 And welcome to the homelab show episode 68 documentation wikis tools and processes. These are all important for managing knowledge, right, Jay? Absolutely. Yep. Yeah. It's a topic we need to cover. I think we've talked a little bit about before. I know we've talked about it on some of the Q&A, but I'm going to implicitly in this, Jay's going to talk about some of the processes and I'm going to talk about, and both of us are going to talk about naming some of the tools you can use for this. It's not a one size fits all. There's actually a lot of different options out there. It comes down to what integrates best into your workflow. The most important part is simply that you document, but how you document, well, there's some variety as long as you're getting it done. And, you know, doing it in a good way. We'll just say that is going to be really important. But before we dive into this, let's talk about a sponsor of our show. And that is Linode. And if you're looking for a place to host some of these document management tools that we're talking about, Linode's an option for you. Because I'm going to mention some of the wikis. And, you know, you may want your wiki hosted on Linode. So it's publicly accessible by everyone. And, you know, that's a great place to host it there. Or even next cloud. I'm going to be bringing the next cloud up. There's another one you can host there because you want to be able to share the documents and work in a collaborative way on documents. Or maybe you want to manage your own Git server. We're going to talk a little bit about Git management for documents. And once again, Linode's an easy answer for that. We're also talking about plenty of things you can host locally. But if you don't want to host locally, Linode is a great sponsor show and a great place to sign up and host your projects that we talk about here on the Home Lab show. We want to thank them as a sponsor and let's get started. All right. What do we want to start with talking about your methodology for learning Git and using Git for it? I think that could be a good place to start. Because we're going to talk about things that you can, of course, self-host, which, you know, I'm sure is going to be what gets people the most excited. But what I'm going to talk about, I've talked about before, it may not, like, always come to mind as super obvious. But it's a really simple idea where I recommend that everyone learn Git. Usually people might think of Git as a tool for programmers, which it absolutely is. But it isn't only for programmers. I mean, there's just so many other use cases. There's recipes in Git, by the way. Yep. Yep. There's all kinds of cool things. But with version control, it's important to have your config files and the things that are important in version control. Obviously, you know, you remove anything that's confidential, you know, like passwords or API keys, because I don't want anyone in our audience to find out the hard way that you shouldn't put those things there. But one of the best ways to learn Git, I think, is to put your notes up there. Because you can learn Markdown. And I think pretty much every Git front-end that I've used supports Markdown. So you can see it in the browser when you upload your files. So you're practicing Markdown. You're practicing how to contribute to a repository. Maybe somebody might give you a pull request so you can practice accepting a pull request. And another thing you could do is run something like GitT or GitLab, something you can self-host. So then you're getting experience self-hosting something if you haven't already gotten started with that yet, plus you're practicing your notes, plus you're practicing Markdown, and you're practicing version control all in one thing. So it's like you're learning a lot all at once. And I'm a fan of the, you know, wikis and things like that, too, as we'll talk about. But I also feel like this method could have some additional value for people that are, you know, starting out and starting to learn these things. Well, here's a fun thing, an easy example. I was just, I couldn't help myself, but get distracted by typing in cooking recipes in GitHub and land on a popular mozzarella recipe. So, but here's the thing, how does that apply? How is this even relevant? And I'm going to bring it back to you. If you're doing these and you're using something, and this can start basic as maybe you're not a developer, but you do have a good idea for how you want to make your mozzarella, you can have version control and have all of your iterations of how you updated your documentation for your step-by-step process or how you modify it. And you can collab with your friends who also want to help improve your mozzarella recipe and add some ingredients there. So it's actually a fun way to learn some of the Git language. I've seen someone in the comments here saying, well, they get a little lost in Git. Anything in Linux, in programming, in using technology, you're going to come back to, once you do it repetitively, you kind of start with a task and a goal and you work your way through it, you learn the process and use it frequently, you're going to get good at it. So start with the mozzarella recipe. I'm going to say it's an easy one to do. I think you had me at open source mozzarella. That's great. Open source mozzarella. I am all for this. Yep. So, yeah, I like your methodology on that. It makes a lot of sense. It's a simple way to do it. Should we start talking really about some of the tools out there for it? Absolutely. I mean, there's some of these tools that are technically separate, but work well together. Like I've been using diagrams.net, which is, I know one of the things you're