Note-taking
The first thing I did when I decided I wanted to take notes on scientific and mathematical topics was to embark on a brief but thorough journey of improving my LaTeX skills. As you can probably surmise by the fact that I am a Neovim user, I’m not the biggest fan of WYSIWYG editing, so I preferred to just sit down and suck it up to improve at LaTeX instead of resigning myself to using them. I’m very big on customization of everything I touch.
I try to cover the major topics/units I learn in the classes I’m digitizing my notes on, but I think the most important thing is how I use them for studying. I love physical note-taking because of the freedom it gives you, so my notes are almost always physical before I write them up on here.
I find that this is actually the best method to study for tests, quizzes et cetera… to pretend you are the ‘teacher’ and type up a mini-‘review lecture.’ I have always learned better by helping others understand topics, since that makes me dive deeper into them myself so that I can fully explain how and why they are the way they are.
Digital Organization
Machines and Synchronization
I often ping-pong from machine to machine, so it is important for me to keep everything related to schoolwork and my programming projects organized. I use a combination of rsync, syncthing, Git and Google Drive to hold everything together, but it’s honestly far less organized that I’d hope.
I’ve kept an overall ‘Gruvbox-y’ dark theme across all of my devices and as many applications as possible. It helps me kind of get in the ‘same zone’ for everything, even if it’s a bit of a placebo affect. Man, I love Gruvbox.
My main school machine is my M1 Macbook running with the Rectangle WM, but I’ve recently been considering switching over to Yabai for the ricing potential… I’m sticking with Rectangle for now, though. I use kitty as my primary terminal emulator on macOS and occasionally on my other machine.
My other machine is a completely blinged-out RGB menace of a desktop touting a RTX 4080 and AMD 7800X3D. I’ve had it running the standard Fedora Workstation spin with some i3 flavor put on top of it for awhile, but I am in the process of switching over to Arch and Hyprland for my own sake. I use a combination of Neovim and VSCode for code editing, depending on what exactly I’m doing.
Website Publishing
I use a very simple pipeline. Changes go from whatever machine I am using to a Github repo that is being watched by Netlify for new commits. Netlify builds the static website that is displayed on 3fecta.party.