Oddly, it also recorded my purchase as a "double pack" even though I only bought one copy. I'd thought it worked like you describe too, so maybe I just found an odd glitch.
Reminds me of my favorite generic speech template:
"I wish to speak to you all on the important subject of _____. As you all know, much has been done in this area, but there are still a great many things left to do. But knowing this is not enough, it will take real effort and dedication. What we need now is progress. I need progress, I request progress, I demand progress! I am certain, though, that with focus and teamwork, we can continue to make the changes that will allow for a better future. Thank you all for your time."
That could be right out of Yes, Minister. Well played.
I'm currently on Virgin fibreoptic, and while the figures look great when you go to a broadband test website, for some reason the real-world usage is nothing like this. Streaming (especially youtube and bbc iplayer) is pretty bad, and seems to hang on a regular basis. It is much worse at peak times. And I know it can be done better having previously used superjanet 6 on university campus several years ago.
I'll probably look to moving to talktalk next - they seem well-priced and are apparently pretty quick too.
Of all my techy/non-techy friends, not one of them has had anything good to say about TalkTalk. Anecdotal evidence, and you don't know me, but take it for what it's worth.
Not that I necessarily disagree with anything you say, but the following bit caught my eye:
Big pharma always downplays nutrition supplements (even studies that support it) as natural cures because they cannot patent it and charge $5 and up per dose.
Nutritional supplements are a multi-billion dollar a year market, and that they paint themselves as the antithesis of "big pharma" is somewhat ironic.
After the end of term actully, but I appreciate your concern:-) You do make a good point for anyone else reading now or in the future which I'd like to echo - don't leave organising things to the last minute, get organised as early as possible because it takes a long time to do properly, and gets increasingly time consuming and difficult the longer you leave it. Fortunately, I have about 4 months to get it done!
Your investigations are quite correct, I'm studying up in Glasgow. I don't know how your university organises their course but we're strongly into PBL here, and all the implications that has. We don't fully get to the clinical stage until 4th and 5th year, so I'll need my notes for a while yet! We also don't cover things by system, so malaria may turn up as an example of a fever in the returned traveller, an example of a disease with often poorly-adhered to prophylactic treatment, and so forth; each visit to the subject adding more information. It's perhaps not the best example, but as you say there are other contexts where it would come up, and it wouldn't do to miss out on them. There are a lot of interlinked subjects, but perhaps that's calling out for a hypertext ( / wiki) solution rather than a multiple categorisation system.
Yes, everything important should end up in my head, but it has to get there first;-) I've actually also done an undergrad degree as well, so I'd like to incorporate the useful bits from that too. Basically, I'd prefer to be overprepared than underprepared!
I appreciate you sharing your experiences, it's very useful to hear from another medic. Which London university are you at, if you don't mind my asking?
Why not use OneNote with either a local folder, a personal server or even a cloud-based Skydrive? It will gobble up everything you have and allow you to search, organize, etc.
Unfortunately OneNote seems to be Windows-only, and I'm spending ever-decreasing amounts of time using Windows. It's undoubtedly a good suggestion for everyone who does though:)
You seem to have missed Zotero (it's up there in the comments somewhere) which is a FOSS plugin for firefox. It keeps an offline database, and for nearly any site (e.g. journals) you click one button on the URL bar and it downloads the citation including full pdf so you can read it whenever. It will also let you perform full text searches of your database, and can be configured to perform OCR on scanned documents. Best of all, it's trivial to make bibtex (or many other formats) bibliographies.
I use that in combination with TiddlyWiki for personal typed notes not associated with a journal article/textbook, and Xournal for annotating documents and taking notes with my tablet computer. When annotating documents (textbooks, journal articles) just configure xournal as your pdf viewer and you'll be able to save every annotation you make. TiddlyWiki has a ton of plugins to do whatever you need, including a GTD (Getting Things Done -- it's a book) variant that's probably comparable to Emacs Org-mode, LaTeX math (I wrote that one -- use it every day), and many more.
The one drawback to all this is that I have no way to automatically organize my handwritten notes from xournal. Though they're computer files, my organization for them is horrendous. I still fantasize about some kind of hybrid mutant of TiddlyWiki, OCR (that can magically read my handwriting and equations), and xournal that would let me do all this on a pen-based tablet...
You're right, I didn't include Zotero in that comment! Having looked at it before, my impression of Zotero was that it is a (very competent) reference manager / source collection. Is it more than this? TiddlyWiki sounds familiar too - this is a subject I've dallied with before, so perhaps I came across it previously:-). I'll have another look at Zotero and TiddlyWiki and see if I can get it to do the categorisation thing I'm looking for that I mentioned in my other comment. Cheers!
