Month: November 2014

wrapping up the weekend

Well, I got a lot done this weekend, Friday and Saturday. But I’ve spent most of the day today moping around the apartment and napping, since I now have a cold. Darn. I was really on a roll for a while there.

I have, though, finally gotten all of my old notes out of Backpack and into Evernote, and closed down the Backpack account. I’m still ruminating on whether or not I want to try managing all my tasks in Evernote, or if I want to try using a second app to help with that. I downloaded a trial version of Things, and messed around with it a bit, but I don’t think it’s what I need. For now, I’m just going to keep using the Reminders app on my iPhone for simple reminders, and I’ll keep project lists in Evernote.

ScanCafe and Flickr – Mom’s photos

With all the work I’ve been doing this weekend to consolidate notes into Evernote and clean up my GTD lists, a few neglected projects have jumped out at me. A big one was my project to scan in all my Dad’s slides and negatives and get them up on Flickr. I started this back in 2010. I got everything scanned in by ScanCafe by mid-2011, in six batches. By mid-2012, I’d gotten five out of those six batches uploaded to Flickr, but I never quite got around to uploading that last batch. Well, I sat down and took care of it today. It’s all in a collection named “Mom’s Negatives Apr 2011“. The first five batches were all basically Dad’s photos. This one was Mom’s. Mom never really took that many photos, and most of these are pretty old. I know who some of the people in these photos are, but some of them are a complete mystery to me. Either way, there are a handful of interesting photos in the batch.

The next part of the project is going to be gathering up all the actual negatives and slides and consolidating those into a plastic bin and moving it into my storage unit. Or maybe just throwing them all out. I don’t know. But, right now, they’re all still in the boxes I got back from ScanCafe, piled up in a closet, which isn’t really a useful way to store them.

And the other part of this project, which I’ve done absolutely nothing on, is to take my Mom’s old home movies and get those scanned in and converted to digital files. Or just toss them out. Either way, I really need to do something about them, since they’re currently piled up under my kitchen table, with a bunch of other stuff that really doesn’t belong under the kitchen table.

Thanksgiving weekend

I spent Thanksgiving day with a friend’s family. It was a good day, but pretty loud and chaotic, which is to be expected when you put sixteen people (including three small children) together in a house on Thanksgiving.

I spent Black Friday home alone, working on some personal organization. I almost managed to update the map on my TomTom GPS, but hit a snag when the new map was too large to copy to the device. That led me on a wild goose chase that ended when I found a notice on the TomTom site that said they were aware of the problem and working on a solution. But it was a fair amount of wasted time. (I’d thought, at one point, that maybe they’d purposely made the new map file just a little too large, to force people with older devices to upgrade to newer ones, but apparently it was an honest mistake.)

I also continued my work on getting stuff out of Backpack and into Evernote. I’m almost done there, and I should be able to close down the Backpack account soon. I’m getting enough stuff into Evernote now that I’m starting to think about how I’m organizing things, and what kind of adjustments I should make. I read the book Evernote Essentials yesterday, and also listened to a podcast with a lot of Evernote tips, so I could hopefully stimulate my brain a bit and come up with some good ideas on how to best use Evernote. I found both the book and the podcast helpful, though there weren’t any earth-shattering revelations in either of them.

I had a page in Backpack titled “GTD”, and I was using it to keep, basically, GTD-related lists, like a “someday/maybe” list, a “waiting for” list, project lists, and stuff like that. But I stopped doing anything resembling a weekly review quite some time ago, and I haven’t really been keeping up the lists. So, for instance, one list item was to use a $10 Best Buy Reward Zone certificate before it expired… in 2011. So I’m not entirely sure how best to clean up and re-structure those lists in such a way that I’ll be more likely to use them.

I really like the general idea of consolidating as much stuff as I can in Evernote, and cutting down on complexity a lot, eliminating OneNote, Backpack,  DevonThink, and whatever else I can. But I also noticed that Things for iPhone and iPad is free this weekend, and the Mac version is 30% off. So maybe keeping my GTD stuff in Things would be a good idea, while using Evernote for reference material and archives. But Things doesn’t have a PC version, or a web version, so I’d only be able to access it on the Mac and iOS. Which probably isn’t really a problem, given the way I’m using my computers these days. (Also, “Things” is a horrible product name, and tends to produce a lot of irrelevant (but amusing) results when Googled.) I’ve already downloaded the iPhone and iPad versions, and have played around a bit, and like what I see. I’m planning on downloading the trial version of the Mac software today, so I can see if it’s going to work for me or not.

Meanwhile, I just ordered two 500GB Samsung SSDs, for $189 each, with the general idea of replacing the old-fashioned drives in my MacBook and ThinkPad. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time now, and I kept putting it off. But I keep hearing, over and over, from friends and random internet sources, about how much difference an SSD will make, so I finally had to go ahead and do it. So next weekend’s project will likely be replacing either the MacBook or ThinkPad drive. Or possibly both, if I have enough time.

I’m also thinking about going to NYC to see The Imitation Game, the new movie about Alan Turing. I don’t think I’ll talk myself into doing that today, given how cold it is outside right now. But maybe tomorrow, if it’s a little warmer.

Dynamics AX documentation annoyances

So there’s an event I can override, with the following signature:

public void cursorNotify(int _event)

So if I look that up in the documentation, I should be able to see what values I might get for the _event parameter, right? Nope.

It says there’s going to be a table of event IDs, but there is no table.
Go back to the AX 2009 documentation, though, and you can see the table.

And hey, it even has some example code. A lot of the AX 2012 documentation leaves me with the impression that it was automatically generated, and then never reviewed by an actual human. And that they don’t really want to bother updating it or improving it And, sometimes, I feel like I need to vent about that…

a bit more on Evernote

I’m making good progress with my efforts to consolidate all my notes into Evernote. All of the notes from OneNote on my desktop PC have been copied over or deleted. And I’m working through my Backpack notes.

I’m still thinking about whether or not Evernote is a good choice for the long term. There’s some interesting stuff in this recent article from The Guardian.

Stuff I like:

  • “We don’t data-mine your information, we’re not selling you to anyone. Our fundamental belief is that we make money when our users say ‘we love this product and we want to pay for it’.”
  • “It takes longer to get started, but ultimately it gives us a shot at building a 100-year startup.”
  • “If a third-party developer makes something great that gives people a great experience, we make more money. Other companies have this love-hate relationship with developers. For us it’s just easy: it’s love.”

Stuff that I’m maybe a little worried about:

  • “We’re about work. Last year we made the decision to really focus on work. We don’t really talk about Evernote [as something] for your hobbies any more.”
  • “We’ve never changed our price: we launched seven years ago at $5 a month, but we realised a couple of years ago that it was the wrong price.”

So, basically, I’m glad to see that they’re thinking long-term, and trying to monetize via paid subscriptions rather than selling info to advertisers, and I’m glad to see that they’re still supportive of third-party developers. But I’m a little concerned that they’re focusing on business rather than personal use, and that they may be mucking with the subscription price next year.

Trimming the Costanza wallet

I must admit that I’ve been carrying a Costanza wallet for the last few years. Well, maybe not as bad as that, but really it’s a bit thick. I’ve been experiencing some pain in my left hip lately, and I think the overstuffed wallet may be a contributing factor. In addition to switching from my left pocket to my right, I also decided that it was time to trim down the wallet a bit.

I’ve been meaning to get rid of all my loyalty cards and replace them with an app on my phone, but never quite got around to it. So I went ahead and did that today. I looked at a few apps, including Key Ring and Card Star, which seem to be the two most popular. I also realized that Red Laser, which I already had on my phone, can be used to store loyalty cards. So I started with Red Laser, and that seemed to work fine, but I decided to mess around a bit more, and tried Stocard. It has a nice and simple interface, and had no trouble scanning any of my cards. So I think I’m going to stick with it for now. I used it for the first time today at the supermarket, and the cashier had no trouble scanning the code off the phone screen, so that’s good. I’ve got about a dozen cards in the app, so that’s a dozen cards that aren’t in my wallet anymore.

I wish I could get rid of some more cards though. My CostCo card, for instance, has a mag stripe on it, and I have to show it at the door when I go in, so I guess I can’t get rid of it. I looked at the CostCo iPhone app, thinking maybe it could be used in place of the card, but apparently not. Oh well. And I can’t really do anything about the “buy 12 coffees, get one free” card from the bakery down the street. Or my credit cards, though I’m hoping Apple Pay will take care of that problem in a few years.

Evernote for Mac 6

I’ve been making steady progress on my project to consolidate all my notes into Evernote. As I’ve said before, there are a few things that I don’t like about Evernote, but I’ve decided that it’s the best solution for my needs.

Last night, I got the usual client software upgrade pop-up on my Mac; Evernote updates their client pretty frequently, so that’s generally not too exciting. But in the release notes this time, I saw that it was a major version upgrade (5.x to 6.0), and the top item in the feature list was “Sleek new design inspired by OS X Yosemite.” I groaned a bit, but went ahead with the upgrade.

