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Ask Slashdot: Life Organization With Free Software?
BigZee writes "For many years, I've used a page-a-day diary as both a planner and a method for taking notes. While not perfect, it's proven to be an approach that's worked fairly well for me. Conscious of the limitations, I want this to become more electronic. In principle, I want to be able to use my Nexus 7 for this function. There are some limitations: My workplace uses MS Outlook. However, I am not able to use Evernote (or similar) on my workplace machine. This limits possible integration along the lines proposed with GTD. What I want is to be able to take notes that are organized by date as well as being integrated to a calendar (preferably Google). Additionally, I want to be able to prioritize my work along lines similar to GTD. I'm not averse to spending money for the right software but prefer to use free software where possible. Can anyone suggest what could be used?" The above-linked Wikipedia page lists some relevant Free software as well as closed-source options. If you use such organizing software, though, how do you use it, and how well do you find it works?
http://www.activeinboxhq.com/index.php/ works with GMail to bring GTD into your email. It works really well, but if you're stuck on outlook then it might not be suitable for you. You can use it for free or pay for more features.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Why do you need the source code?
Just slap Microsoft OneNote to your Nexus 7 and be done with it. For your work PC, it comes bundled in MS Office.
I know this goes contrary to what a lot of people here will think, because it ignores the technology aspects we're all so obsessed with.
Me, I still use the same black lab-books for persistent note-taking I've been using for 20 years.
I've got a stack of them, numbered and with dated pages. Every time I've looked at an alternative, I've found it cumbersome and less useful, and sooner or later you discover whatever technology du jour you're using has gone away, and you're left finding yet another alternative.
By all means, apply technology as you see fit. But for some things, many of us have found that old fashioned pen and paper is still superior. Everything else is a temporary solution which will eventually fail on you or go away completely.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Your planner and notebook dont run out of batteries, work when (mostly) wet, are readable in sunlight, and offer many advantages over electronic forms. Analog is sometimes better than digital.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I have been using Google Keep. https://www.google.com/keep While not great it is adequate. Integrates with google account, although better integration with calendar would be cool. Works with google drive. Posting because some organizations are more open to letting you use google apps. Google keep is relatively new and seems not a lot of people have found it. Here is a pretty good review of Google Keep. http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/google-in-the-enterprise/five-things-worth-noting-about-google-keep/
It's really a "geek only" tool but emacs org-mode is great for me for organizing my work. The big plus is that the format is plain text so you can use version control to manage it. I use drop box and leave the files on there. I usually use one per project and then a master file.
Here's a specific guide to using it with GTD: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-gtd-etc.html
TiddlyWiki is a self-contained app stored in an HTML file that you can store on a USB, Dropbox, or elsewhere. People have written GTD add-ons for it and it is easy to write your own customizations. There is an Android app to help run it on Android systems and the new version uses HTML 5 with option to use node.js to make it even more powerful.
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 believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
I'm currently in the process of setting up something like this.
Kolab is a FOSS groupware server that can synchronize emails, to do lists, calenders, notes, etc. across multiple devices. You can access it from the included web interface (roundcube), the recommended client (Kontact), or via Outlook with the connector installed. Android support is available via ActiveSync, and I believe Kontact Touch will be ported to Android now that Qt 5 supports it.)
If you're not interested in running your own server, there're also sites like this which sell accounts.
Here are some notes on my experiences setting it up, for anyone interested:
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
I use a wiki. Specifically, I use OpenWikiNG, http://sourceforge.net/projects/openwiki-ng/ , however, any wiki software would work. My reason for using OpenWikiNG is that I largely use windows and the software is ASP based and can work with a simple Access database. The way I have it setup, and in hindsight, I would do this differently now, is that I use the personal web server that comes with Windows on my personal home desktop. With the access database, I don't have to worry about some heavy database engine. Since I'm the only user, this has been a very stable setup and trivially easy to migrate to a new machine when needed. Another reason I use OpenWikiNG is that it's open source, very simple, and somewhat easy to hack. It works for me, and that's all I care about.
With wake on LAN capability, I can VPN into my home network and wake my machine if I need remote access. And since this is a wiki, I don't have to install any software on any other device. All I need is a web browser.
In terms of usage, I have my wiki start page as my browser's home page. I have links to site I visit often, some RSS feeds, my daily schedule, even some emails and phone numbers. I use the wiki as sort of a second brain. I have pages where I put my ideas, pages where I put things that are important, things I might need, and all sorts of other resources from computers to food. My personal wiki is a much better bookmarking system than what any browser could ever come up with. I can easily annotate information that I add, and most importantly, I can search.
To give the benefit of my hindsight, I would probably want to use a dedicated LAMP server on my home network. And I would consider something with better file and image management, as OpenWikiNG really sucks at that. To really find something that would suit one's personal taste, I suggest looking at http://www.wikimatrix.org/ to compare them. I have a lot of stuff in my personal wiki, and converting it to some other format really seems like a hassle. So, if you do this, pick a wiki you're comfortable with. The more time you spend using it, the more you lock yourself in.
It's funny to see comments praising OneNote as the best thing since sliced bread...
Don't get me wrong, I like OneNote, and use it at work. But in a moment of snark I dug up a copy of Lotus Organizer 6 (from 1999) and installed it on my Win8 work machine. Lo and behold, I can keep notes in a multi-tabbed interface. I can format them all kinds of ways, add pictures, embed doc and ppt files, share the org file with other users, and generally do anything OneNote can do. I can keep a full calendar, manage contacts, track tasks, and keep linked notes. .. And then there are the things Organizer does that OneNote couldn't do... until v2013. In OneNote 2010, if you pasted in a table, you couldn't even select a column to format it -- OneNote mishandles it as line text. Track changes (which Organizer doesn't have at all) broke all the time in 2010 and doesn't survive more than a couple users in 2013; OneNote still totally trashes style data from other Office products, so you can't roundtrip text from a mildly complex word doc back into that doc without hosing the final. Embedding a ppt or xls table into OneNote would consistently get corrupted from editing collisions on a shared .one file. But Organizer would defer to the linked file and survive multi-user editing. Hah, funny.
Everything old is new again, with Redmond's fresh coat of pastels and waaaaay too much whitespace in the UI. Then again, these products are sinkholes for data -- from the latest .ONE file format back to the decade-plus-old .ORG-.OR6 file formats -- it's difficult to extract your stuff in usable ways when the format dies. Not that Microsoft, Google, IBM/Lotus, or other big companies would do that. Repeatedly. Predictably. Dependably. (E.g. Microsoft Office has trouble importing ... Microsoft Office files from 15 years ago, produced while working *at* Microsoft, FFS.) Tho it's much more limited to notes, Zim is really attractive in that regard: everything is saved in an open/documented non-binary format that'll be readable/recoverable when there's time to dig thru this crap when I'm old/near death.
Meanwhile in the real world, for just making notes and getting crap done quickly and effectively, the ubiquitous lab/moleskine/black notebook is the way to go.
I think not...(*poof*)
The first time I got an Android, I was utterly appalled that there was no note editing app in the base install.
I went looking for combined note/voice-note/picture/calander organizing apps. Most had too many strings attached (specific cloud-service sync options, or whatnot.) All of them lacked the ability to quickly procrastinate a task. You'd think that would be an obvious feature, but no. I went back to just remembering stuff with wetware. By the time my wetware starts to wear out, hopefully there will be something suitable.
Someone had to do it.