Slashdot Mirror

It's not 1 : 1 comparable but I find that Zim is a pretty good tool on Linux for similar notes.

The fact that it stores the info in flat text files also makes it easier to manage data directly if you should so choose.

see http://zim-wiki.org/

I use Zim for just this purpose.

http://zim-wiki.org/

If you're working with GNU/Linux, consider Zim, the desktop wiki.

Some points for Zim:

• Zim stores your notes in plain text with only light markup so you can also edit them with your favorite plain text editor.
• Built-in support for version control systems, including git
• Equations and Plots with LaTeX and Gnuplot
• Supports multiple wikis

http://zim-wiki.org/

Personal desktop wiki that stores everything in flat text files, which can be stored somewhere like dropbox. My full review here: http://www.tidbitsfortechs.com...

I like Zim for note-taking with minor formatting and image insertion. Have the folder sync to any sort of "cloud" storage you prefer and you can access it anywhere and keep it synchronised. The formatting is just a basic wiki style formatting using plain text files and folders, so even if you don't have a native client for every device (phone/tablet), you can still edit or add files and clean things up later. It also has a plugin system so you can get extra features like in-line calculation, automatic date-based journal creation under a namespace, tagging, etc.

I keep one primary notebook for notes, ideas, and random information, using separate namespaces to categorise; then I also keep some extra notebooks for specific projects or even keeping track of data for games that benefit greatly from a journal of locations and inventory, such as Minecraft or Starbound.

LightPaper is also decent but it's tied tightly to Dropbox. Visually appealing, works nicely on mobile, and formatting is Markdown so it's simple to work with on other platofrms. Bad part is it's hard to get your files out of it other than with Dropbox, and limited platform support (Android and OS X only, oddly).

No matter what you choose, though, it should be something that creates files that are human-readable or at least can be parsed by other programs. Anything else risks you losing your data

I wouldn't. Automatically log every conversation and mark any coordinates mentioned, with a link back to the log. Why in blazes shouldn't the computer handle a simple and, frankly, tedious bookkeeping task? Removing manual copy-pasting of text is not "dumbing down" a game.

Completely agreed; one should not be required to keep a separate Zim notebook just to play a game. If nothing else, provide a simple method of bookmarking information as it's given to you, so that it's easy to record information in-game yourself.

The problem is that there's a fine line between "convenient" and "mindless", and a lot of (perhaps most) games cross it. Automatically recording information about the general area of an important location: awesome. Giving you a reliable idea of which direction you should be looking, or some other way of limiting the scope of your search so it's not "needle in haystack" hunting: great. Showing you exactly where and what your target is and completely eliminating any need for exploration: bad. As an example of how to get it wrong in both ways, the game nearly everyone has played or at least knows exists: World of Warcraft. Over the years, Blizzard has managed to hit both extremes (too obtuse, too hand-holding) without getting anywhere near a good compromise.

At release and for a long time after, you had to find quest locations by reading the log and discovering the location yourself. Unfortunately, the directions tended to be vague, and were sometimes even completely useless or non-existent, so you spent a lot of time wandering aimlessly in a vaguely-worded "north" or "east" and hoped you found the right thing to stab. Eventually, the people that did the exploring made websites and addons that did the work for you, until they became the de facto standard for playing the game, at least for most players.

Years later, Blizzard overhauled the quest log system as a response to this third party ecosystem of quest assistants. Instead of making it more user friendly and accurate, they took out any sense of exploration at all. Big blue area markers on the map that show exactly the area you need to be in, with hover tooltips on every enemy and item that tell you which quest they belong to, and arrow son the minimap that point you toward where your "active" quest area is located. Click a quest, go toward arrow until blue appears, click enemies until you find one that is marked as quest-related, then kill and loot. No discovery, no explanation, and no reason to even glance at the quest text any more, except for a handful of particularly obtuse quests.

I use the Zim Desktop Wiki http://zim-wiki.org/ plus Dropbox.

Zim is a graphical text editor used to maintain a collection of wiki pages. Each page can contain links to other pages, simple formatting and images. Pages are stored in a folder structure, like in an outliner, and can have attachments. Creating a new page is as easy as linking to a nonexistent page. All data is stored in plain text files with wiki formatting. Various plugins provide additional functionality, like a task list manager, an equation editor, a tray icon, and support for version control.
If you need version control, Zim supports Bazaar, Git, and Mercurial as backends.

Zim is not network aware, so I just keep its ~/Notes files in my Dropbox folder, install that and the desktop Linux/Windows/OSX Zim client as needed and I'm good to go.

Unfortunately, there is no smartphone version of Zim, but I have little need for a smartpone app of this sort. I do email myself info as needed to integrate into Zim later.

