Paz

Exactly that. Export one page, open it on the Windows machine, Ctrl-F a word you know you wrote. If it finds it you're fine. If it doesn't, you own a folder of pictures and you'll find that out in April instead of September.

Handwriting search works well in both of the big iPad note apps and has done for years — that half is solved. The half that will bite you is the second one. Both store notes in their own format, and the Windows side of your life gets PDF exports at best, which are only searchable if the app burns recognised text into the PDF. Test that on day one with a page of your worst handwriting, before you commit a semester to it.

With a gas hob, the extractor is your air purifier. Ducted to outside if you have it, and run it for ten minutes after you finish cooking rather than switching it off when the pan comes off the heat. A recirculating hood with a tired charcoal cassette is doing almost nothing and no freestanding unit in the room will make up for it.

You want a text editor with sync, and the good news is the category exists and is deeply boring. Three properties to look for: it stores plain text or markdown, it syncs without an account you'd be upset to lose, and search is instant. Anything with 'workspace', 'database' or 'second brain' on its front page is not the thing you are shopping for.

Replace the hand-me-down regardless of what you buy next. Snell's own guidance is five years from first use, and you don't know its history. If it has ever been dropped hard onto tarmac the liner may be compressed in a way you cannot see from outside. That's the actually urgent part of your post.

Vintage. Pre-war pans are thinner and were machined smooth at the factory, and they turn up in junk shops for the price of a sandwich. Surface rust is cosmetic and comes off in an afternoon.

Came out the other side. What it looked like: I deleted every plugin, used it for three months as a text editor with backlinks and nothing else, then re-added exactly four when I hit a problem I could name in a sentence. Nineteen plugins at three weeks means you have installed solutions to problems you have not had yet. The tool is fine. The failure mode is that it rewards fiddling, and fiddling feels exactly like work.

Backlinks are the part I'd genuinely miss. Everything else on that list, agreed.

The bit nobody mentions: where the notes end up. If they live in the tool's own web app you now have a second notes system, and your actual notes are split across two places you'll search separately forever. I only kept mine once I'd got it dumping into the same folder as everything else.

Eleven years, same folder, three different apps on top of it over that period. That's the trick nobody says out loud: you don't have to be loyal to the app, you have to be loyal to the format. I've changed editors three times and never once migrated a note.

Worth adding that meeting those criteria is a floor, not a ranking. Plenty of brands tick all four and are still just fine rather than special, which is roughly the point the person above is making about a healthy dog.

Separate the two questions, because they're independent and only one of them matters. Is the app free? Are the files yours? An app that costs money and writes plain markdown into a folder you control is far safer than a free app keeping everything in its own database. Judge on file format, not on price.

Did about 5,000 pages. I accepted a flatter structure and it was the right call. Two days of scripting got the hashes off filenames and rewired most of the links, and the last 10% would have taken another week. The nested hierarchy turned out to matter far less than I thought once search was fast — in eighteen months since, I've reached those pages by navigating maybe six times.

Tingling in the ring and little finger runs a different nerve path from the classic thumb-side symptoms, and a sharp desk edge pressing into the forearm is a very ordinary cause of it. I'd get it looked at rather than go shopping — mine turned out to originate at the shoulder and no pad on earth was ever going to touch it.