John Siu Blog

Created a new cheat sheet menu.

TL;DR

New Cheat Sheet Tag, accessible through menu.

Blog Don’t Fit All

There are multiple reasons for me to write blog. Following are the major ones:

• Hope my experience and skills can benefit more people.
• Put my thoughts and skills in an organized and presentable form.
• It help in organizing small personal projects as I made it a habit to update the draft as I progress.
• It is an “instruction manual” for various tasks, for others and myself also.

However, not everything fit in a blog.

The Mess of Note Taking

Over the years, I find myself searching those same things over and over again from the internet. Things that I don’t use often, but often enough that I remember searching them … Tried different ways and tools to improve the situation:

• Memorize as much as possible. Result is obvious.
• Write them down on paper, notebook like old days. Keep buying new one and keep looking for old ones.
• Type them up into text files, sort them into folders. They scattered over multiple computers. Lost track and a pain to sync when I try.
• Use online note taking software, so far still doing it.

  Software	Comment
  Evernote	Never implement the sort function.
  OneNote	Too powerful, and app only for all platforms. (Use this if >100 notes)
  Google Keep	Simple with check-list and reminder. Web base when using computer.

I still use Google Keep heavily. Keep lot of lists with it, including quiet a few cheat-lists. Not elegant but easy, fast and mobile.

However, there is always the concern of it going away with any Google product. Google like cleaning house.

Cheat Sheet Section

There are lots of cheat sheets on the internet for all kind of topics and different formats. However many of them are either too extensive or too short. And just like my old notes, all over the place. That is why I creating my own.

Google Keep is really a good fit. But the thought of it may one day disappear made me think about alternatives. As I already write and host my own blog, why not make those lists into static pages in a separate section? And markdown syntax is perfect for creating them.

I am quite satisfy with the lists converted so far. They have better format than in Keep, and I have copies of them in multiple locations, fully synced.

Google Keep is still be my on-the-fly note taking tool. But now I have a long term fall back solution.

I hope you also find them useful. Again, they are here.