Operations
| Operation | Keystroke(s) |
|---|---|
| Add line below | Enter |
| Add line above | Alt-Enter |
| Indent | Tab |
| Outdent | Shift-Tab |
| Mark task complete | Space |
Operations
| Operation | Keystroke(s) |
|---|---|
| Add line below | Enter |
| Add line above | Alt-Enter |
| Indent | Tab |
| Outdent | Shift-Tab |
| Mark task complete | Space |
I’ve been using Nirvana for Getting Things Done (GTD) with some success, but it is falling down for me in two areas:
After some preliminary review, here are the candidates:
Checkvist and moo.do integrate an outliner and to-do. I expect that integration will be more convenient for moving items between the outliner and the to-do list. OTOH, part of my trouble is that Nirvana isn’t giving me enough separation between the two. From a skills perspective, I’d prefer one tool over two.
I selected the “Candidates” above via a cursory review of capabilities. i.e. They provided to-do items and outlines. After a little more investigation I came up with some strategic differences:
That leaves me with:
RTM has all the DIY-ness of Checkvist, without bringing an outliner to the table. When compared with Nirvana, it would add subprojects but the DIY-ness adds substantial “friction” to my process. So that leaves me with:
Alternatives:
Workflowy puts more lines on the page. Denser spacing.
Workflowy has a Zen-like simple appearance.
Workflowy has a (beta) offline desktop app. Checkvist has no desktop app.
Both have OPML export.
Checkvist has auto-backup to Dropbox. Workflowy Pro has a “backup” but they say it is not in a user-readable form. (Dunno if it is really non-readable. It is “Pro” so I can’t just look.)
Neither has “Someday”. You have to create a separate Someday node in your outline.
Workflowy has nice drag-and-drop (plus keyboard) item move; Checkvist’s drag/drop is adequate but a little twitchy.
Checkvist has a few things in Zapier. Neither has anything useful in IFTTT.
The big differences (for my use:)
The big gaps for GTD use:
Neither has anything like Nirvana’s “Scheduled”, which hides/defers the task until the scheduled date.
Checkvist has “due dates” but not starred/focus items, so due dates show up only in a due search. Workflowy has no due dates but says they are working on them.
Upshot: If I’m going to use either for GTD, I’m going to need to invent some way long-distance moves and of calling attention to:
Real choices:
Actions:
I’m developing an app in Clojure, for personal use. I will have a source-level debugger. The only games in town are Counterclockwise (Eclipse), Cursive (IntelliJ), Visual Studio Code with the ‘Clojure Code’ extension, and Emacs.
If you are using Eclipse or Emacs for other things, you’ll probably want to use them for Clojure too. Otherwise, Cursive is your best bet.
I’m capturing my learnings/observations from an attempt to make the Cursive IDE my primary Clojure development environment. If you use it for commercial purposes, you have to pay an annual fee. (Maybe the ‘Clojure Code’ extension for Visual Studio Code is ready for prime time if that becomes relevant). You must request a new non-commercial license every 6 months, after a 30-day eval period.
Note: “IdeaIC2017.01” will be updated for newer versions. The 1st and the 5th letters are both capital “i”.
The Resource Monitor window is empty. You could say it is transparent. There is a title bar and a frame, but the main window body is empty/transparent.
It turns out that Resource Monitor does not work with the Windows Classic theme. It only works with an “Aero” theme enabled. Yuck!
Impacts Windows 7, and possibly others.
I wanted to print a report showing all of my holdings, grouped by account. Quicken 2017 almost cannot do this.
It can be difficult to see all of the accounts, because the spacing is funny, but they really are all in there.
If you export to text, that also seems to work OK, except it seems to inject blank lines in the middle of some accounts. Also, if your fields aren’t wide enough on the screen, you’ll get “…” in your export. If that happens, go back to the page in Quicken and make the column wider (even if it looks wide enough to you).
I needed to change the IP address on a Windows printer. In the search box I entered “Printers” and I selected “Devices and Printers” in Control Panel. Right-click on the printer, choose Printer Properties, and then the Ports tab. Everything is disabled. WTF?
Solution:
This might work better:
I moved my blog from a self-hosted Drupal site to GitHub Pages with Jekyll. I did this for two reasons:
I can’t say for certain whether the unauthorized update was an intrusion or my virtual server host updated my configuratino by default. The only change I observed was that someone moved my ssh port. Whoever did it, carefully checked to ensure that the new port was open on the firewall. I can find no evidence of any other changes or activity. My VPS provider states that they did NOT make the change. I suspect that the owner of a different site on the same provider requested a port change on his host and the provider changed mine by mistake.
In the end, there is very little difference – an unauthorized change was made on my server, so now I can’t trust its integrity.
Because my content is entirely static (with the exception of user comments, which I’ve suspended due to spam), Drupal was really overkill. By migrating to GitHub pages, I make someone else responsible for server security – someone who can put a lot more time/effort into it. I retain a local copy of the entire site, so even if GitHub melts down, I can re-publish elsewhere, with no loss of content.
I’m using Jekyll to create my site from Markdown files. Actually publishing a blog post with GitHub + Jekyll is more work (and more technical) than with Drupal, so I’ve wrapped it in a script. At this point, my script assumes that I solely post to my blog from my Macbook. I need to tweak my process and my script so that I can safely add a page from another laptop/PC when I’m away from my Mac.
Prose is a spiffy tool for updating GitHub pages from a web browser. All of the logic is run by the web browser except for authentication. Ohh… Not good. That means that Prose can do anything to GitHub that I can. They say you can host the auth part on your own web server. That might be worth investigating. Links:
It looks like it is mostly abandonware. In theory, the only really scary thing is that they could delete my repository. For any other malicious change, I could always revert git.
Ahh… Silly me. You can do this from the GitHub user interface. To edit a file, just browse to the file and press the Edit button. To create a new file, browse to the _posts directory and press the Create New File button.
Prose does have a Preview feature, which GitHub doesn’t.
I left Evernote. As a result, I’m re-thinking my Personal Knowledge Base (PKB) a.k.a. Personal Knowledge Management (PKM).
As givens, I use a Mac, I share data with my Windows-using wife, and I want to be able to read my documents for the next 50 years. I need:
There are different kinds of documents:
I need Quick Capture and some Personal Documentation to be available quickly-to-immediately when I’m rebuilding my PC/Mac.
Sheesh! I begin to understand why RFCs are issued in plain plain text.
The big thing I miss, if I use discrete files (whether plain or rich text) is hyperlinking from idea to idea (document to document). That’s something which a wiki (including TiddlyWiki) or Evernote/OneNote give me.
Pointers:
I never can remember this:
filename=foo.txt
echo ${filename%.*}
will remove the trailing “.txt”. Mnemonic: % sorta looks like dividing two circles. “%.*” says to divide at the period, matching any file type.
I often use a for loop which looks something like:
for f in foo*.txt ; do
echo ${f%.txt}
done
Keyword fodder: bash, shell script, remove file type, remove file extension, basename, base name, Linux, Unix