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randomling) wrote2012-10-12 02:53 pm
randomling) wrote2012-10-12 02:53 pm
Entry tags:
Trying to organise my tech life.
This post was partly inspired by ursamajor.
So this is a large, overwhelming thing for me - trying to decide and sort out what systems I want to use for various technical stuff. This is mostly life-organisation and communication stuff, though there's a bit of coding stuff in here too. It comes with a big side of "trying to reduce my dependence on Google services".
I occasionally use IFTTT as the glue between services, so I would be interested in stuff that can be manipulated that way. I'm also not averse to things that might require a bit of commandline wrangling, scripting, coding, or technical playing about to set up. (Obviously I love when stuff "just works", but I'm also not too scared of doing a bit of technical work.)
So, on to the technical stuff! This will get long, so I'm sticking it under a cut.
I am currently on OSX 10.5 and considering upgrading to 10.7, or perhaps going radical and nuking OSX in favour of either Ubuntu or Debian. Unfortunately Mountain Lion doesn't support my fairly-ancient hardware.
Note-taking.
I'm pretty happy with Evernote for pretty much all my note-taking and note-keeping needs, and I find it awesome for reference stuff, too. IFTTT allows you to save things to Evernote, too, which I've found handy in the past.
Email accounts.
I have a bunch of accounts with Google, and am trying to move emails away from there. I also have two accounts with Zoho; Zoho is just fine apart from one thing, but I am not married to it (and actually the One Thing is a real problem). My major requirement is IMAP support, and I would strongly prefer a decent amount of storage space for free (about 1GB would suit). Current finances mean I do need it to be free to open and maintain an account. If you've got recommendations for email services, I'd love to hear them.
Email client.
This is proving to be a Real Problem. I am currently using Mac Mail, and the more I use it, the less I like it. About its only good feature is that it supports IMAP, which means I can actually use it. And it does, to its credit, have rules. But it has no label support, which I find extremely frustrating, having been used to Outlook and Thunderbird. However, Thunderbird is now A Problem for two reasons: one, development has stopped on it, which means there will be no more bug fixes and no more security fixes; and two, Zoho IMAP for some reason does not play well with Thunderbird, which means I can't even set up one of my accounts in Thunderbird. (The other was set up before this problem started.) I'm tempted to upgrade to 10.7 just to try out a couple of alternative email apps from the App Store, but I'd also be interested to hear about any free or cheap clients that will work with 10.5. I'd also be open to trying out a commandline email client, if anyone has recommendations.
Contacts management.
Argh. This is a Real Problem. I don't love the built-in address book that comes with a Mac, and I'd also like my contacts to be at least backed up somewhere not-local. Most of my contacts are (I think) mostly stored on Google. I'd like to change this, but I have no idea how to do this. Save them in a spreadsheet and back it up on Dropbox? This seems non-ideal. And if there are other options out there, I don't about them. Help!
Calendar.
I currently don't really have one (not even on paper). I would like to keep this online and in the cloud for ease of sharing, and Google Calendar does have the advantage that it Just Works, but if you know of any alternatives, I'd love to hear them.
File storage.
Mostly I store text files on my local machine, and keep some of the stuff I really don't want to lose in Dropbox. This actually suits me pretty well for now, though I do need a better filing system.
Blogs.
There are a few blogs I like to keep up with. Currently I use Bloglines, having switched from Google Reader a few months ago. The disadvantage of this is that I lose the IFTTT functionality that would save articles I wanted to refer to later to my Evernote. There's also the part where there are no apps for either my Android phone or my iPad, and while I have other stuff I can read while I'm on the go, it'd be really nice to be able to automate some stuff, and to be able to read stuff via an app on my phone/iPad.
IRC.
I currently use IRSSI via a permanently-online shell account a friend gave me for free. I'm quite happy with this, but I'd also quite like to be able to have my permanent connection be accessible via a graphical client (I quite liked using Colloquy). This is mostly technical help, I think, because getting all that stuff set up is majorly confusing. Any help with this would be welcomed!
IM.
I use Skype for IM a lot. I'm also on Google chat and AIM (and Yahoo and Facebook chat if you push it), and in a truly ideal world, I'd like to be able to use some of these chats without opening three separate clients and a browser window. Trillian, which I remember liking in the past, doesn't support Skype and seems to be less good than it was. Recommendations here would be most welcome!
Social networks.
I'm kind of fond of Hootsuite, through which I (sometimes) track my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn feeds, but I'm not married to it. Any recommendations for that would also be welcomed!
Code.
Okay, so I'm pretty happy with my SSH/Vim setup here.
And I think that is finally the end. Thanks for reading, anyone who got through this!
ursamajor.So this is a large, overwhelming thing for me - trying to decide and sort out what systems I want to use for various technical stuff. This is mostly life-organisation and communication stuff, though there's a bit of coding stuff in here too. It comes with a big side of "trying to reduce my dependence on Google services".
I occasionally use IFTTT as the glue between services, so I would be interested in stuff that can be manipulated that way. I'm also not averse to things that might require a bit of commandline wrangling, scripting, coding, or technical playing about to set up. (Obviously I love when stuff "just works", but I'm also not too scared of doing a bit of technical work.)
So, on to the technical stuff! This will get long, so I'm sticking it under a cut.
I am currently on OSX 10.5 and considering upgrading to 10.7, or perhaps going radical and nuking OSX in favour of either Ubuntu or Debian. Unfortunately Mountain Lion doesn't support my fairly-ancient hardware.
Note-taking.
I'm pretty happy with Evernote for pretty much all my note-taking and note-keeping needs, and I find it awesome for reference stuff, too. IFTTT allows you to save things to Evernote, too, which I've found handy in the past.
Email accounts.
I have a bunch of accounts with Google, and am trying to move emails away from there. I also have two accounts with Zoho; Zoho is just fine apart from one thing, but I am not married to it (and actually the One Thing is a real problem). My major requirement is IMAP support, and I would strongly prefer a decent amount of storage space for free (about 1GB would suit). Current finances mean I do need it to be free to open and maintain an account. If you've got recommendations for email services, I'd love to hear them.
Email client.
This is proving to be a Real Problem. I am currently using Mac Mail, and the more I use it, the less I like it. About its only good feature is that it supports IMAP, which means I can actually use it. And it does, to its credit, have rules. But it has no label support, which I find extremely frustrating, having been used to Outlook and Thunderbird. However, Thunderbird is now A Problem for two reasons: one, development has stopped on it, which means there will be no more bug fixes and no more security fixes; and two, Zoho IMAP for some reason does not play well with Thunderbird, which means I can't even set up one of my accounts in Thunderbird. (The other was set up before this problem started.) I'm tempted to upgrade to 10.7 just to try out a couple of alternative email apps from the App Store, but I'd also be interested to hear about any free or cheap clients that will work with 10.5. I'd also be open to trying out a commandline email client, if anyone has recommendations.
Contacts management.
Argh. This is a Real Problem. I don't love the built-in address book that comes with a Mac, and I'd also like my contacts to be at least backed up somewhere not-local. Most of my contacts are (I think) mostly stored on Google. I'd like to change this, but I have no idea how to do this. Save them in a spreadsheet and back it up on Dropbox? This seems non-ideal. And if there are other options out there, I don't about them. Help!
Calendar.
I currently don't really have one (not even on paper). I would like to keep this online and in the cloud for ease of sharing, and Google Calendar does have the advantage that it Just Works, but if you know of any alternatives, I'd love to hear them.
File storage.
Mostly I store text files on my local machine, and keep some of the stuff I really don't want to lose in Dropbox. This actually suits me pretty well for now, though I do need a better filing system.
Blogs.
There are a few blogs I like to keep up with. Currently I use Bloglines, having switched from Google Reader a few months ago. The disadvantage of this is that I lose the IFTTT functionality that would save articles I wanted to refer to later to my Evernote. There's also the part where there are no apps for either my Android phone or my iPad, and while I have other stuff I can read while I'm on the go, it'd be really nice to be able to automate some stuff, and to be able to read stuff via an app on my phone/iPad.
IRC.
I currently use IRSSI via a permanently-online shell account a friend gave me for free. I'm quite happy with this, but I'd also quite like to be able to have my permanent connection be accessible via a graphical client (I quite liked using Colloquy). This is mostly technical help, I think, because getting all that stuff set up is majorly confusing. Any help with this would be welcomed!
IM.
I use Skype for IM a lot. I'm also on Google chat and AIM (and Yahoo and Facebook chat if you push it), and in a truly ideal world, I'd like to be able to use some of these chats without opening three separate clients and a browser window. Trillian, which I remember liking in the past, doesn't support Skype and seems to be less good than it was. Recommendations here would be most welcome!
Social networks.
I'm kind of fond of Hootsuite, through which I (sometimes) track my Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn feeds, but I'm not married to it. Any recommendations for that would also be welcomed!
Code.
Okay, so I'm pretty happy with my SSH/Vim setup here.
And I think that is finally the end. Thanks for reading, anyone who got through this!
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I have the problem where I really, really like Apple and Mac-specific software and don't like Google, but I'm running the only Mac on my network. :( I may post about it later.
ETA: iChat, now Messages, supports AIM, Yahoo, and Google Talk/Jabber, at least on my version. Nothing else though.