Wiki on a Stick: Personal Memory

There's a lot of info out there nowadays, more than a normal mind can process, especially if its outside of your career. But, searching for info on the web or in books when you need it and have forgotten it can be a needle-in-haystack issue, especially if the keywords you need to use are common.

To help myself remember all the little details I find interesting, for either my career or my hobbies, I use a personal wiki. The nice things about a personal wiki:

* Its organized the way you think, so its much easier to find stuff.
* It only contains stuff you need or want to remember, no extra details.

Now, math and physics are hard to put in a wiki, but its perfect for all those weird little programming language gotchas, all that miscellaneous information about various supplements and what they do, all those things you see in magazines that you want to try but forget about...

I'm also thinking it may be good for world building in writing, if a little slow. Something that could have multiple views opened at once might be better, rather than having to follow link trails everywhere. I'll have to look into whether there's anything better out there.

You can also carry it with you (though you need a portable machine to view it):

http://www.mediawiki.....ver_on_Stick)

I recommend mediawiki. The special characters aren't as likely to clash with something you type normally as some I've used (eg. instiki, which uses Textile, very bad for wikis involving programming).