going to bring up, so I just gave a spoiler. But I mean, because having a diagram is great, and you can put that in your notes as well. So that's something you could use with any of the solutions, whether it be mine or one of the others we're going to go over. And setting up a good diagram, if you're not working in IT yet, then this is probably something to get used to when you get into network engineering, because people generally want this kind of thing, and it's good to have, especially when you have someone new starting, and they don't really know how things are laid out. But having practice with that already, just makes you ahead of the game. Yeah. Diagrams.net hands down. Now, it is an application that you can go to. Diagrams.net, run it in the browser, download it, self-host it. It's independent. If you want to download it as an independent install, like run the file, run the binary, you can do this cross-platform, because it's supported on Mac, Windows, and Linux. So there's lots of options to do this. And to go a step further, it's not just like a self-hosted instance. There's ways you can embed this in many of the other tools we're going to be talking about. And a variety of wikis support it. You can embed this in your next cloud. There's a lot of options. So I think starting out with the diagrams is really important. Now, a couple of notes about doing diagrams. They are incredibly helpful when you are asking for help that I can't express enough how many times I wish someone would not try to articulate into words what they're trying to do and what they're trying to connect, especially when it comes to a network question, which I answer a lot of. But if they take the time and use diagrams.net, I always puzzle when people, because it's a free product, try to draw an MS Paint or something like that. I'm like, you're making it hard on both you and the readers who want to help you. Using a tool like diagrams.net, spend a few minutes with it. I've even made a couple of tutorials on my channel how to use it. Man, it just makes it easy to build a quick diagram of I want this thing here connected here, make a few notes on there of what does connect, what doesn't connect. And now you've started to document it. By the way, I'm willing to bet a lot of people when they start documenting it, start staring at it and go, oh, I may have solved my own problem. Not that I've visually laid it all out. Yeah, I've solved the problem recently in a very interesting way I might mention if we get into that kind of thing. But diagrams.net is awesome. I also feel like it's important to understand there's a little bit of an art style when it comes to diagrams. Now I'm not saying that to mean like, to try to make it over complicated. I think the art style is to try to make your diagrams less complicated. And I don't mean include less of your information, include all of the information that's relevant, of course, but if it looks like spaghetti strings and I have a really hard time understanding what's connected to what it has the opposite effect. So spend some time and just think about how to best structure it in a way that is easily made sense of. Otherwise you might cause the opposite problem, which in that case is probably better to not have a diagram. But as you practice, you'll find that you're able to tell more with your diagram with fewer lines all over the place. It's just one of the things that I mentioned. You could tell how long someone's been diagramming based on how many intersecting lines there happens to be. And I have two different types of diagrams I do. I have the ones I do for my YouTube tutorials and I just make the fonts and everything a lot bigger because it's harder to see. But for ones we may have internally or we document a client thing, they're going to be a little bit more, less of these large fonts. So for those of you going, can I do it just like Tom does or how does Tom do it? There's two styles I have. What you see for presentation purposes in 28-point fonts and then there's the normal, I leave it at the 12-point font when I'm doing it. Kind of related and this is cybersecurity related, but this is becoming really amongst the cybersecurity people. There's so many data points you need to connect and mind mapping and using tools like diagrams.net. This is another thing you can do is start understanding from a cybersecurity standpoint where all these things are connected. Start first, throwing all the different pieces of information you have when you're doing a incident response. You're like, all right, this happened, this happened. I don't know how these things are related yet, but you may start putting them out there. And you can find tutorials on kind of building a mind map, building a flow and then start pulling these things all together. Matter of fact, something kind of novel is if you upload things to VirusTotal and do a sign-in free account with VirusTotal, it'll help build some of those mind maps and then you can use that for a template to understand and draw those connections and diagrams.net. It becomes really helpful just to get a mental understanding of where all the different things are attached in a very visual way. And of course, once you want to do something collaboratively with colleagues or ask for help, that same mind map helps of, here's all the things. Can you help me make sense of how these things... I don't know that this incident is related to this part of the incident. And it's just really helpful to kind of draw that out for you. And a lot of you guys that are starting out out there, you may not even have much to diagram, especially because I understand, even though we're not a fan of running everything on one