Ulix Knowledge
Answers for information people.
Essays, guides, and useful notes for making the world legible.
Latest Briefs
Saturn May Be Growing a Decagon at Its South Pole
The jet moves more than 46 times faster than the ten-sided wave embedded in it, and the wave itself still appears to be evolving.
What Is Memory For?
Remembering the past may be episodic memory’s most basic evolutionary function even if future and communicative functions came later.
A Planet's Atmosphere Can Be Confused With Its Star
JWST measures star and planet together. Around active cool stars, separating the two can become the hardest part of reading an atmosphere.
The More You Know, the More Questions You Can Have
Knowing a little can make better questions possible, and those questions can help build the knowledge that makes the next questions possible.
The 2,500-Year-Old Statue That Became a Paving Stone
A fifth-century BCE statue survived Roman Sardis because builders broke it up and laid it face down in a street.
Kusama's Infinity Rooms Did Not Begin With Mirrors
Before mirrors multiplied Kusama's rooms, she spent years painting and sewing repetition by hand.
Explore Knowledge
Browse by problem
Books & Collections
Find books, manage physical collections, search shelves, and preserve useful location context.
TopicReading & Classics
Public-domain books, difficult reading, Homer, translation, offline reading, and study.
TopicNotes, Capture & PKM
Save passages, keep provenance, tag only when useful, search later, and export cleanly.
TopicLending & Shared Collections
Track books, tools, kits, and small shared collections without building an inventory bureaucracy.
TopicPersonal Data & Tracking
Run small experiments, build useful logs, track long enough, and know when to stop.
TopicResearch & Archives
Keep sources intelligible, preserve context, reopen old work, and avoid data lock-in.
Start Here
Broad problems, useful first answers
I Can't Find My Books
Use Shelf Scan live at the shelves, or photograph a large collection once and search the saved Library later.
How Can I Search a Large Home Library Without Cataloging Every Book?
When the real problem is retrieval, a full catalog may be more work than the library needs.
Where Can I Read Classic Books for Free?
Public-domain libraries make an enormous part of literary history available without a subscription.
Do You Really Need a Second Brain?
Probably not in the elaborate sense. A useful knowledge system can be much smaller.
How Do I Keep Track of Things I Lend to People?
The useful record is smaller than most inventory systems make it.
How to Run a Small Personal Experiment Without Fooling Yourself
Predefine the question, comparison, primary outcome, stopping rule, and what result would actually change a decision.
Browse by App
Show guides for a tool you already use
Recently Added Guides
How to Compare Two Homer Translations Side by Side
Turn on Two texts, choose an English translation for each pane, and decide whether the panes should move together or keep independent positions.
How to See Which Wi-Fi Channels Are Being Used Around You
Open Curious Air's Wi-Fi screen and read the channel spectrum: each discovered access point is plotted where Android reports it operating, with signal strength and channel width visible.
How to Start Tracking Something With Track Analysis
On the Log screen, choose the nearest event type, write what happened in ordinary language, and tap Add Event. Track Analysis timestamps the entry automatically.
How to Record Your First Loan in Loan It
Tap the + button, describe what you are lending, add the borrower or due date if useful, and tap Save. A loan record can be very small.
How to Save a Web Article to Keep Clip
Share a page to Keep Clip when you want the link; select a passage before sharing when you want the quotation too. Then check the captured source information and tap Save.
How to Find and Download a Project Gutenberg Book in Guten
Search the Browse tab by title or author, open the book's details, and tap Download Book. Once downloaded, it lives in your Guten Library for offline reading.
How to Search a Bookshelf With Shelf Scan Live Mode
Live Mode searches the shelf in front of you: enter a word, tap Search, and move the camera until matching spine text lights up.
Accuracy, Precision, Resolution, and Sensitivity: What Is the Difference?
A sensor can display a very fine number without measuring the world that accurately. Four measurement terms explain why.
How to Photograph a Bookshelf So OCR Can Actually Read the Spines
A shelf can look perfectly readable to a person and still be a bad OCR image.
Markdown, CSV, HTML, RTF, or Plain Text: Which Keep Clip Export Should You Use?
There is no best export format. There is only a best format for what you plan to do next.
How to Ask an LLM a Useful Question About Your Own Tracking Data
An LLM can read a CSV full of personal log entries and produce an explanation almost immediately. That is exactly why the first prompt matters.
How to Write Freeform Log Entries That an AI Can Actually Analyze Later
Freeform logging is useful because life does not arrive in dropdown menus. It also creates a predictable problem: six weeks later, the data may be full of entries that made perfect sense at the time and are miserable to analyze in aggregate.
How to Turn a Vague Self-Tracking Question Into Useful CSV Analysis
What affects my energy? is a reasonable human question and a terrible data-analysis request.
How to Save a Kindle Passage Without Building a Second Note System Inside Kindle
A reading app is good at being a reading app. It does not necessarily need to become the permanent home of every quotation you want to keep.
What Should You Do With Highlights From Five Different Books on the Same Topic?
Highlights become more interesting when they stop being about the book they came from.
How to Make a Homer Quotation Image Without Stripping Away Its Context
Homer is unusually easy to turn into a handsome quotation card and unusually easy to damage by doing so.
How to Design a Multi-Sensor Logging Session Without Creating Useless Data
A phone can expose a surprising number of signals at once. That does not mean you should log all of them.
Save the Quote and the Link Together: What Context Should Travel With a Clip?
The quotation is usually the easiest part to save. The harder question appears six months later: Where did this come from, and why did I care?
Prose First or Poetry First? A Practical Way Into Homer
There is no neutral English Homer.
How to Build a Reading Collection Around a Question Instead of a Genre
History, philosophy, and novels are perfectly sensible ways to sort books. They are not always very good ways to build a reading project.