Blog

A 360 degree view of your data

Many of us use tools and websites to get a 360 degree view of our financial life. These tools show us summaries of assets and holdings across multiple banks, brokerages etc. Many of these tools let us zoom in and view the data in different ways – e.g. asset distribution between stocks, bonds and cash; between different stock classes etc. These views provide valuable insights about our financial health. Unfortunately, our digital sprawl tends to be much worse – hundreds of thousands of photos, videos, documents, emails, text messages etc. spread across a dozen or more places! We would surely […]

How to move, copy or download your emails

We often have useful information in emails and need to back them up. While there are many file backup tools, there aren’t many apps that allow you to move, copy or download your emails (especially in bulk). Datamaton’s Digital Manager (called Knit ) is one such useful tool, allowing you to move or copy emails from one account to another, or as files to your computer or to cloud storage. The need often arises when you want to migrate from one email account to another. Your old email provider may be shutting down, or may no longer meet your needs. […]

How to find archived emails in Gmail

One of the annoying things about Gmail is how easy it is to archive an email by mistake, and how much harder it is to find archived emails in Gmail. This post shows how easy this becomes with our Digital Manager app Knit.   Quick intro to Gmail “Folders”, “Labels” and “Categories” Some knowledge of Gmail’s “folders”, “labels” and “categories” is useful to understand how Gmail archiving works. These are key concepts that distinguish Gmail from other email providers and make it easy for us to organize our emails. Unfortunately, Gmail offers too much of a good thing! An email […]

How to find files inside ZIP files or emails

Sometimes, important photos, documents etc. lie hidden inside “compound” ZIP files (or 7z, ISO or gzip files). Often, we don’t even know that a file we’re looking for is embedded inside something else! For example, when we download multiple files from Google Drive, we get a single ZIP file. Files aren’t the only “compound” types – emails can also contain embedded attachments. Older files and photos are especially likely to have been emailed around rather than shared via cloud storage providers. We often remember something about the file we’re looking for but nothing about the compound file/email which contains it. […]

Integration With Other Tools & Next Steps

In this post, I’ll discuss how Knit search integrates with other tools you might use to handle your files, emails, social media posts, appointments etc. I’ll also discuss some planned next steps for Knit Search. This is the 5th and final part of my blog series related to finding your personal digital content. Other posts in this series include: Part 1: Intro to the search problem and Advanced Search. Part 2: Quick Search and its powerful search syntax. Part 3: Customizing the search results display. Part 4: Other ways to find your content. Part 5: this post – Integration with […]

Other Ways To Find Content

In this post, I’ll talk about the ways in which Knit helps you quickly find your digital content without issuing a search for it. This is the 4th part of my blog series related to finding your personal digital content. Other posts in this series include: Part 1: Intro to the search problem and Advanced Search. Part 2: Quick Search and its powerful search syntax. Part 3: Customizing the search results display. Part 4: this post – Non-search ways to find your content. Part 5: Integration with other tools & next steps.   Some of the methods described in this […]

Digital Manager’s Search Results

In this post, I’ll talk about the Knit search results display and how you can customize it further to quickly find the file, email, post etc. that you searched for. This is the 3rd part of my blog series related to finding your personal digital content. Other posts in this series include: Part 1: Intro to the search problem and Advanced Search. Part 2: Quick Search and its powerful search syntax. Part 3: this post – Customizing the search results display. Part 4: Other ways to find your content. Part 5: Integration with other tools & next steps. Knit Search […]

Digital Manager’s Quick Search

In this post, I will describe how the Datamaton Digital Manager’s Quick Search can quickly find an file, email, text message, appointment or contact regardless of where it is stored. I’ll also describe the powerful search syntax it supports, so you can issue sophisticated searches by directly typing into the search box. This is the 2nd part of my blog series related to finding your personal digital content. Other posts in this series include: Part 1: Intro to the search problem and Advanced Search. Part 2: this post – Quick Search and its powerful search syntax. Part 3: Customizing the […]

Finding Personal Digital Content

Finding a file, email, appointment or social media post months or years later is a constant and frustrating battle. Not being able to find something is as bad as not having it in the first place! In this post, I’ll talk about the problems with current search tools and mechanisms. I’ll show how the advanced search capabilities of our app Knit solves these problems. This is the 1st post in my blog series related to finding your personal digital content. Other posts in this series include: Part 1: this post – Intro to the search problem and Advanced Search. Part […]

An overview of how Datamaton’s Digital Manager works

This is a high level overview of how Datamaton’s Digital Manager works. This app (called Knit) lets you search, organize, backup and use all your digital content from one place. You don’t really need to know how it works to use it, but its nice to know a little more about an app you might use every day.   Knit is an indexer, just like Google & Bing search engines . . . Similar to how Google and Bing index websites, Knit indexes your storage locations. That is, it makes an inventory of your content while leaving everything undisturbed in […]

What makes our digital life so complex

Our digital life has evolved from a few files and emails at a small number of places to something too complex for us to handle! The problems listed here motivated us to create our Digital Manager app Knit – a universal aggregator. So what makes our digital life so complex? We have too much digital content. We’ve long since moved from having a few thousand files and emails to hundreds of thousands of content items! Digital photos are so easy to take, we often take hundreds of them in a month. Same with emails, text messages etc. Spread across too […]

Hello World!

We’ve just announced the first Datamaton Digital Manager release! It’s called Blob, and it lets you search, organize, backup and use your digital content from one place. We’ve been working on it for several years and believe it is finally ready for prime time.   Blob’s raison d’être is intuitively simple – we’re drowning in a deluge of personal digital content! From a few thousand files at local disks, we’ve gone to hundreds of gigabytes at over a dozen web based email, social media, photo, video, calendar and cloud storage accounts in addition. This digital sprawl is way beyond our […]