I keep loosing notes....

Here is my problem. I keep misplacing important notes. On Friday I left bunch of my thesis notes at work, and I could not use them over the weekend and today. I also tend to loose old notes that are not attached to some notebook I'm currently using. Paper based notes have this annoying property of being tied to their physical location. In other words, I can connect to the work server without any problems - but that does not help me to recover my paper based notes from my desk.

So, how do I get around this? I figured that I need to scan paper based crap and store it somewhere as ps/pdf files. Now I could just dump bunch of these files on pegasus, but that might be messy. I wish I had some nice and easy way of indexing and/or tagging these files for easy lookup. Any suggestions for some type of software that will do this with minimum hassle? By minimum hassle I mean app that will work on basic php+mysql setup and not much else.

Actually, I love the way Flickr works - I would love something like that for organizing random files. Or even backpackit for that matter - but I'd rather use my own storage (or a free service), rather than have them charge me some insane prices. I'm still looking for some decent software like this. Any suggestions?

Another deal here is note taking software. So far, the best note taking app I have seen is OneNote. It really allows for the free form note taking - you can type, you can doodle with your mouse and etc. From usability point of view it's awesome. Unfortunately, it is proprietary and made by Microsoft. It has no easy export feature, and you cannot convert your notes to an open document standard. And of course it won't run on Debian - which is what I have on my laptop. In other words - crap.

KDE has Kjots which is pretty good. But it's text only - no support for pictures or free form doodling. And I find it that in CS courses there sometimes tends to be allot of pictures, graphs and doodles to be taken down. :( The tomboy app takes a slightly different approach (linked notes) but also shares the same flaw - no support for doodling and drawing.

As evidenced by this poll, and this slashdot article there seems to be no good linux based note taking apps that could compete with OneNote.

Sigh... My search continues...

Tags: notes, note taking, onenote, kjots, note taking software