List of personal knowledge base software by
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-18 +Created 1970-01-01
Lists:
- www.bibsonomy.org/user/bshanks/education fantastic list, presumably by this guy:
- www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/168cmca/which_note_taking_app_for_a_luhmann_zettlekasten/
- www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/18vvavl/best_free_notetaking_app_switching_from_evernote/
- github.com/topics/note-taking has a billion projects. Oops.
- www.noteapps.ca/
Personal knowledge base recommendation threads:
TODO look into those more:
- roamresearch.com/ no public graphs
- nesslabs.com/roam-research-alternatives a bunch of open source alternatives to it
- Trillium Notes. Notable project! Pun unintended!
- Stroll giffmex.org/stroll/stroll.html. How to publish? How to see tree?
- tiddlyroam joekroese.github.io/tiddlyroam/ graph rather than text searchable ToC. Public instance? Multiuser?
- Athens github.com/athensresearch/athens rudimentary WYSIWYG
- Logseq github.com/logseq/logseq no web interface/centralized server?
- itsfoss.com/obsidian-markdown-editor. Closed source. They have an OK static website publication mechanism: publish.obsidian.md/ram-rachum-research/Public/Agents+aren't+objective+entities%2C+they're+a+model but leaf node view only for now, no cross source page render. They are committed to having plaintext source which is cool: twitter.com/kepano/status/1675626836821409792
- CherryTree github.com/giuspen/cherrytree written in C++, GTK, WYSIWYG
- github.com/dullage/flatnotes: Python
- github.com/usememos/memos: Go
- github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan: Go
- github.com/vnotex/vnote: C++
- github.com/Laverna/laverna: JavaScript
- github.com/taniarascia/takenote
- github.com/silverbulletmd/silverbullet: TypeScript, Markdown, web-based WYSIWYG, focus on querying
Major downsides that most of those personal knowledge databases have:
- very little/no focus on public publishing, which is the primary focus of OurBigBook.com
- either limited or no multiuser features, e.g. edit protection and cross user topics
- graph based instead of tree based. For books we need a single clear ordering of a tree. Graph should come as a secondary thing through tags.
Closed source dump:
- www.toodledo.com
- Simplenote: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplenote, by WordPress.com operator company Automattic
List of physics courses of the University of Oxford by
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-18 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli used to read books when he was younger (Harry Potter up to the 4th, Lord of the Rings), but once you are reading code, technical articles and news the whole day, you really just want to watch videos of people doing useless things on YouTube to rest, enough text.
Stronger version of the big O notation, basically means that ratio goes to zero. In big O notation, the ratio does not need to go to zero.
Creator of Primer
youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Primer gives real identity:Feels exactly the background you'd expect: disilusioned by the educational system, and working to make education better! Great guy! Reminds Ciro Santilli of himself a bit.
- the name is Justin Helps from Minnesota
- dropped out of his PhD that got boring, and used to work at Khan Academy
- LinkedIn gives PhD subject: www.linkedin.com/in/justin-helps/ as materials science
- twitter.com/helpsypoo personal Twitter account
Face reveal at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC91Bf8hQVo
Very easy to use and pretty powerful MIDI creator!!!
One of the rare audio applications actually works with PulseAudio on Ubuntu 20.04 out-of-the-box, so you don't have to turn off every other audio application!!!
Has lot's of plugins built-in just working out of the box, e.g. ZynAddSubFX out-of-the-box without doing a gazillion complex setup connections.
Most plugins are just simple toys however, ZynAddSubFX is the only super powerful one. The others are more LMMS integrate however, and seem to use a more dedicated LMMS GUI style.
Step of electronic design automation that maps the register transfer level input (e.g. Verilog) to a standard cell library.
Pinned article: ourbigbook/introduction-to-the-ourbigbook-project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 2. You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either OurBigBook.com or as a static website.Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally. Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension. - Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact