Managing life

[Tim Holloway]

Seeing as how I'm insomniac this morning, I thought I'd do a heads-up on a couple of resources that I use to try and stay on track with life, work, and everything.

In addition to the usual (google) suspects, like Google Calendar, I have some additional friends.

My go-to application for general organization is Gome gnote. This is a sticky-note app that basically spun off Tomboy Notes - which was a great app, but since it was implemented in C#/Mono didn't find a warm welcome in the non-Microsoft world.

I have one of my media keys set to bring this one up, because anytime I'm confused about what I need to do. I can look at the lead-in note. The gnote notes can hyperlink between themselves and to URLs, including file references, So I can get one-click access to document files and open my file browser to working directories. It's easy to add new notes and notes can be organized by topics.

For figuring out what to do and how urgent it is, I like TaskWarrior. The great thing about TaskWarrior is that it's a command-line application (at least if you spend as much time in terminal windows as I do). It allows me to make 1-line (optionally annotated) "to do" items and it prioritizes them. The standard priorities are few, just High, Medium and Low, but by tagging a task with "+next" you can push it to the urgent top of the list. And within priorities, oldest tasks show before newer ones. You can also define recurring tasks, hide tasks until a particular date, and do lots of other useful things. I also have a cron job that emails me today's task list every morning, so it's not just for the desktop.

Speaking of not just for the desktop, something I've really gotten into lately is Joplin. Joplin is an open-source equivalent for EverNote, and among its virtues are that I can host the master sync server myself (I don't like keeping personal data on someone else's cloud), although if that's not your style, you can also opt for end-to-end encryption and store on a variety of cloud services.

In my case, I'm using a local WebDAV server. This works pretty well, although I learned the hard way NOT to use nginx as either server or proxy for Joplin, as the DAV module shipped with CentOS 7 lacks critical functionality. Apache works fine, though.

Joplin has both notes and to-do, with alarms (but not Google Calendar alarms) and automatically syncs with all your Joplin clients. Which can be mobile devices, Linux desktops, Windows (including an option to keep it on a thumb drive for when you're using a foreign desktop) and Linux text (terminal) mode.

That means I can update a grocery list from the desktop and have it handy on my phone when I go shopping. Or make a quick note away from home.

Terminal mode is great because when I have to do heavy maintenance on the server farm and I need to note or reference something, I can do it from any machine - since my servers are work machines, they don't run X GUI. And thanks to the sync feature, anything that comes up while I'm working can sync back to my desktop for later followup.

Joplin's sync features are very important to me, but it also boast rich text editing via Markdown language. Not only the usual bold, italics, and so forth, but tables, images and URLs.

On Linux, the terminal-mode version of Joplin is a Node application, and can be installed easily via npm. The full GUI version is available as a PackageKit distribution, which means that you can easily upgrade to the latest release, regardless of what distro you are running. That proved very useful to me this morning, since a sync failed owing to the version of Joplin I had under Android being more advanced than the desktop version. I got a "Unknown type 13" error, which turned out to be support for note history that my desktop didn't have. A simple download-and-execute of the latest PackageKit fixed that.

These are all open-source, extensible aids to keeping organized, scheduled and reminded, and while nothing is ever exactly as one could wish, they're pretty useful once you learn their tricks. Also, they all have open-source data formats and import/export facilities which means that they can easily be repaired if damaged and backed up regularly with easy restore. Some have individual text files, some, like Joplin, keep their data in a sqlite database.

[Travis Phillips]

Interesting thread idea! Never knew about taskwarrior before. I can throw a few more in that are kinda neat.

For notes, I've mostly been using Keepnote, but it was written in Python 2 with gtk2 and doesn't seem to be under active development anymore. I've been prospecting cherrytree notes which seems a close replacement, and they got it working in Python 3 with gtk+, however the future road map is to move the project off Python and into C++ due to being burned by the Python 2 to 3 transition, a lot of devs are questioning Python's long term viability. I like these apps as they are a hierarchical based note application, and that helps keep things organized in my opinion and can even store files within them, and cherrytree has a syntax highlighter widget that's kinda nice to have in a note taking app.

