Okay, let’s talk about what I got done today. It wasn’t anything groundbreaking, just some basic groundwork, really.
Getting Started
So, I had this idea simmering for a while. Needed to pull together some information from a bunch of different places I’d saved notes over the years. We’re talking random text files, old documents, scribbles in digital notebooks, that sort of thing. The goal was just to get a first pass, grab everything that looked relevant into one spot. No fancy filtering, no real organizing yet. Just grab it all.
The Process – Step by Step
First up, I had to actually find all this stuff. Spent a good hour just rummaging through old folders on my main drive and a couple of dusty external hard drives. You know how it is, folders inside folders, weird names I thought were clever back then.
Once I felt I had located most of the potential sources, I started the copying process. Just dragged and dropped everything that looked promising into a single new folder I labeled ‘Raw Data Pool’. Didn’t even look inside most files, just went by filename and type.
Then, I figured I needed a way to quickly glance at the content. Didn’t want to open hundreds of files one by one. So, I used a simple command-line thingy – nothing complex – just something to spit out the text from all files into one big mega-file. Told it to just dump everything it could read.
- Located the source folders.
- Created a central ‘Raw Data Pool’ folder.
- Copied potential files into the central folder.
- Used a basic tool to concatenate text content into one large file.
This took a little while, especially with some larger documents. There were definitely errors popping up for files it couldn’t read properly, probably weird formats or corruption. I just let it run and ignore those for now.
Today’s Raw Output
So, what I’m left with is basically one massive text file. And when I say raw, I mean it. It’s a complete mess.
You’ve got:
- Chunks of plain text notes, like I expected.
- Weird formatting characters littered everywhere from different document types.
- Headers and footers pulled from documents.
- Sometimes just filenames or metadata got dumped in.
- Lots of duplication where I probably saved the same notes in different places.
- Garbled text from files that didn’t convert cleanly.
There’s no structure to it at all yet. It’s literally just the digital soup pulled from all those sources. It’s pretty ugly, honestly. But, it’s all in one place, which was the main goal for today.
Tomorrow, maybe I’ll start trying to clean it up, figure out how to sift through this mountain of text to find the actual useful bits. But for today, this pile of raw text is the result. It’s a starting point, I guess.