I am a researcher. I want to add my vote for "file system." The less interaction you do with most of this material, the better off you'll be. For me, important or useful material goes into a reference manager. Those files get tagged in the reference manager. At this point in my career--only four years in--that's just under 600 articles with accompanying pages of notes. Other stuff goes into folders based on broad categories. I don't do any tagging on these because find-by-content always does the job just fine. Avoid the extra work. You're not paid to be a secretary. And most of the organizing won't pay off, will become an end in itself.
Thanks, it's good to be aware of the payoff of pre-organising things (a la putting in frameworks in programs that will never need it) before embarking on something like this. You also reminded me of something I wanted to put in my follow up: The reason I wanted multiple categorisations or tags is that some things do fall under more than one category. I'm a medical student, so I'll give you an example: Malaria. Does that come under:
Parasitic diseases
Blood-borne diseases
Diseases involving the liver
Tropical medicine
Block 3, where we first covered it?
I'm not sure what your research area is, but you must have come across something similar. I've (very briefly) worked in the area of antioxidants, and even there it would have been useful to pull out say everything on copper chelators in rat models, clinical trials of antioxidants and so forth. Basically, I'm concerned that while a filesystem-based approach is good for retrieving one or a few results for a specific query (ie where was that paper by Doe et al from 2007 on the effects of foo in vivo), it is less good at including things that fall under multiple categories (eg malaria, heart disease). Symlinks go somewhat of a ways towards alleviating this but they are a significant increase in efforts versus tagging and I'm concerned about cross-platform symlink handling.
Of course, you may ne right in tht I may be putting *too* much thought into this, but then again I'm a medical student and we worry about not knowing things fully;-)
(OT but ordered/unordered lists aren't showing up for me in preview. Weird.)
Many thanks for all the informative replies so far. I've had a quick glance at Evernote, thebrain, Nepomuk (I'm loving KDE4 so far after switching a week or so ago), OpenKM and FreeMind and these seem promising. I've still to look at emacs' org-mode, and when I do I will try to put my vi prejudices aside;-) Some of the other suggestions are rather good but aren't really what I'm looking for as they are either fully cloud-based (eg Google Docs, Wave) or one platform only (eg Sharepoint) or too expensive (hire a secretary:-P).
I like the idea of some of the "roll your own" ideas, eg directories + hard links, serving from a web server or wiki. The problem is as I progress though the medical degree, I am likely to have decreasing amounts of time to tinker with things if they have shortcomings; and to be honest they probably will as I am unlikely to have thought through the problem fully! Plus third-party solutions will definitely have substantially more polish than anything hastily dreamt up by me!
A shared wiki for my cohort / medical school / country may be an option on top of whatever comes out of this discussion, but I'd like something personal as... ah, let's say medical students have wildly varying standards of what is acceptable for notes;-)
My supplementary questions for anyone still wanting to chip in:
Do Evernote and thebrain/personalbrain have an "offline" mode? That is, can I keep things nicely organised locally instead of having to upload to the cloud? Evernote seems to suggest this is the case but at a very cursory perusal both seem to stop short of actually saying "you can use this to organise the files on your hard drive".
Do any other docs / medical students want to chip in and say what they use? I suspect each solution will have practical considerations that may affect my decision or not. Sharing practical experience is very useful, even if it's just "I use Evernote and find it useful" as some have said above.
Similarly, does anyone have experience of Nepomuk? Any drawbacks?
Thanks again for the helpful replies, Slashdot. You continue to impress me - I doubt I would have gotten such a useful variety of responses elsewhere. I hope this discussion is useful to other folk looking for something similar.
I too have a Desire HD too and was considering installing a custom ROM for the heck of it. But I don't see what advantages it offers beyond the slightly-nebulous "more control", although your power widget example was quite useful. Since you seem to be a fan, is there any chance you could expound upon cyanogenmod's virtues?:)
Or better, place an order for an "erectile enhancement kit" you read about in your email, with your own credit card number. Use the credit card company's address as the shipping address. Then call the credit card company and declare that an unauthorized payment has been made, and make them roll back the transaction.
Anyway, as abuses of HTTP go, it's pretty cool:) If the site starts working again, do yourself a favour and have a go at lostpig. It's a fun, well-written award-winning little text adventure. Info and link to flash version here.
Likewise... I'd love to hear of any alternative though. I have a pile of crap to sell, and Ebay makes it so painful that I've not bothered to do it for months!
Any good alternative that is used in Europe and UK as well?
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, but someone taking part in Stargazing Live reportedly discovered a planet! A nice little series.
Oddly, it also recorded my purchase as a "double pack" even though I only bought one copy. I'd thought it worked like you describe too, so maybe I just found an odd glitch.