The new version is, indeed, more Yosemite-like, with diminished contrast between foreground and background, making it harder for old folks with poor eyesight like me to use. I’m having the same problem with 1Password.

There’s a good overview of the upgrade at MacStories. Other than the unfortunate Yosemite-inspired design changes, the client still works fine, and they didn’t make any unnecessary changes to keyboard shortcuts or anything else that would affect my ability to use the software productively, so that’s good. (When did we get to the point where the main thing I hope for in a software upgrade is that they don’t make it too much harder to use, though? Was it the Office ribbon? The all-caps menus and horrible color scheme changes in Visual Studio 2012? iOS 7? But I digress.)

I’m also not terribly excited about the new features they’ve added to Evernote recently. Over the last few versions, they’ve added a presentation mode, work chat, and now “context“. None of those things really helps me use the software for its main purpose — taking notes and organizing them. But they’re easy enough to ignore. (I’d be even happier, of course, if they’d let me remove the buttons for these features, so I could use the space more effectively.)

And I’d be really happy if programs like Evernote and 1Password would introduce options in their software to switch to an alternate color scheme, like Visual Studio did after enough people complained about VS 2012’s default color scheme.

Meanwhile, I’m wondering if messing with the system font on my Mac will make things easier to read or harder. I want to try out Fira and Input. While replacing the system font probably isn’t something Apple wants you to do, it’s simple enough and appears to be easily reversible, so I might as well try. (I miss the old days, when you could use a tool like Kaleidoscope to change practically everything in the UI!)

rearranging the deck chairs

I’ve been working on a few things lately to improve the way I keep things organized. I’ve already blogged about my move from KeePass to 1Password. I’m also working on consolidating all my personal notes in Evernote. And I spent some time this weekend cleaning up my GMail inbox, and reviewing my use of OtherInbox Organizer, and thinking about whether or not I want to keep using that.

All of this “work,” when viewed from a certain perspective, looks a bit like pointless busy work, “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” as it were. GMail, for instance, gives me enough space that I really don’t ever need to delete an email. And the search tools in GMail are good enough that I really don’t need to categorize anything, if I don’t want to. If I need an old email, I can probably find it in a few seconds with no problem. Evernote is almost as good. The limits on even a free account are generous enough that I’m not going to hit them, and the search is good enough that I can find stuff quite easily, regardless of how little I’ve bothered organizing things.

But there is a real point to smoothing out the kinks in the system, reviewing old notes, and cleaning up old cruft. It’s a way of reviewing my own recent history, maybe seeing some patterns that I didn’t notice before, or remembering projects that I had abandoned but would like to pick back up, or sweeping away old projects that aren’t relevant or interesting to me anymore. And, even if none of that mattered, it’s still something to do that just makes me feel a little better about myself and my control over my own life, so it’s worth it just for that mental benefit, even if it’s fleeting and possibly illusory.

So, having said all that, I’m now going to bore anyone still reading this with some details on what I’ve been doing. First, with 1Password, I am now about 80% of the way through moving everything over from KeePass. I have the iOS, Mac, and Windows clients all installed and running, and the Firefox extension installed on my Mac & Windows machines. I’m not sure if I’m entirely happy with the Firefox extension, and its ability to automate logging in to a site; it seems to get that wrong most of the time. That’s probably something I can straighten out with some more work, though I’m not sure if it’s worth spending too much time on it.

With Evernote, I’m trying to convince myself that I can use it to replace Backpack, and I want to try and consolidate all of my random notes from various other systems into Evernote. Backpack is a product that has been pretty much retired by 37signals. They still keep it running for existing users; I pay $7 per month for it, and it works fine. But I know it’s not getting any new updates or features, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they decide to shut it down entirely at some point. So it seems prudent to get my data out of it and into a more actively-supported product. A while back, I paid a flat fee to set up a personal Basecamp account, which is now 37signals’ only active product. I haven’t really done anything with it though. While I could shoehorn my Backpack data into it, it’s not really appropriate as a general note-taking and reference tool.

Looking at some other options, I would be tempted to go with OneNote, since it’s now freely available across Windows, Mac, and iOS, but I’m not convinced that Microsoft isn’t going to pull the rug out from under the Mac and/or iOS versions at some point. Their commitment to alternative platforms comes and goes, so I just don’t feel like it would be a great idea for me to commit to a product that might disappear in the next management shake-up.

Evernote, on the other hand, is (of course) the main product for Evernote, the company. They’ve always been cross-platform, and I can’t think of any reason why that would change any time soon. And they seem pretty stable as a company, and not not likely to run out of money, or get acquired and shut down, or any of the other things that tend to happen with small, young, Internet start-ups.

