Finding digital assets
Part of a series:
- Introduction. About the series.
- The key to finding things. Tags.
- Browsers. Vivaldi.
- Bookmarks. Raindrop.io.
- Emails. Outlook.
- Files. Everything and XYplorer.
- Music. MP3tag and Musicolet.
Series summary
Tags are a key to finding and managing digital assets. They can be combined with a shallow folder hierarchy to access your second brain.
Browsers seemed to me a commodity. I’ve used Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer(!), DuckDuckGo and Brave. But Vivaldi has recently given me practical advantages. I’m keeping it.
Bookmarks seem rather quaint, like something from a bygone era. That’s not helped by browsers giving substandard functionality on bookmark management: it’s too easy to get swamped in thousands of bookmarks. But raindrop.io nails it.
Emails give pain beyond simply receiving and retaining too many. We may need to retrieve old emails. For technical reasons I’ve been forced to drop Gmail but, to my surprise, I’ve found that Outlook offers a more than adequate experience when used with care. Read my tips.
Files are, for some, the biggest pain of all. The Windows folder system with Explorer are inadequate tools if, like me, you have a huge number of electronic files. For years Everything has given me lightning fast searches. I’ve now added the impressive XYplorer. Join me: cut your filing down to size.
Music - which for me means MP3s - is perhaps the easiest area to manage, even if your tastes include classical music, where tracks often get mangled. A basic insight - that MP3s are simply files - coupled with using MP3tag and Musicolet means that iTunes has become a bad but distant memory.