server, we also understand that money doesn't grow on trees. And it's not like, yeah, you might wish you had 10 different servers. You might not be able to afford it yet. So you might start out with one. So obviously not much to diagram there, but you could start out with your current layout in your home lab, but also your dream layout. What do you want to get to? What do you want to build it toward? And as you start to go to that direction, it kind of makes it fun because you can see the intended layout for the future. You can adjust it over time. And then as you start building it, you'll see it, your dream get realized, which is always fun. But if you start out when you don't have a whole lot to diagram, that might even be the best. Even if you only have one server, you can just keep adding to it. So it exists and just keep modifying it with diagrams.net. Even if you were to use it in your browser and you didn't install it, you could download the diagram in a file and save it on your hard drive. And then you can upload it and make changes again and re-download it however many times you want to. So that's also something people might want to check out. Kind of an honorable mention here is, obviously if you're using Windows, the snipping tool built into Windows is fine for grabbing screen grabs and screenshots of things. If you're using Linux though, there's, well, the nice thing is a new latest Ubuntu, and I assume this is a GNOME feature in 22. The print screen now has a built-in screenshot in there. There's a new tool that replaces the, or is intended to replace the GNOME screenshot app that they used to have. There's some missing features, but it does look better. It does look a little better. But if you're looking for a couple more advanced tools in the Linux world, the two I recommend are Flameshot, which is really slick, and so is Shutter. Shutter's my personal favorite. I believe you still got to do a PPA add-on to do it. I've just let mine carry over. I don't think they've built a app image for it or a snap for it, but man, the Shutter tool personally, it's how I am so fast to reply to people. So I will, someone will ask me a question. This is often internal with staff, and I am extremely quick to grab a screenshot. I literally leave a tool open all the time. Grab a screenshot. I make a notation. I frequently draw arrows pointing to things in very large, bold arrows. Sometimes you'd be, oh, I don't know, maybe a little bit of a smartass, but then I send that reply to them right away. It's right here. It's this button. It's really handy and can be very effective. Sometimes even when you're building your notes, and I actually use it in the building of some of my tutorials as well to kind of instruct people. Yeah, those are a couple of tools though for Linux. Flameshot and Shutter, both great tools in the Linux world. I know there's not a Windows equivalent of them. The Windows stepping tool is fine. It can do some basic annotation as well. Snag it. I think that's the one that was popular in Windows. Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, I'm not a Microsoft expert or anything, but I'm pretty sure that Windows is pointing people towards something newer. I just don't remember, but I'm pretty sure when I looked at Windows 11, there was something new. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's the case. Either way, you won't go wrong with using those tools. They definitely are effective. Next one to mention here is Media Wiki. Now, this is not for the faint of heart. Jay has been extremely helpful and me and Jay worked together to build some auto updates for Wiki. The good and bad of Media Wiki. It's extensive. It's powerful. It's wonderfully done. It's based on the same software. It runs Wikipedia essentially. It's part of the Media Wiki foundation. The bad news is it's a little bit challenging to set up. It's not a possible at all. It's got good documentation and what's even better. If you follow my old videos, which I probably should even consider taking down and make a new one because they finally integrated the visual editor as part of the installer. So that whole debacle of challenge, I should say, because there was a lot of weird little hiccups you ran into setting up visual editor on there. But Media Wiki is great. It has full, you know, if you're going to build something public facing, you want to have a documentation or really anything and just really a lot of extensibility, a lot of plugins, a lot of customization and all the cool features that you kind of need, such as collision detection when you're doing a collaborative document. So multiple people can edit the same page, infinite revisions so you can see the history, you know, the same features you're expecting out of the Wikipedia in the power of your hands. Jay, are you still using that for a lot of LearnLinux TV or have you migrated on it? I used to have wiki.learnlinux.tv and I felt like I was maintaining too many websites for the channel. So nowadays, if there's anything that, you know, like commands or code, if you click on a video that I have on my channel, the recent Next Cloud video that I've done is a good example of this. And you click on that, you could find the commands and things right in that same post because I kind of consolidated, but I kind of miss media wiki to be honest. So I'm not 100% sure and my life just went out, but for those that are listening, share with me at the wave at my motion sensor. But media wiki is what I've been using internally if we've been building all of our documentation with it. It's a solid, really good app. That was a IoT failure right there. Ah, yes. Yeah. I have a light switch. It seems not to fail. Maybe I'm