Baining Zhang

Baining Zhang

Sophomore at HKUST

A Survey of Personal Wiki Software

2 minute read

Published:

I just spent the whole evening messing with personal wikis. I have been wanting to create a personal wiki for my maths notes for quite some time. The short conclusion is that there are currently no software satisfying my needs.

Notion

I started using notion a long time ago, when I was in Form 3. I used it for a while, particularly for inventory and procrastination. It has ok LaTeX support. The main downside is that it is not a local software. Even worse, their servers are known to be unreliable and many users have reported that their notes just disappeared.

Obsidian

The famous alternative. This was where I first started to write notes. It has ok LaTeX support. In particular, it allows snippets via a plugin. However, I left it after I started university, since I set up an environment in VSCode to type up homework in LaTeX.

It is a local software, and you can pay for your notes to be synced and hosted so that they are put on the internet. This is very important for long term notes. You don’t want the company to one day just vanish off the face of the Earth along with your notes. ahem Notion ahem

This is one of the best options for a personal wiki.

Instiki

This is the software nLab is based on. They have since started a fork and are now developing on their own. I spent the whole evening messing with it.

The problem is, we still cannot use the full LaTeX. I need my macros and packages to type my notes! It is pretty good-looking (see nLab). The issue is that it is just too limited. You can’t even have many embeds.

A particular problem is the lack of quiver, which is an online tool for drawing commutative diagrams. You can either embed this into your markdown file, or use their TeX package. However, Instiki supports neither of these.

In terms of functions, it is nearly completely trumped by Obsidian.

What I’m Currently Using - A Giant LaTeX File

Yeah. In the span of less than four months, I have over a hundred pages of notes in this file. It is what it sounds like, a single large LaTeX file. I can use any package I want. I can create references and hyperlinks. I use my lovely VSCode setup to type. Just works quite well. Of course, it is not nearly as good as one of the above software + full LaTeX support.

We can only dream of a day when such magnificence befalls us mortals.

Post Midterm Brights

1 minute read

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Third blog post within one week! By the way I love post-midterm UST. The campus is a lot more empty.

My First HK Probability Seminar

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Yesterday, I attended my first Hong Kong Probability Seminar. Gefei Cai, from Peking, spoke about the 3 point connectivity problem in 2D critical percolation.

Week 1, Year 2 Fall

3 minute read

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Going into Year 2, I am rather uncertain about my goals this year. On the one hand, I have already started working my way into the field of statistical mechanics and random geometry. Yet, I lack the necessary prerequisites to get into some of the more ‘pure’ fields. The biggest roadblock is certainly stochastic processes and stochastic calculus. Complex analysis is also necessary, but I feel like somehow I can intuit my way through this while checking some references.