the system mangler

Posted from Dublin's fair city!

…the result of today’s match between Mun­ster and Lein­ster pleases me :-)

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After read­ing posts from the likes of Shawn Blancs on task man­age­ment (“A Sledge­ham­mer Called Omni­Fo­cus”), I guiltily went back to my neglected Toodledo.com account.

In the past I had read David Allens “Get­ting Things Done” and pur­chased the toodledo.com sub­scrip­tion to get­ting going on this. Only prob­lem, I don’t par­tic­u­larly like web apps. I pre­fer the zip of a desk­top app. So with this in mind, I thought I would have look at the field:

Fea­ture

Things

Omni­Fo­cus

Too­dleDo

MobileMe

Mid­night Inbox

The Hit List

Remem­ber The Milk

Easy­Task

Desk­top $69.99 $79.95 TaskAn­gel for Win­dows $20
TaskSurfer for Mac $39
iCal (free) $35 $50 Beta No $20
iPhone $9.99 $19.99 Too­dleDo $3.99
2Do
Todo $4.99
No Com­ing soon Com­ing soon Free / Pro pro­vides Push Notifications Free
iPad $19.99 $39.99 Too­dleDo $3.99 is a uni­ver­sal app. No $14.99 No No Free
Web n/a n/a Free / $14.95 per year MobileMe n/a n/a Free / $25 Yes, www.easytaskmanager.net
Sync Yes over LAN Yes using MobileMe Yes, using Toodledo.com Clumsy, ToDo entered in Mail.app or iCal sync up to MobileMe, but those entered in MobileMe don’t seem to sync down. No No Yes, using Rememberthemilk.com Yes, using www.easytaskmanager.com
Alerts & Reminders Not Sure Push Alerts Yes No Pro pro­vides Push Notifications Yes, through iCal
Cal­en­der / iCal Yes Yes Read only Yes Read Only using Feed Yes, syncs either projects or con­texts to par­tic­u­lar calendars
Fold­ers / Sub Tasks “Projects” / No Fold­ers > Projects > Actions > Indented Action Yes No Yes Projects > Sub Projects > Tasks
Con­texts “Areas” Con­texts Yes No Yes Con­texts
Growl Sup­port None None Yes (TaskSurfer) No Don’t Know No
Other Com­ments Looks great, sim­ple inter­face which doesn’t overwhelm. Expen­sive, Sledge Hammer? A lit­tle dis­jointed, but def­i­nitely cheap­est option ($39 + $14.95 + $3.99) Not a run­ner, but would love two way sync with iCal from a desk­top app. Mostly desk­top app at the moment Not bad look­ing, cheap, web­site is rather basic.

In short:

  • MobileMe, Remem­ber The Milk, Oth­ers dis­ap­point in some way
  • Things is miss­ing over the air sync
  • Omni­Fo­cus is the man, but it costs an arm and a leg

So, in the end, I kept my Toodledo.com sub­scrip­tion and:

  1. used Fluid to cre­ate a Desk­top App for it
  2. I tried a num­ber of iPhone apps for Too­dledo, but my favourite is Appigo ToDo
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Cre­ated in Ever­note :-)

Fea­ture Ever­note iDoc­u­ment Yojimbo Yep Page­M­an­ager 9 Paper­less DEVON­think Neat­Works
Price Free / $45 per year $50 $39 $45 $80 $49.95 $49 — $149 (Pro ver­sion includ­ing OCR)  $79.95
Online / Local Online (Local DB cache) Local DB (some online) Local DB (export to html for web access!) Local Filesys­tem Local DB Local DB Local DB Local DB
Plat­forms Mac, Win­dows, Web Mac Mac Mac Mac, Win­dows Mac Mac Mac, Win­dows
OCR jpegs (PDF’s with pre­mium account) No No No Yes Yes Yes Yes
Sync Yes No Yes using MobileMe No No No No No
iPhone / iPad Yes Com­ing Soon No No No No Com­ing Soon No
Scan­ner Support Using Image Capture No No Yes, Opti­mized scan­ning interface Yes, Opti­mized scan­ning interface Yes, Opti­mized scan­ning interface Using Image Capture Not sure

One big crit­i­cism of ever­note though… very hard to paste a table into tum­blr! This table came in using Ever­note > Export to HTML > MarsEdit > Paste HTML Source.

Incase you haven’t guessed by now, I ended up using Ever­note. I am not reli­gious about it yet, but it’s work­ing well.

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Since the last update, I have:

  1. Moved from Win­dows 7 on Sony Vaio to OSX on Mac­Book Pro
  2. Wrecked my knee (RCA: Beer)
  3. Fixed (~ish) my knee
  4. Made 70million pots of tea while my in-laws were vis­it­ing from Ireland
  5. Upgraded Pro­duc­tion to Net­Backup 7, Pure­disk 6.6
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How to Name a Vol­cano — The Oatmeal

The Oat­meal is always great!

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Typog­ra­phy for Lawyers

I must admit that this is a sur­pris­ingly inter­est­ing read. Must be because I am an engi­neer that does a lot of tech­ni­cal writing.

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Get Real!

Enough with the shop­ping list, key­word laden job descriptions:

  • Microsoft Win­dows (XP, Server 2003)
  • Red­hat Linux, Suse Linux, Debian Linux
  • HP-UX, AIX, Tru64 Unix
  • HP Open­VMS
  • Solaris 9/10
  • IBM pSeries LPAR
  • VMWare ESX
  • IBM Informix dynamic server
  • Ver­i­tas Netbackup
  • Apache http server
  • MySQL. 
  • Minor duties for desk­top sup­port of 40+ users
  • PABX main­te­nance
  • Net­work­ing expe­ri­ence, par­tic­u­larly with Cisco products
  • Admin­is­tra­tion of an iSCSI SAN environment

If a sin­gle per­son has all these skills, one of two things will be true:

  1. They will be crap at most of them
  2. They will be out of your (and your clients) price range
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I love this. Lived in India in 2004, sorry I never made my way here.

 

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An occa­sion­ally mod­i­fied list of soft­ware I use and trust:

  • Crash­plan for back­ups. Free soft­ware, which is ad sup­ported, but bear­able. Backs up to local disk, across a LAN to another PC, across the Inter­net to a a friends PC with Crash­plan installed, or online to Crashplan.
  • Vir­tu­al­box for VM’s. If you are a techie, test­ing out new oper­at­ing sys­tems comes with the ter­ri­tory. While VMware’s Work­sta­tion is great, it costs. Vir­tu­al­Box is free. 
  • DVD­Fab for DVD rip­ping. Spare me the vobs, the multi step processes. DVD­fab costs a lit­tle, but works beau­ti­fully. I get approx 90 frames/s when rip­ping on my laptop.
  • 7Zip for file com­pres­sion and extrac­tion. Ever get sent a RAR archive, a TAR, a ZIP, or a .GZ file? This will open them all. Free.
  • Tweet­deck for Twit­ter and Face­book. Beau­ti­ful appli­ca­tion, done in Adobe AIR. Free.
  • Google Chrome. Unless you really really know what you are doing, please don’t use Inter­net Explorer. Every time I rebuild a PC for fam­ily or friends it is infested with add-on tool­bars and viruses. 
  • Microsoft Secu­rity Essen­tials. Men­tioned pre­vi­ously

More later.

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Word­Press: What’s the best Caching Plugin?

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