old school. Well, I have an on-air light that if I turn on, it disables motion sensing, but it's broken apparently anyway. But yeah, I get that this is a challenge. And if you have any of these, like media wiki public facing, make sure you keep up with the updates. Make sure you maintain it for security reasons because you don't want that to get taken over. And I've seen someone mention wiki.js and that's the next one actually on my list. I have set up a few demo sites with wiki.js. The things I love about it, very nice, modern look and feel, very solid updates. I had a few revisions that I went through and I was like, okay, this is really nice. The updater didn't destroy anything. It does have a web interface updater. The downside, I would say a wiki.js. And this is just an opinion. And Jay, tell me what you think out here. When things are built with a lot of different complicated technologies, I worry about it because you're greatly increasing the threat surface. So there's one problem I have with it. But that could just be me. It's not that these things are complicated. Things are impossible to secure. It's just more to secure. It makes me worried. And I'm hoping to go through some good code vetting so I can get more confident in them as a product. The second thing, and this could be a misunderstanding I have of it. I didn't find any way to switch back and forth between like code editing versus WYSIWYG editing. And I like the simplicity of media wiki by comparison. So that was at least two things that I kind of noticed about wiki.js. I think wiki.js. I haven't used it, but it seems like every screenshot I've ever seen looks better than media wiki. But media wiki seems like it is more tried and true. So I almost feel like it's hard to choose a favorite between the two because the pros and cons are basically equal in different directions, but equal when you combine them. So I think they're both really good solutions. As far as multiple services, that really depends on the services and how they're pulling things in. Well, it's built on Node. And I just know Node. I see that. I think, OK, it's got a lot to it. And it's just me being a little bit of old-school thinker and liking the simplicity of things and make it no more complicated than needs to be and stop there. But I didn't have any problems. It has not been in the news for security issues. It's been around for a minute. And it's going to be very actively developed. So this is just me being the overly cautious for things. Well, I think that's a good way to be. My mindset is that, you know, I'm just going to throw a random number out there. 10,000 lines of code split between 10 apps or 10,000 lines of code between, you know, just one. It's still 10,000 lines of code, regardless. So that's kind of like when the system D debate comes up. It's like, it's trying to do everything and it's less secure. But whether you have everything split up into multiple things or everything in one, it's still, you know, a lot of lines of code. But one of the things that I do feel can become a problem with this kind of thing is, for example, let's just say you set down, you want to redo your WikiJS for whatever reason, you know, homeland people, we just redo things and, you know, we break, fix, break, fix all the time. So what happens then when one of the libraries is unavailable? Maybe something's offline where the download comes in from. The more components you have, the more likely the build is to fail. It's still not very common, but you could run into a situation where, oh, I guess I have to wait some time because there's a known issue with this library. It's breaking everything. So I'll just have to wait for upstream to fix it if I don't know how to fix it myself. That could be a little frustrating. I've run into that, but I'm not really sure there's a whole lot that can save people from that anyway, because we're literally pulling things from different repositories anyway, which is not all that different. Yeah, another one, if you want to go a little further on the simple end of it, and that's going to be DocuWiki. DocuWiki is kind of slick because it doesn't use a database. It just creates a bunch of, well, plain files. The downside is it's not going to be great for collaboration. The upside is simplicity, and you can't beat simplicity when it comes to something. So I haven't really used it, but I know a lot of people, especially in the homeland world, do seem to like DocuWiki. So that's D-O-K-U-Wiki. And yeah, that one works pretty good too. Like from what I've heard, it seems to be popular among Reddit, but not a bad tool. Yeah, definitely looks, I haven't used it, but from what I've heard, a lot of people have some great things to say about it. You can't go wrong with just simple and no database. I mean, well, you can go wrong with it, but it's a lot less to go wrong. Now, kind of a bigger project, but boy, I think this is a good one, is NextCloud. NextCloud is great because you can integrate so much into it. Jay's got some recent videos on that, getting started with NextCloud, but from a note-taking synchronization, because the best place to have your notes is where you are. And NextCloud having different apps and being able to make this easily accessible, like they have a phone app for NextCloud, and that works on still, and they still have the Android apps kept up to date, right? Yeah, they have that. They also have, so they have an app. iPhone, I was going to ask you about, I've been to ask you about iPhone. Is the iPhone up to date? I don't know. I don't use, I mean, iPhone is something that I have, but I also feel like phones are unnecessary evil, so I don't like to use mobile phones. It's kind of