I'd say RepRap. Not that it is "unknown", but strange it is not mentioned all that often when one thinks about from that first blogpost in -05 and what have happened since. Especially these days when you can get the plasticparts (clonedel), stepper motors on ebay and a small drillpress for cheaps. Not to mention tiny "one board", easy to solder through hole solutions like Sanguinololu.

Passwordmaker generates ditto for all my internets accounts, pinpadlocks etc. Runs on whatever you throw it at, as javascript, android, crapple, N900 (Thanks George (caco3)!), as CLI. Portable to say the least, mature and of course secure to the extent of what cards you got up your sleeve.

I use Zim to organize everything these days! It's stays out of your way and doesn't complicate things. It uses textfiles as database, which is really nice as you get access to your stuff quickly through a terminal for example. Ok, sure I long for the day that it gets say a Couchdb-plugin...

Redshift safes my eyes from getting cooked. I have yet to download that maemosandbox and compile it for my N900 though. There was a new release a few days ago btw, some new fine functions and not "just" bugfixes!

1. Blog your progress. Whatever you did today, blog it. Let people know what you did that worked, or what was faster (Nginx vs. Apache), or what wasn't (ColdFusion?). Don't reinvent the wheel, use WordPress, regardless of whether you like PHP/MySQL or not.

2. Use a subscription/payment management company. You're just a small group of nerds, not accounts receivable clerks. Fastspring, Plimus are free; Chargify, Subsify, Cheddar Getter, BrainTree, Spreedly charge; and Zuora is expensive.

3. Use Google Docs and Slideshare to share documents.

4. Chat. Don't just rely on email. Emails can often read like "this way or the highway". Be collaborative. You can often accomplish more with 15-30min collaboratively as opposed to composing and responding to long emails. Skype, Jabber, SIP

5. Take notes on what you did. Made a server configuration or a setting change in your CMS, your compiler, or whatever? Copy and paste from xterm so you don't have to guess about those commandline switches next time. Take screenshots and make them available to others. Zim, Projly, DokuWiki.

6. Have a phone numbers. If not bog-standard landline phones, take advantage of Google Voice and SkypeOut and SkypeIn (people can call your Skype line on a normal phone number). I realize Google Voice might not be available in South Africa yet.

7. Someone mentioned version control. Use git if you're a cool kid. Or svn if you're old and busted. Read the RedBean book. I've had success in having non-tech colleagues using graphical clients like TortoiseSVN (integrates into Windows Explorer).

8. Write tests. Any member of your team, sitting anyplace, should be able to push a button and run all your tests. Tests document how you're supposed to use a given method, class, etc., especially valuable when you're so far flung. Use JUnit, PHPUnit, FooUnit for your language. Write the tests before you develop, and you're doing Test Driven Development.

9. If you're writing tests, that implies loose coupling, which might require dependency injection. Can be difficult to climb that mountain, but it's worth it when you can just run a test and be sure your project works.

10. Development processes: Scrum, Extreme Programming. UML lets you communicate graphically about objects.

I finally dealt with this problem once and for all in the following way. I found the best personal wiki out there (Zim: http://zim-wiki.org/), and wrote a simple python script (http://www.inrim.it/~magni/zimDMS.htm) that scans nightly my folder structure, keeping up-to-date my wiki. My wiki, therefore, is a perfect mirror of my folder structure, with the added bonuses that I can navigate to each folder, comment it, describe its content, insert images, insert links to other folders, and finally by a single click I can open it in the file manager. My ~ 15000 folders are managed perfectly...

Find project you like or use and start contributing. Or ask them if they need any help.

Most of the big ones do have "help us here" pages, such as KDE:
http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute

And another KDE page for those just starting out:
http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute/Junior_Jobs

So either the OP needs those links, or he is looking for smaller projects to help with. Here, let me suggest some small-project tools that I use that could use the help:
Anki, flash card application: http://ichi2.net/anki/index.html
Zim, desktop wiki: http://zim-wiki.org/
Gmail Conversation View for Thunderbird: http://github.com/protz/GMail-Conversation-View/issues
Vimperator/Muttator: http://vimperator.org/
Redshift, change screen colour per time of day: http://jonls.dk/redshift/

I have been very happy with Zim for about a year now:
http://zim-wiki.org/

Even as a KDE user, I find Zim to be the pest note-taking application there is. It even support checklists, something no other note taking software does as far as I know. It does all the little "wiki" things too like linking pages, hierarchies, and so forth. It's written in Perl and GTK, with a Python port in the pipes.

I love zim:

Zim - A Desktop Wiki
http://zim-wiki.org/

Thanks, Blice. As the site is geared towards Ubuntu 7.10 I will ask on the Ubuntu mailing list about specific tweaks in 8.04. Also, I see that the info is available as a Zim notebook. That's great, I love Zim. Thanks!