Dead Mac

The mini tower died this week. Wouldn't even boot up into Mac OS 9.2. It was from Freecycle so I wasn't too upset over it. Fired up the other G3, moved the RAM and hard drive over and booted into Linux on that one. I discovered that you can't get a resolution higher than 800 x 600 with the AV personality card installed. Take it out and the same set up will go to 1024 x 720 (or whatever it is. You get the drift.) I don't know why this is, but I could repeat it on the Mac by removing it, booting up and getting the higher resolution. Then I'd put it back in and it was back to low res. I also bought a Marble Mouse, so I could switch over to the USB keyboard I bought. Which lead to something else interesting. Mac OS 9.2 does not see the USB ports until after BootX comes up. Which means that you can't choose to boot into Linux using a USB mouse and keyboard. Neither one works. You have to plug in an ADB mouse, boot up and choose Linux, then unplug that mouse. It's crazy but it works. It's amazing how much I get done with worn out hardware.

I did some upgrades and was able to try out Wyrd and Tomboy a bit. Wyrd is a front end for Remind and is pretty cool for text based stuff. I love the idea of Remind in principle. In practice, I haven't learned enough commands to really use the program. One of these days, I might actually get to try out some of the stuff I'd like to learn. Tomboy is a simple wiki program. I like the looks of it, but it does seem to have some of the drawbacks that the early Note Studio had. You can't pull up a list of pages you've made. I'll hack around with this a bit more and maybe post some screenshots. I do like wikis. It doesn't look like you can export these, so it's not something you can sync with a Palm. It does show progress towards making nice, user-friendly Linux apps.

Linux, Palms, and GTD

I guess I have more readers than I thought here, so I won't be putting an end to this blog just yet. I had one poster ask me about using Linux and my Palm for GTD. I find it so much easier than when I used the Mac. I've used the Palm desktop for Windows a few times. It wasn't bad but really is pretty limited to the apps that it supports. The Mac desktop is pretty bad. I didn't like working in it and that's the period when I used Life Balance the most. I registered the Shadow Mac desktop but didn't use it very often.

When I first installed Ubuntu, I tried Evolution.Now I am not an Outlook fan. I do think that Evolution shows promise and I have been using for one email address. It won't sync the Todo list from my Palm since I use a Zire 71 with the old todo list rather than tasks. The other items seemed to work okay. Then I tried Jpilot and found that it's exactly what I wanted. It's very simple and doesn't have a lot of options. I can sync with pedit's memo32 db, so I can put long text files into my Palm if I decide to work with text files on my desktop. I just go in and change a setting to look at this database instead of the built in memos db. It seems rock solid. I even used the pilot conduit to convert my photos the other day and that worked fine too. The only drawback is that there are some items that are repeating that I am forced to put on my calendar as I can't do repeats with the built in todo list. I'm considering either A5 or Todo+ on the Palm to handle that. They really are just ticklers and don't need to be done on a particular day. Makes me nervous to see them on the calendar.

I still use paper for a lot of things, especially collection. I also carry a small notebook with me that I use for thoughts about the system. If I can find a better way to do a review or change the settings for better results, writing about it helps me think things through. I enjoy using my Palm too much to go completely analog again.

Nothing to see here

I think I may discontinue this blog. I really am happy with my system to date and it's pretty simple. There's just not a lot to talk about. I'm also considering moving a bit more towards paper, although I'm not getting rid of my Palm. I just have some other things I want to do besides plan. I don't think that many people read this blog any way, so I won't be disappointing anyone but me.

Goodbye Evolution

I've been trying to use Evolution to check my spindlitis account. It looks like a good program, sort of an Outlook clone. But there have been problems. It won't sync the Todo list on my Palm although it will sync the other databases. And now I'm having problems with the mail part. I asked for a different zipped file to update Memoleaf as I couldn't open the one online. They sent it to me and I waited to use Evolution to download it. I know that it downloaded it. I watched it and it took about 25 minutes. (This is slow dialup. I had enough time to go out and get the eggs and to dress for work.) When it finally finished, instead of 5 messages, I had three. And the one with the file was not there. I am going to install Pine or something else, just so I have a reliable way to check my mail. This program doesn't cut it.

On the system front, I uninstalled Mobile Note. The index became corrupted and I was getting fatal resets. I am not really using it any more and had already planned to remove it. Since I've started using Jpilot, I can use the built-ins plus pedit and manana. So I really don't need the wiki any more.