weird. Last I checked, it was fine, but that was a few years ago, but they do have a lot of integrations, like an app image for Linux desktops, and then even Nome has a built-in thing in the settings you can go to and log in to your NextCloud instance there, and it'll pull in things as well. So there's no shortage of integrations. It's actually usually one or the other, right? Yeah, and that's one I think is really important is having, this is where, because like the Android app where having a desktop app, being able to easily and quickly access them across different machines, and these are sometimes, I'm trying to, and this is myself, because we, as a business, I use G Suite, or as it's called, Google Workspace now, to cloud with my staff, but for personal notes, I've started using NextCloud, because you get too dependent on G Suite, and from a business standpoint, hey, it's kind of easy to use. It's a good integration when you have a large number of employees and you're sharing a lot of documents with outside contractors. I trust that they maintain it and update it well, but NextCloud, I want that more for some of my personal stuff, so I've been putting more effort into using it that way I can do an upcoming video on a few different aspects of handling it. I started migrating all my personal notes for things into NextCloud, and the big thing for me is I do a lot of notes on my phone, and that's why I need something that has a phone app on there, and NextCloud does a nice integration. Now, these are more about using personal notes than it is using about external notes, but I think it's a good thing. It's a great product. There's a lot of extensibility in terms of plugins on there, and obviously you're a fan of NextCloud. Yep, I even had a video come out this past Monday. Brand new, updated for Boon 2, 2204. So it's a fresh guide if anyone hasn't seen my original. It's no different. It's just adjusted and tweaked to be compatible with 2204. So if you haven't done it yet, then you can check out the newest video. Yeah, so NextCloud is, they've been around for a minute, and it's just, while I was looking through some of the plugins on there and some of the new features, I didn't know this, and this is kind of a novel thing. Now, this does require you to share your NextCloud in a public way, but they offer some document signature apps that I was going to start testing. I'm like, this is just kind of neat, because they started it. Yeah, the plugins that they offer are pretty office suite extensions that are really business case useful. But the thing you really have to consider, and I think you can probably talk to us a little better, is managing the updates if you have this public facing. Yeah, the updates are very important in NextCloud. Don't wait for the updates. People are looking, and there's also a security tool built in the NextCloud as well. You can use to see if there's any low-hanging fruit that someone might be able to use against you as well. So, yeah. Yeah, that's having it automatically update. And by the way, the testing I've been doing has been with TrueNAS Core, so not the Docker instance, which I kind of expect to work, but the instance that's running on IOCage, the Jails inside of FreeBSD, that's sort of been using from an NextCloud instance. And I've been running it for a while because I wanted to use it over time because setting it up is not that hard, but using it over time, what used to happen long time ago was that there was an update. It broke, and that was always aggravating to troubleshoot. I only had one minor problem with an update. It had some file that it got hung up on. Easy fix. It actually just said this file shouldn't be here, so I removed the file and it was happy. So that's been the extent of my update experience for a couple of versions now. I think about two months ago we set that up. So that's been, my experience has been good, so my review coming on it is going to be doing it with TrueNAS Core, not Scale. I know it works in Scale because it's a Docker image. It's pulling the latest Docker image, and there's an official Docker image for NextCloud. So that's kind of an obvious that it's going to work. But with Core, hey, cool. It's great to see that one is still supported. And this is actually supported directly by IAC systems, by the way. It's not a third-party add-on app. It is integrated in there. And the nice thing about running on TrueNAS Core is you get the ability with ZFS to do all your snapshots, do all your backups of it, which also is helpful when you are worried about something breaking, set a snapshot for the entire jail, and then you can roll it back if needed. But the overall performance and everything, whether it's been, well, solid. I've been happy with it. Yep. I haven't had any experience on NextCloud that I remember. I mean, with TrueNAS, I meant to say. Yeah. But if it works for you, then I guess that's great. So would, this is a fair question that someone asked in here. Would you recommend a container over a VM instance of NextCloud? I actually, I'm partial to running it as a native virtual machine, rather than pulling down the Docker image. So it's all running that. What do you think, Jay? I think it depends on what you have, how much, you know, in the way of resources. I mean, I think both solutions are fine. The good thing about containers, which is also the bad thing, is that everything is set up for you. Yeah. So if you want to get up and running quickly, that's great. But if you want to learn how everything works by building it from scratch, you could build your own Docker container, sure. But at that point, it's like, why not just set up a virtual machine? So it really depends on if you