine and all-around brain), I’m torn between DT and Tinderbox. I’ve experimented with DT a good bit more, probably because its demo version is much more functional than TB’s. I’ve had a great time entering blog posts into DT, organizing them, and exporting them to ecto for posting to my blog. I could easily see myself writing *everything* in DT.

I haven’t really tried using DT as a general-purpose notetaking or brainstorming app. TB seems more suited to that, but it’s also byzantine, emacsian and intimidating — as you’ve already noted. I can’t afford to buy both, nor would I want to store my data in two places. I’m leaning towards DT at the moment, but have never been a big fan of hierarchy. I hope you’re right about category and tag support in the final release of DT Pro.

All that being said, could you be more specific about your experience with TB? How did you attempt to use it? Any gripes other than usability?

Over at the PigPog Blog is a great post about Storing Nuggets of Information, calling for ideas. This is something I’ve been struggling with for many years myself, and have only lately been making any sort of headway. When I think about all the years …

Woe to my poor wife, for she has married a packrat. You know my type: the person who keeps one –or multiple– “junk drawers” or “junk boxes” filled with discarded wires, ticket stubs, twisted metal bits, leather scraps, ancient gadgets, cheap give…