People have spent a lot of time looking a method to digitize their daily diary. I still remember watching the TV Show Doogie Howser MD in which Doogie was shown to maintain his thoughts on his computer. I was so impressed by that at that time (I was in school at that time and did not know anything about computers). One of my cousins who was computer knowledgeable at that time told me that it isn't possible to save any text that is written on the screen at the prompt. I didn't understand then, but just said yes. Then I discovered Wordstar, MS Word, Lotus WordPerfect etc using which you could perhaps maintain a personal log sort of but with much effort. You have to manually enter a date, and remember to do it. Or write some scripts to add the date automatically which is again another hassle.

I always used to think of notepad as a very handy but low end tool good for editing some text, web documents, scripts etc. Today, I came across a neat feature of Notepad which I never knew.

You can use the plain old Notepad as your diary and maintain a history trail of date / time automatically. Notepad allows you to automatically date your entries in the file by adding a very simple line at the beginning of the file. To use Notepad as your personal log, open up a next notepad instance and type in .LOG in the first line and press enter. Then go ahead and save the file with whatever name you want. The next time you open the same file, the next line will contain the current date and time as shown above in the picture (Click here to see a larger image). Every time you close and re-open the file, it will contain a date stamp.

Neat isn't it?