When you buy Frozen Synapse you get two copies :)
Reminds me of my favorite generic speech template:
"I wish to speak to you all on the important subject of _____. As you all know, much has been done in this area, but there are still a great many things left to do. But knowing this is not enough, it will take real effort and dedication. What we need now is progress. I need progress, I request progress, I demand progress! I am certain, though, that with focus and teamwork, we can continue to make the changes that will allow for a better future. Thank you all for your time."
That could be right out of Yes, Minister. Well played.
Curious medical student here... perhaps too curious! What happened to you when you were 10?
I'm currently on Virgin fibreoptic, and while the figures look great when you go to a broadband test website, for some reason the real-world usage is nothing like this. Streaming (especially youtube and bbc iplayer) is pretty bad, and seems to hang on a regular basis. It is much worse at peak times. And I know it can be done better having previously used superjanet 6 on university campus several years ago.
That might be due to an (alleged) problem with the routers they supply, see http://www.ispreview.co.uk/story/2011/02/22/virgin-media-uk-admits-to-broadband-speed-problems-with-new-superhub-routers.html, and there's an El Reg story about it too- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/20/virgin_media_apology_over_media_superhub_snafu/
I'll probably look to moving to talktalk next - they seem well-priced and are apparently pretty quick too.
Of all my techy/non-techy friends, not one of them has had anything good to say about TalkTalk. Anecdotal evidence, and you don't know me, but take it for what it's worth.
Not that I necessarily disagree with anything you say, but the following bit caught my eye:
Big pharma always downplays nutrition supplements (even studies that support it) as natural cures because they cannot patent it and charge $5 and up per dose.
Nutritional supplements are a multi-billion dollar a year market, and that they paint themselves as the antithesis of "big pharma" is somewhat ironic.
Me too, and I'm going to mail them a letter (yep, a real dead-tree letter!) to that effect.
After the end of term actully, but I appreciate your concern :-) You do make a good point for anyone else reading now or in the future which I'd like to echo - don't leave organising things to the last minute, get organised as early as possible because it takes a long time to do properly, and gets increasingly time consuming and difficult the longer you leave it. Fortunately, I have about 4 months to get it done!
That's useful to know, thanks, I'll look into Zotero further (if for no other reason that I'll probably end up using it as a reference manger!).
Your investigations are quite correct, I'm studying up in Glasgow. I don't know how your university organises their course but we're strongly into PBL here, and all the implications that has. We don't fully get to the clinical stage until 4th and 5th year, so I'll need my notes for a while yet! We also don't cover things by system, so malaria may turn up as an example of a fever in the returned traveller, an example of a disease with often poorly-adhered to prophylactic treatment, and so forth; each visit to the subject adding more information. It's perhaps not the best example, but as you say there are other contexts where it would come up, and it wouldn't do to miss out on them. There are a lot of interlinked subjects, but perhaps that's calling out for a hypertext ( / wiki) solution rather than a multiple categorisation system.
Yes, everything important should end up in my head, but it has to get there first ;-) I've actually also done an undergrad degree as well, so I'd like to incorporate the useful bits from that too. Basically, I'd prefer to be overprepared than underprepared!
I appreciate you sharing your experiences, it's very useful to hear from another medic. Which London university are you at, if you don't mind my asking?
Why not use OneNote with either a local folder, a personal server or even a cloud-based Skydrive? It will gobble up everything you have and allow you to search, organize, etc.
Unfortunately OneNote seems to be Windows-only, and I'm spending ever-decreasing amounts of time using Windows. It's undoubtedly a good suggestion for everyone who does though :)
You seem to have missed Zotero (it's up there in the comments somewhere) which is a FOSS plugin for firefox. It keeps an offline database, and for nearly any site (e.g. journals) you click one button on the URL bar and it downloads the citation including full pdf so you can read it whenever. It will also let you perform full text searches of your database, and can be configured to perform OCR on scanned documents. Best of all, it's trivial to make bibtex (or many other formats) bibliographies.
I use that in combination with TiddlyWiki for personal typed notes not associated with a journal article/textbook, and Xournal for annotating documents and taking notes with my tablet computer. When annotating documents (textbooks, journal articles) just configure xournal as your pdf viewer and you'll be able to save every annotation you make. TiddlyWiki has a ton of plugins to do whatever you need, including a GTD (Getting Things Done -- it's a book) variant that's probably comparable to Emacs Org-mode, LaTeX math (I wrote that one -- use it every day), and many more.
The one drawback to all this is that I have no way to automatically organize my handwritten notes from xournal. Though they're computer files, my organization for them is horrendous. I still fantasize about some kind of hybrid mutant of TiddlyWiki, OCR (that can magically read my handwriting and equations), and xournal that would let me do all this on a pen-based tablet...
