I personally believe, after having read all of the replies thus far, that I can safely claim to either do or have done each and every thing some particular individual suggested or a close equivalent: except for the wiki(-like) approach. Thinking of it, it seems a valuable one, and indeed I'm already playing with TiddlyWiki. (Which I cherish for the extreme KISSiness) In this sense, I was searching an appropriate link for ruoso-suggested ZIM when I stumbled upon Wikipedia's personal wiki page which lists quite a lot of similar projects and may be of interest here...
Basically, I need a PIM/Calendar app: and I have tried many, but none of them did really suit my needs; one may think that I have bizarre or exaggerate requirements, but that's not the case. On the contrary, I have the impression they tend to have far too many features and they get confusing for me. Here, everybody may start listing his/her own favourite tool... As far as I'm concerned, I've recently found a simple enough FireFox extension called ReminderFox that may be "the one" I am after, or close to it. It does make sense because I'm "always on FF" although occasionally I would also like a cli based interface.
To be fair, all of the approaches thus far have been either a failure or not completely satisfactory:
- if I get on a page I want to read or in which I want to write something, then I keep a browser tab open on it. Generally, this lasts days. In the fortunate case I manage to "do it" early enough. In the mid-unfortunate one, I manage to do it late enough to have to write something like "sorry for answering so late" (if it's a reply, but you get the sense...) In the most common one, first or later the browser or the OS crash: this used to free me from the curse of these TODOs. Unfortunately FireFox now recovers successfully from such crashes in most cases. And even if it were not for that, I sometimes enter paranoid mode and "bookmark all tabs in a folder" not to mention that I save partially written text in my temp dir, generally as last.txt: and trust me, I have quite an impressive collection of last.txt's. (Actually, I've not been completely sincere: I also have the likes of theverylast.txt, theveryverylast.txt, and so on!)
- My "important" bookmarks go to my delicious space but I also maintain a "short list" of locally saved individual pages which are interesting enough to be reviewed ASAP, but just not now: (and hey, I already have far too many open tabs, this thingie is about to explode...) needless to say, it's now long enough that even simply scrolling it is a real PITA!
- However ridiculous a method may seem, if compared to other means mentioned here and in the whole thread, I also keep some info in gmail drafts: this is especially tailored in connection with the desktop/Eee setup, comprising an email of info gathered on the desktop and supposed to be read when I have to go to bed, and one of info gathered while reading on the bed, referring say to pages to be edited and so on. Needless to say, every now and again I remove some items from each of the lists but every day they grow much more than they shrink.
Incidentally, I am fully aware that a much better solution than a gmail draft would be Instapaper, a dedicated tool developed by an Italian guy which was a beta when I was gently offered an account, and probably still is...
- Similarly I also have todo.txt-like plain text files in my temp directory full of... well, you know what. They're in the temp directory because they're supposed to only stay there for a very short interval of time and then important info will be moved to nobler "formats" and to other locations in my filesystem. Guess what? All still there: some long forgotten, some actively growing.
- Oh, and then I use paper too: it's right here on the side of my laptop with five numbered points of things to todo, along with arrows, corrections, additions and so on - precisely it's the "todo list of this morning" and the morning is that of some two weeks ago. The list also has in addition to the signs mentioned above, a horizontal line and an asterisk: in fact the former is a stricken point and the latter means that I half-sort-of-addressed part of another one...
- Like everyone else, I also save whole pages and code snippets and so on: generally I prefer the latter ones, doing some minimal cleanup, but they too go in temp, for it's clear enough that they make part of my grand scheme for a much more thorough cleanup that would fit them in a well organized collection, rather than this incoherent lump! Much less or much more ambitiously depending on the POV and the mood (which may change on a day by day basis...) I may just blog my findings either on my Italian/bilingual tumblr or more sensibly in my use Perl; journal especially since the feed of the latter is imported into the former, and my current setup ideally should comprise the further step of translating/expanding/explaining the imported post: something which I actually do - only on what could hardly be defined a "regular basis!"
WRT the last point, I have some recent anecdotal evidence: the other day moritz told me about a very interesting tool that I could not use at first, but that got me strongly intrigued. Part of the discussion went from the original thread to a series of /msg's and eventually I asked whether he recorded his findings say in a (public) journal - because in that case I would happily subscribe the feed! Now, the point is that when you learn that particular something, you think: hey, now I know and time is so little anyway - why should I waste it by writing it down too? And then you forget that you may
- help others by publicly writing about it;
- forget about the damned thing altogether in a few months if for whatever reason you don't actively use it, and it will hit on your nerves again!
WRT both points it has to be said that at least as far as I am concerned, I like to write about my findings, but only when they're ambitious and supposedly "important" (here hubris plays a role!) while I realize that even the "small things" should deserve being given the same attention, and perhaps even more so...)
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