Personal Knowledge Management

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is a challenge. I’ve been taking notes for years, accumulating ideas, notes, meeting notes. I’ve tried everything: paper, loose files, Evernote, Notes.app, Craft, Standard Notes and Notion. They all promised to be “the definitive one.” None of them were.

The problem isn’t the application, it’s the model. When your notes live in a proprietary format, on someone else’s servers, you’re renting your knowledge. And one day the company shuts down, raises prices, or you simply decide to switch… and you discover that migrating is hell.

The Swiss Army Knife for PDFs

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I just discovered pdfly (pronounced PDF-ly), the Swiss army knife for working with PDFs from the command line (CLI). It’s an application written purely in Python, designed to extract (meta)data and manipulate PDF files.

It’s based on the fpdf2 and pypdf libraries, is a free and open-source project with no commercial affiliation, and is licensed under BSD-3-Clause.

Documentation on Technical Notes

Personal Knowledge Management

The Swiss Army Knife for PDFs