want to get, like, a turnkey kind of thing going on, or if you want to use it as a means of learning how to deploy an app. So it kind of depends on that, in my opinion. So I think for each person, they'll just make their own choice, depending on their use case. Yeah. And obviously less efficient to run an entire VM just for NextCloud. But, you know, it's not, it isn't like, I think the requirements are what, one gig of RAMs? So it's not. Two, but... Two, okay. Yeah, it's not a ton. And it's a good learning experience to put it all together. And hey, Jay has a video on it. I sure do. Yep. It's even featured in the new book that I'm trying to wrap up. I've been working on for a while now. So definitely no shortage of exposure for NextCloud. Yeah. Of note, someone asked about setting up NextCloud on a Synology. I haven't tested it, but I will assume that it's going to work with the Docker image, because you can run Docker images on Synology. So it's probably a way to do it, because you can just pull specific Docker images. Shows a tutorial on it. I've not tested this, but that should be a way to get it working on Synology. I think the important thing when you're making a choice is make sure that if you're getting like a container or using TrueNAS or Synology, if there's a plug-in, make sure it's up to date, because I have seen, there's one case where someone mentioned in the comments in one of my videos, why not just use the Snap package, which I never wanted to use, because when I looked into it, it was always extremely out of date and insecure. However, when that person made the comment, I looked at it again. At that point, it was actually completely up to date. You've really got to pay attention to not only if it's up to date right now, but keep your eye on it and make sure that whoever's providing that turnkey solution is doing a good job keeping you updated, because if it's not up to you to update it, then obviously it's up to someone else, and I hope they're doing a good job, because updates in NextCloud are not to be taken lightly. They're there for a reason. There's a lot of security benefits. There's only been a couple major security vulnerabilities down in NextCloud. They were very fast to patch them, but their very fast to patch didn't mean, patch available does not mean patch installed. This is where things got messy. There was a ton of NextCloud instances that got taken over because people didn't patch them in time. This is something that I didn't use to complain about as much, but now I kind of have to really push. We have people that contact us wanting to self-host something, often businesses, and I'm like, what's your plan to keep it up to date? That's my first question before we even talk about whether or not it's a good idea. That answer determines if it's a good idea. If you have something public-facing, you just have that risk. If you put it by VPN, you're buying yourself some time because someone has to be on your network. Hopefully no one's on your network that you don't trust. It's lesser of an issue when you're self-hosting. Going, oh, cool. I've seen an update. I'll get it done later, but if it's public-facing, you can bet the instant. I think they tracked in minutes from the time of CVE becomes publicly disclosed to the number of attacks that start attacking that, and it's amazing. It's a matter of minutes, not even days anymore from the time something's disclosed to the time it's actively attacked. And sometimes it's the reverse. The CVE was discovered because there was active attacks. That's how they discovered there was a flaw in their property. So you really have to, more than ever, and it's due to the automation. There's a lot of the threat actors that keep indexed servers of versions of things they found on the internet, and they're like, hey, cool. I've seen you're running NextCloud 24. No known vulnerabilities. Oh, vulnerability found in NextCloud 24. Hurry up. Give me that list of everything we discovered that had NextCloud 24 on it, because anyone who's not on 24.x update covers CVE. So it's just a lot you have to think about when you're publicly exposing these. Agreed. And more specifically about Notes in NextCloud, you should check out the Notes app. I don't remember if that was one of those that gets pre-installed. It is. And it does mark down and it's really simple. Cool. It saves everything too as just individual text files. So it's marked down. It's individual text files. It's easily organized and it's well indexed. So as you save things in there, you can then search across them. And like I said, I was, I was shocked at how well it worked. So that's one that I started using that. Like I said, I'm trying to break my habit and someone can flame me in the comments for using the Google Notes just too much because while they work and they're available. But speaking of notes that are available, I'm going to list this as an honorable mention because the solution I'm about to mention is not something that I would recommend for anybody's primary note-taking app. This is completely secondary. It's equivalent to grabbing a notebook and just jotting something down that you might later put into an actual note. And the solution is simple note, which is what I use for, you know, one-off notes. So for example, if I'm in a meeting with somebody, it runs in a browser. I just jot down some notes and then I'll transfer those notes to the appropriate place afterwards. But it's really great when you just want something quickly to jot something down. Maybe somebody's reading a phone number to you over the phone or, you know, something, you know, light usage like that, then simple note is a great solution, I think, for that kind of