evernote

Gonna be a hell of a rager, Thunderbird!

Over the past couple years I’ve been using Nextcloud as my file syncing solution with plenty of success— you just have to make sure to set it up properly. I’ve enabled a couple of extensions for it (they call them “apps”) but the one I truly rely on is Tasks, which enables a CalDAV compatible to-do list.

Now, over the past decade or so I’ve tried a myriad of to-do applications and a lot of them really fell down on their face:
– Google Tasks: They change their interface so often, at the whims of whomever is in charge of that bit of code over at google. It tries to be too smart for its own good. It’s a google application do you don’t actually know if it’ll stick around.
– Google Keep: Free-form management sure, but it gets extremely unwieldy once you try to have more than what can fit on your screen. It also tries to be smart. There also the potential for extinction.
todo.txt: This is meant for people who are on their desk computers all day every day. I’m not.
Remember the Milk. It’s a paid app. At this point I don’t even remember what the limitation was that turned me off it.
wiki.vim: Again, meant for desk use.
Notion: It’s just so slow.
– Evernote: They seem to care more about how your to-do list looks rather than crossing items off it. Also you have to pay for all the goodies.
Microsoft To Do: You need a Microsoft account and they push hard to get you to upgrade to full-on Office.
Org Mode: Emacs. Just… no.
– I’m not listing any apps on iOS cos Apple devices are toys. Yes iPhones take awesome pictures but that’s cos they’re toys for adults.
– Mozilla Thunderbird: No built-in sync with other Thunderbird instances. Given that Mozilla is putting all of its resources into Firefox…

I’ve probably tried using a myriad others but decided against them for one reason or another, be it compatibility with my operating systems of choice, UI/UX decisions made by the part of the developers, lack of sane defaults forcing me to change al of the configuration settings, etc etc. At some point you just give up. Now, the Tasks app on Nextcloud is plenty capable and so far it has been the only one that I’ve been able to stick with longer than two weeks cos it covers all the features I want, which I found quite surprising:
– Web-based interface for availability pretty much everywhere you have a browser and Internet access.
– Hierarchical tasks! (aka subtasks) with notes attached to everything so you can document what you did and how you did it.
– Compatibility with pretty much everything out there via CalDAV. It’s a bit of a pain depending on what you’re using (looking at you, DAVx and tasks.org.

This last point is what I have to poke fun at Thunderbird. For an application that is trying extremely hard to run your life, they don’t fully support CalDAV, namely, hierarchical tasks. Found this on their Bugzilla

\Thunderbird Bugzilla: Bug 194863: Subtask nesting and event triggers (hierarchical to-do): Opened 20 years ago This bug grew up into quite the young adult[/caption]
This bug has been open since February 25, 2003. I’m typing this in January 3, 2023. In less than two months this bug will be able to drink in the United States.

I like you Thunderbird but what the fuck lol.

Gonna be a hell of a rager, Thunderbird! Read More »

tl;dr I want Google Keep extended with WikiWords and file storage.

I’ve toured all the note-taking apps: Evernote, Simplenote, OneNote, Google Keep… and I’ve found them all wanting. These past few months I’ve gone back and forth between Keep and Tiddlywiki trying to figure out exactly what I want I think I finally realized what I want:

  • The speed of Google Keep when it comes to creating and saving new notes.
  • The speed of Pinboard when it comes to tagging.
  • The formatting facilities of Simplenote, which uses markdown. The version control is also nice.
  • The file attachment ease of OneNote when it comes to binary blobs. You can put anything in those notes.
  • For images… well, pretty much everything sucks, but I guess WordPress is a good starting point.
  • The interlinking ease of Tiddlywiki. WikiWords kick ass.
  • The ubiquity of Keep. It’s on your phone, your desktop, your tablet. Which goes back to it being fast.

Reading through this and apparently no one makes a version of Keep that has better text formatting, lets you attach images and decide where they’ll appear, while letting you travel from note to note via tags or WikiWords so you can remember the flow of though that led to that thought sequence.

Paper does not work for having to remember related thought separated by time and space. Plus writing for more than five minutes annoys me.

They say most programming projects start from a developer scratching their own itch. I guess it’s true.

tl;dr I want Google Keep extended with WikiWords and file storage. Read More »

Failing to choose your new password

So Evernote got cracked into and they’re having everyone reset their passwords. It works well, except when it doesn’t:

Screenshot - 03022013 - 11:40:51 PM

They’re telling me I can use letters and numbers and punctuation characters but then I enter a nice complex passphrase (not password!) and I just get that little error message. No help mouseovers, no links to a FAQ or blog post.

Then I entered a passphrase with all space characters removed soyouendupwithsomethinglikethis and it worked. Got account access back. It could be helpful to tell people they cannot use spaces at all, specially after punctuation characters.

Evernote is doing many things right, but password resetting is not one of them.

Failing to choose your new password Read More »