For music, and you might like this being a CLI junkie, is ncmpcpp (NCurses Music Player C++, if you need a way to remember that). It's a mpd client to play music, it's for the command line and makes use of ncurses and has some nice features, supporting playlist, editing tags, and even a visualizer for your music in the command line. Best of all since it's a client to the mpd server, you can exit it and music keeps going, you can also run multiple instances of it in tmux to create a pretty awesome layout of a music player dashboard.

Also recently started playing with KDE recently as a desktop, it's not the bloated monster it was anymore, in fact, the new version is actually lighter in memory than XFCE4 is. But what's interesting here in KDE Connect. KDE Connect has a companion app for Android and iPhone, once installed, you can pair it up with a computer on the lan and it can let you do so much cool stuff:

- find your phone by making it ring.

- monitor the battery life of your phone from the systray.

- use the phone as a keyboard and trackpad for the computer.

- see notifications from the phone on your computer, and vice versa.

- prevent the computer from locking while the phone is on the lan, and autolock when it's not.

- send files between the devices.

- use your phone as a presenter's remote for slides.

- on the phone app, you can select folders to make visible to the computer, and at that point, you can just browse them casually in your file explorer.

I find this a useful way to sling files between the computer and phone without a cable or the use of a cloud service.

As for a general purpose editor, I use geany because it's cross platform and supports a wide range of languages, and you can add templates to it, which is nice for having boilerplate code for GUI apps already done, and it supports meta tags that will be replaced once used (developers name, date, etc). However since I'm playing with KDE, I also want to play with Kate, which is supposed to be on part with vscode.

Also in other news, Microsoft now has a Linux preview build of Teams for Linux. Testing that so far works pretty well, chat, voice, video, and screen sharing all seem to work. The only limit so far has been screen sharing won't let you share just a window, you have to pick and share a monitor. But overall, it seems pretty stable.

Anyways, thanks for sharing Tim. There's some new toys for me to look at! 😀

- Travis Phillips

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[Tim Holloway]

Thanks, Travis! Linux is a very rich environment these days.

Case in point. Actually, speaking of music players, I'm a bit heavier into it than that. I do composition as well as playing and like to design custom voices as well. Which means that I have had to get pretty deep into the Linux sound system, and the Linux sound system can be a bewildering place indeed. First of all, we have a lot of mostly-obsolete sound managers. Then we have Alsa, which manages the physical devices, plus runs a MIDI bus. Then you have PulseAudio, which is designed to route stuff in a multi-used environment, including over a network. Then you have Jack, which is a high-performance audio connection system. Audio apps often have different views on which of these systems they should connect to, including some which have to be specifically compiled for one or the other. And there are lots of audio apps. Ardour is considered the Gold Standard of digital audio workstations, but it won't run on my 8-core system. I think it needs a real-time kernel built for it. I like Rosegarden, but setting up a serious session required so many other apps that I learned to love the Non Session Manager, which can open and connect them all at once. Unfortunately, Rosegarden itself isn't (or isn't fully) Non-compliant, since Non closes it with prejudice, leaving a lockfile that has to be deleted manually if you forget to close the project before using Non's master "Off" button.

It was all a lot simpler when it was just my Amiga and Deluxe Music. Plus the Amiga OS was real-time out of the box, so that's one up on standard Linux.

Another case where Linux excels out of the box is in electronic design. I use the stock apps supplied with Fedora to design schematics, layout PCBs and generate files to be shipped off to - oops - China  (cough, cough) for manufacturing. Linux also comes with FPGA tools if you're into the really gnarly stuff.

I'll confess that the main reason I don't have much to do with KDE is that those infernal bouncing icons really put me off. That, plus Red Hat favors gnome. But I draw the line at gnome-desktop and use Cinnamon.

I argued against designing a major product in python over 10 years ago when it was first announced that Python 3 was going to require a lot of rewriting. As it happens, the long interval has softened the blow, somewhat and starting new projects in Python3 is not so bad. I'd just hate to have to convert anything major - the outfit that was so dead-set on Python ended up folding for non-technical reasons, by the way.

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