2024-06-18

Now that "Bits of the Mind's String" has been put to bed, I'm moving onto Draft 2 of a movie script, and starting to nose around some ideas for a possible (maybe/someday) novel.

I've been playing with The Brain quite a bit recently. At 25 years old, it's pretty much the original digital PKM app, and under-the-hood, it almost certainly remains the most powerful. The latest version incorporates AI and there are mobile apps etc. I really love how it organises information and how it works very much like my mind seems to work. The downside is that it is not very pretty and there's not a lot of flow to be found within the system. I WANT to love it, but I don't yet. I'm running it side-by-side with Capacities and Capacities just seems fresher and easier to use. I’m not giving up on The Brain though, because I suspect something interesting will emerge the more information that goes into it.

In other PKM new (you see how I have now caved in and adopted that term?), I signed up to Tana Core as soon as it came out and haver adopted it, in place of Notion, as a kind of digital bullet journal. Tana is still not QUITE there (the mobile app is in active development) and I’m not sure it would ever replace either Capacities or TheBrain, but as a place to jot absolutely anything down and be able to find it again instantly, it is simply staggering. All of these apps have good AI co-pilots. Tana can record online meetings, transcribe them and produce a list of action items which is alarmingly accurate, Capacities offers a GPT access which is fine for basic research (as long as you’re prepared to fact-check it) and TheBrain excels at building out complex thought forms on subjects.

A word of caution: The Brain is SUPER expensive, although it does have a trial period.