There are two things, functionally, that I don’t like about Evernote. First, I don’t entirely like the simple linear organization of notes. As stated above, yes, you can easily search through the notes to find what you need, but I still like to have a bit more structure. (OneNote is really good on that front.) And it bothers me a bit that they don’t support plain-text notes, only rich-text. That might not seems like a big deal to most people, but it can get in the way when I want to paste some source code into a note. The “paste as plain text” option helps out there, but I’d really like an option to just have a new note be either rich text or plain text, and maybe to set an entire notebook to be plain-text by default. But I think I can live with both of these slight annoyances.

What I’ve decided to do with Evernote, in terms of imposing some organization on it, is to create multiple notebooks (but not too many) to sort things out into a few major buckets, then use tags to make it easier to find certain things, such as all notes related to comic books, or all notes related to F# programming. I’ve renamed my default notebook to “Inbox”, and I’ll be using it as an inbox in the usual GTD sense (though maybe not being as strict as I could be). New stuff will go in there until I sort it out somewhere else or delete it. The other major notebooks I’ve set up are:

  • Lists: various active lists, such as my list of which Dresden Files books I’ve read and which I haven’t.
  • Reference: various notes that I may need for reference in the future, such as the note reminding me that “sudo killall coreaudiod” is the command I need to use on my Mac whenever sound stops working.
  • Archive: old notes that I probably won’t ever need again, but maybe I will, so I might as well keep them.

That’s probably all I need, but I’ve also created a “Travel” notebook, for travel-related notes, and I may create a few other topic-specific notebooks.

Once I get to the point where I feel like I’ve got a good system going in Evernote, I’m going to want to consolidate the notes that I have in other systems into Evernote. I’ve already mentioned Backpack; that’s been my primary GTD and general note-keeping system for some time now. Copying stuff out of there and into Evernote shouldn’t be too big a problem.

I also have a bunch of old notes on my Mac in DevonThink. I actually really like DevonThink, and I kind of wish I could use it as a front-end to Evernote, but it’s really a Mac-only solution. What I have in there, at this point, is mostly software license info (which could go into either Evernote or 1Password), and some miscellaneous lists and Mac-specific reference info.

And, finally, I have a fair amount of stuff in OneNote on my desktop PC. This all dates back to a time when I was using that desktop PC a lot more often than I am now. I don’t recall entering any new info into OneNote this year. So, again, it shouldn’t be too hard to get that stuff into Evernote, mostly into the ‘Reference’ or ‘Archive’ notebooks.

The benefits of doing all this will be:

  1. I’ll have all my notes in a single store, accessible on my Mac, PC, and iOS devices, and via the web. (The stuff that was previously only on the Mac or PC will now be available everywhere.)
  2. I can discontinue my $7/month Backpack subscription. (I don’t currently have a paid Evernote account, and I probably don’t need one. But if I want one, it’s still a bit cheaper than Backpack was.)
  3. I don’t have to worry about relying on a product that’s not really supported anymore, and might get discontinued at any time.

So this has turned into a pretty ridiculously long blog post, but writing it helped me straighten a few things out in my head, and maybe reading it will help someone else out someday. (Or at least amuse someone slightly.)

MacBook cruft

I’ve been thinking about doing a clean re-install of OS X on my MacBook for some time now. I’m not entirely sure, but I think the one and only clean install of OS X I’ve ever had would have been on my very first OS X iBook, circa 2002. Since then, I’ve just done upgrades, and (when I’m moving to a new machine) migrations. So I’ve got cruft on my current MacBook that goes back to 2002.

I made the mistake of looking at /var/log/system.log today, and there’s quite a lot of stuff going on in there. I managed to identify and remove some old stuff that didn’t need to be running from /Library/LaunchAgents and /Library/LaunchDaemons, but I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of other stuff running (or at least taking up hard drive space) that I don’t really need.

Of course, if I’m going to do a fresh install, I should really switch to an SSD at the same time. I can, of course, just do a fresh install on my current hard drive (since I have a full backup, thanks to Carbon Copy Cloner). But SSDs are cheap enough now that I can probably justify buying one for myself.

So Much Microsoft News

Wow, so much nifty news coming out of Microsoft this week! Scott Hanselman has a good overview. And The Morning Brew for today has a great round-up of links to various blog posts from within Microsoft and elsewhere.

I’m definitely excited about the new Visual Studio Community version. I’ve been using VS Express at home, for my various recreational programming projects, and it’s not bad, but I’m glad that I can now use a version of VS that supports extensions, and doesn’t impose artificial barriers between desktop and web development.

Oh, and F# 4.0 looks interesting!