thing. Again, not something I'd recommend for anybody's primary solution. This is just for people that just need something quick. Maybe you want the app equivalent of just getting a piece of paper out and writing something down real quick. And that's simple note. And you could log in from all your computers and since it's web-based, obviously, but it's automatically synchronized because it's in your account and then once you transfer it to a more, you know, proper Wiki or documentation solution, then you can just delete the note. But it's great to have as a quick bookmark when you want to jot something down. Yes. Now, another one, now we'll talk about some local apps, like things you can just run. And these are going to be both of these I'm going to mention across Platform. Now, the first one I thought it nailed it of it, like good UI design, but it does have a bug that really annoys me. And that's AppFloey, APPFLWI.IO. So AppFloey is kind of, well, they're pitching themselves a bit as a notion alternative. It's got that same look because I seem to want to mention notion. And I like it because it was pretty. It was easy to create a bunch of notes. I like that it just stores the files in a simple database. The downsides of it are kind of weird. One, you don't get to pick the where it saves the database. It just goes into your documents folder, which is fine. At least it stores it somewhere and you know where so you can make your backups of it. I like the fact that as you type it just saves or as you create, and it has the ability to essentially create a lot of different forms, like you can create what would you call those? Not just to-do lists with checkboxes, but nice templated fields and things like that for those of you that may be checking it out. It's really cool when you look at it. You can add things to the grid. Kind of, not quite like Kanban, but I guess more like how Notion handles it. So that part's really good. The weird thing that really drove me nuts about it, Control-A selects all. But that's normal, right? On almost every note-taking app or editor. But with, I don't know why Flowy ignores things. If you hit like Control-N, it doesn't go to the end of a document. I'm a very much keyboard person when I'm typing out like that. I just hit Control and bounce between words and change them around a little bit. Some of the keyboard shortcuts seemed not to work right, or at least the ones I'm used to. And they don't seem to have a way to customize that feature. So that was kind of an annoyance with it, but it was a pretty neat app for doing that. And essentially, it's all done in Markdown, so it's easy to copy it out as HTML or as Markdown on there. Next one I'll mention, and this seems very suggested in Reddit, and I started using it about a week ago. And it's called MarkText. GitHub links for these will be in the description for the video. But MarkText is a really simple cross-platform editor, and it doesn't have that same problem as Flowy. But it saves everything into the series of Markdown files. But one of the things I like is it autosaves them all. So as you create a series of tabs in it with a lot of different details and data, for example, when I'm creating the show notes for today, I have a lot of things I don't necessarily need saved in a browser, saved in a cloud. It's a really minimal app that gives me a noise-free typing environment just to keep it over there. I tabbed to it real quick, pasted in some things. As a matter of fact, it actually does a nice job of grabbing the titles and putting the links in kind of a Markdown language. Instead of just dropping a raw link, it grabs the title of the link, puts it in there, does this for YouTube videos. It makes for some really clean notes that I can just then hit my favorite button, Ctrl-A, and select all in a particular one, Ctrl-C, and paste it into the description of the show notes for the show, and they're there. So I found that to be really a dead simple desktop app, cross-platform, Windows, and Linux, I think Mac as well. But yeah, just an easy app to use for note-taking. And I think those are really important because sometimes I'll have a series of commands that sometimes will get a little complicated that you're typing in for the command line, and that's where I'll save those. And I'll copy and paste them. I was going back and forth and testing something. I had a couple of long Linux SSH commands I needed to do to grab some files and move a couple of things and create some actions. Jay's probably going, Tom, just write it in Ansible in the Bash script. But I just typed them out. Yeah, once I got the script to run once, and I knew I was going to have to restart the server and keep kind of running it a couple of times, I just threw it all in the notes real quick and going, all right, here's the extra keys, extra parameters to add. So choose the note, control C, control V right into a SSH session to quickly get that task accomplished. I needed all of four times for you with the server, and then after that, I don't care about it. Other than it'll go into my long-term storage of instructions of how to build something. Yep. There's one I want to mention too that's local. But before I do, I want to address a comment that I saw in the comments here. So someone mentions that they tried to set up the office integration in NextCloud and had some difficulty with that, which I will admit has historically been a challenge. By earlier videos that I did on NextCloud would walk you through that, but they've made that, they've since built that in now. There's nothing to do anymore. So the office integration, you just get it. So just install NextCloud. If you see an older tutorial that's telling