You're right, I didn't include Zotero in that comment! Having looked at it before, my impression of Zotero was that it is a (very competent) reference manager / source collection. Is it more than this? TiddlyWiki sounds familiar too - this is a subject I've dallied with before, so perhaps I came across it previously :-). I'll have another look at Zotero and TiddlyWiki and see if I can get it to do the categorisation thing I'm looking for that I mentioned in my other comment. Cheers!
I am a researcher. I want to add my vote for "file system." The less interaction you do with most of this material, the better off you'll be. For me, important or useful material goes into a reference manager. Those files get tagged in the reference manager. At this point in my career--only four years in--that's just under 600 articles with accompanying pages of notes. Other stuff goes into folders based on broad categories. I don't do any tagging on these because find-by-content always does the job just fine. Avoid the extra work. You're not paid to be a secretary. And most of the organizing won't pay off, will become an end in itself.
Thanks, it's good to be aware of the payoff of pre-organising things (a la putting in frameworks in programs that will never need it) before embarking on something like this. You also reminded me of something I wanted to put in my follow up: The reason I wanted multiple categorisations or tags is that some things do fall under more than one category. I'm a medical student, so I'll give you an example: Malaria. Does that come under:
I'm not sure what your research area is, but you must have come across something similar. I've (very briefly) worked in the area of antioxidants, and even there it would have been useful to pull out say everything on copper chelators in rat models, clinical trials of antioxidants and so forth. Basically, I'm concerned that while a filesystem-based approach is good for retrieving one or a few results for a specific query (ie where was that paper by Doe et al from 2007 on the effects of foo in vivo), it is less good at including things that fall under multiple categories (eg malaria, heart disease). Symlinks go somewhat of a ways towards alleviating this but they are a significant increase in efforts versus tagging and I'm concerned about cross-platform symlink handling.
Of course, you may ne right in tht I may be putting *too* much thought into this, but then again I'm a medical student and we worry about not knowing things fully ;-)
(OT but ordered/unordered lists aren't showing up for me in preview. Weird.)
Many thanks for all the informative replies so far. I've had a quick glance at Evernote, thebrain, Nepomuk (I'm loving KDE4 so far after switching a week or so ago), OpenKM and FreeMind and these seem promising. I've still to look at emacs' org-mode, and when I do I will try to put my vi prejudices aside ;-) Some of the other suggestions are rather good but aren't really what I'm looking for as they are either fully cloud-based (eg Google Docs, Wave) or one platform only (eg Sharepoint) or too expensive (hire a secretary :-P).
I like the idea of some of the "roll your own" ideas, eg directories + hard links, serving from a web server or wiki. The problem is as I progress though the medical degree, I am likely to have decreasing amounts of time to tinker with things if they have shortcomings; and to be honest they probably will as I am unlikely to have thought through the problem fully! Plus third-party solutions will definitely have substantially more polish than anything hastily dreamt up by me!
A shared wiki for my cohort / medical school / country may be an option on top of whatever comes out of this discussion, but I'd like something personal as... ah, let's say medical students have wildly varying standards of what is acceptable for notes ;-)
My supplementary questions for anyone still wanting to chip in:
Thanks again for the helpful replies, Slashdot. You continue to impress me - I doubt I would have gotten such a useful variety of responses elsewhere. I hope this discussion is useful to other folk looking for something similar.
Excellent, thanks for the info :)
IHPBT? Isn't that the code in Doom 1/2 for infinite ammo? *grin*
I too have a Desire HD too and was considering installing a custom ROM for the heck of it. But I don't see what advantages it offers beyond the slightly-nebulous "more control", although your power widget example was quite useful. Since you seem to be a fan, is there any chance you could expound upon cyanogenmod's virtues? :)
(Please don't do everything people tell you to do on the internet.)
Sage advice :)
Or better, place an order for an "erectile enhancement kit" you read about in your email, with your own credit card number. Use the credit card company's address as the shipping address. Then call the credit card company and declare that an unauthorized payment has been made, and make them roll back the transaction.
Isn't that fraud?
Is that how you normally fix a slashdotting?
The site is only responding intermittently here:
operator: Slashdotted..367 users, holy shit
Anyway, as abuses of HTTP go, it's pretty cool :) If the site starts working again, do yourself a favour and have a go at lostpig. It's a fun, well-written award-winning little text adventure. Info and link to flash version here.
The future is greedy.
(PS check out UIM if you still have it lying around)
Or just write a file the size of the drive and then do an MD5 hash of it?
Likewise... I'd love to hear of any alternative though. I have a pile of crap to sell, and Ebay makes it so painful that I've not bothered to do it for months!
Any good alternative that is used in Europe and UK as well?
UK - Gumtree*
*Owned by eBay :(
Actually, if I read you right I think it's you that gets the "whoosh": GP is referring to the 'Junis' / JonKatz saga "Message from Kabul" (see http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/17/204207).