you to set it up or install the Docker container or whatever they're having you do, it's more than likely outdated unless they're just trying to show you an alternate way to do it. So nowadays when you install NextCloud, you should just automatically get that feature. I just wanted to make a point to mention that, but my other recommendation is Zim, which is a desktop wiki. It's not a favorite of mine personally, so I don't personally like it, but it's just personal taste. Nothing wrong with it. It's just not my forte, but a lot of people love it. So I wanted to make sure that I mentioned this and I've known some people that have used this for years and they really like it. I don't really remember what it was that turned me off of it. I'm pretty sure it didn't support Markdown natively. I just did a quick Google search earlier and there was a, I don't know if it's a fork or an alternate one or just based on the idea of Zim that does have Markdown support. However, it also hasn't been updated for three years, so I can't recommend that one. Zim is still updated, so that's fine. I wanted to throw that out there in case that's something someone might want to look into. It's all local. It's not something you're hosting. It's like an app that you install and it reads the files and the files are on your hard disk, so I just wanted to throw that mention out there for Zim because a lot of people seem to like it. Yeah, and I seen someone mention Obsidian. I think the problem I had when someone can call me out if I'm wrong on this. I looked at Obsidian, but it wasn't open source and it's a neat tool that's popular, but not being open source is kind of I tried to lean these things towards the open source world, but if you like Obsidian, I seen someone likes it for creating some of the notes and then adding them to Wiki later. Cool. There's definitely methodology to do that. I kind of like the simplicity though, like the one I ended up landing on as much as I wanted to like app flowy and maybe I'll give it another try if I can or if someone leaves a comment of anytime you use these keyboard shortcuts instead, but or you can remap the keyboard shortcuts here, but the one I'll stick with is probably that mark text. I've been man, I have a lot of notes in that that I like pretty well. Of course, Jay's probably doing most of his notes in Vim. Yeah, I do. I like it. They're all in markdown form though, so I'm pretty much using that solution that I mentioned earlier where I'm literally uploading notes to a get repository or in markdown, so that's literally what I use for my personal notes, but for professionally things that are external facing, I just jot it down in WordPress so I don't have to maintain another instance, but I do kind of miss MediaWiki to be honest. I'm not really sure I feel 100% about my solution. I mean one less server to maintain sure, but I do miss MediaWiki. Yeah. So that's there's a lot and there's a lot that's hopefully we gave you a few hints for a few tools out there and explore because there's, as I said in the beginning, there's not a one-size-fits-all. Lots of different people have different workflows. I know if you've ever watched Phil work, Jay of when he was back when he's on the podcast, we watch him, he did everything in Vim. That dude lives in Vim, so, or by so. I do a lot in there too. I even have the syntax checking plugins and even like a spell and spell check, grammar check when I'm writing. I have all kinds of things in there. You'd be surprised how much you can extend Vim. Yeah. There's so many different plugins you can do in there for code editing everything else and then mix it in with your T-Mux session and what was that tool he used? Is it NerdTree? Is that the one that's popular? Yeah, that's very popular for that one. I'm using a different one but I forgot the name of it though. I think NerdTree is built in now, isn't it? Yeah, because you can actually kind of use it in there. That's pretty cool. An equivalent of NerdTree is built in. Yeah, I think it's just an equivalent of NerdTree. There is something built into Vim now that does that. Well, everything we mentioned down below will be in the show notes for those of you who didn't want to write it all down. I'll make sure I put all those links in there to all these different tools so you can figure out which one is out there. As I said though, just get documenting. It'll help you. It'll help you get help. As I said, with making diagrams of things and proper notes for things. We need to check the feedback one because we probably could do a feedback episode pretty soon. We're planning on, or hope is to do a retro homelab show. Me and Jay are excited about that. Yeah, that would be a lot of fun. We want to talk about doing some retro stuff. That's going to require a guest to be on there for that. We're waiting for the guest approval. Then we can talk about that. We also, what's the topic we're probably going to be doing next week Jay? I was looking into remote access as a topic. There's just multiple ways. I'm not just talking about SSH here. Even just getting a remote desktop to appear. What clients to use. What to serve the remote desktop connection in the first place. We've talked about those things, but we haven't dedicated an episode to it. Feel free to fill out our feedback form. Tag us in a tweet. Leave a comment down in here in the YouTube video about some of the things you want to see for the remote desktop apps. I'm aware of Rust Desk. It's one of the ones I'm going to have on the list. Absolutely. Thanks everyone for joining us. It's been a fun episode. Hopefully you learned something. We're looking forward to hearing from all of you. See you next week. Thank you.