Miklb's Mindless Ramblings

Like most, I’ve struggled with note taking and mind dumping solutions. I’m easily caught up in chasing the productivity pr0n, looking for the perfect system (hell, I gues by writing this post, I’m still doing that). At first glance however, with the discovery of my most recent set of tools, I believe I’ve found the most streamlined, cohesive solution yet.

My most recent excursion in a single note taking solution was EverNote. Certainly versatile, perhaps too so, and it never felt like the right fit. It was just too something. I wanted a no frills solution that I could easily access my notes from my desktop, laptop and on the go (currently using an iPhone). Certainly EverNote fits that bill, but again, too cumbersome and too busy.

A little while ago, I stumbled on a Habari plugin, SimplyNoted, which interfaced with an iPhone app SimpleNote. Quite an elegant little app/plugin, I could take notes on my phone and be able to pull them up in a Habari Silo, and turn them into a blog post, etc. Nice, but my iPhone isn’t the only place I take notes or want to do a brain dump. So it’s lingered on the second page of my phone, starring at me, taunting me to use it. Then the other day, the always with a great idea Merlin Mann, resurrecting his invaluable 43folders website, posted a screenshot and short post about his workflow.

Wait, did I just read about something syncing with SimpleNote? Sure enough, Merlin was espousing the virtues of an app he’d been using, and how it now syncs with SimpleNote. Notational Velocity is a no frills, desktop application (is there a mobile, I didn’t look) that snycs with SimpleNote, quietly saving behind the scenes,with plenty of keyboard shortcuts but no fluff. It gets out of the way and makes it easy to just jot notes, brain dump, or I’m sure in the hands of someone like Merlin, far, far more. But for this simple guy, it was the missing link to being able to have an app on my Macs that did all the things that SimpleNote could do.

So far in two days of using it, it’s been more usable than any other system I’ve tried. I was able to bang out some thoughts before bed on my laptop, both gather links for this post as well as some outlined thoughts (yeah, this was actually thought out), as well as some ideas for some work I had to do today. I was able to grab those notes when I hit the desktop this morning without doing anything, add to them, and then pick them back up on the laptop later in the day to finish up the writing I needed to do for my new job. After dinner, I was able to then login to the admin of the blog, start a new post, open the SimplyNoted silo, and bang, all of my links and notes were there to write a post. I can’t count how many events I’ve been to the past year that I took notes at either in EverNote or with TiddlyWiki, but never got around to copying them over to writing a post. I look forward to this being the missing link between thinking about blogging, and blogging. Time will tell.

I posted this to Twitter yesterday, but was quite pleased with how it turned out, and just wanted to post it up on this here blog. I used the “magazine” option in the iPhone app Camera Bag. It was just before sunset, when this huge flock of crows flew into the neighborhood and lighted in a big oak tree across the street. The neighbor was cleaning out his garage at the time, and every time he took stuff out of the garage and threw it into the garbage can, the tree would explode with cawing birds that would swirl around the trees. I just happened to be sitting on the porch with phone in hand as it was happening and snapped a few shots. I’m occasionally surprised by the quality of pics a mobile phone, and the iPhone in particular can take. I still remember my first digital camera only being 1.3 megapixel and the size of a small refrigerator.

As great a mobile device I think the iPhone is, there was one thing I couldn’t do with it that I wanted without fuss - easily upload a photo from the phone and post the picture to Twitter via my Flickr account. Prior to the 2.0 OS, you couldn’t even copy and paste a URL, but even after you could, it just wasn’t as quick and convenient as most tasks are on an iPhone. Sure, you can use one of the 3rd party services like yFrog or TwitPic, which might be fine for a throw away snapshot you don’t really care about, but if it’s something you’d like to reference in the future, or have control over how and where it’s used, they simply don’t seem like a good option. I merely wanted to snap a photo, enter a title, tap a button or two, and the photo upload to a Flickr set and automatically post to Twitter. Enter Flickit.

It wasn’t evident when I first starting using the app how to accomplish this. Even after I explored the app and found in the default metadata settings an option to post to Twitter or your blog, I didn’t see how to actually enter my Twitter credentials within the app. I then thought perhaps it was a Flickr setting, and looked into the settings for Flickr for the ability to connect to Twitter. Again, I didn’t see any obvious option.

Finally, I emailed the developer to inquire how exactly to accomplish this. Maybe it was just me, but the solution certainly didn’t seem intuitive, which isn’t usually the norm with Flickr. You have to go to your account->extending flickr->your blogs->edit. From the dropdown, you can then select Twitter as the type of weblog you have. Then within Flickit, in the aforementioned settings->default metadata, you can choose to autopost to Twitter, in addition to setting defaults for title, tags, description, sets and groups. You do have the choice within Flickit to not post to Twitter on individual uploads by altering the setting for that image, so you are not locked into tweeting every upload.

Now, you can easily snap a photo, even from within the app, quickly upload it to Flickr, and it will post the title and URL of the photo’s Flickr page to Twitter. Still not the same as a Twitter client harnessing the Flickr API and allowing you to write a full tweet, upload the image, and embed the URL like they do with the other 3rd party apps, but it sure beats using 3 apps and cutting and pasting a link, or compromising in choice of image hosting. Oh, and did I mention Flickit is free?

Watching MSNBC this evening, the Haitian Ambassador to the United States reminded me, and declared to the rest of the country it was Haiti who helped the United States make the Louisiana Purchase. The comments were in direct response to Pat Robertson’s despicable comments about Haiti’s “deal with the devil”.

Had Haiti not defeated Napoleon’s army in Saint-Domingue, the course of history would have changed dramatically. We often forget such events, and take our country for granted, not thinking such a small country could have had such a monumental effect on our history and success.

Anyway, this bit of history aside, I can’t believe there’s an American alive who would want to politicize and criticize the rush to help the people of Haiti (*cough*, Limbaugh, *cough*). I’ve tried to do my little part after seeing a tweet that Small Dog Electronics was matching donations to Doctors Without Borders. All I could think about is the families of all the people that I’ve worked with over the years in the restaurant business, and what if it was my family. I know they would do the same.

I will never be a javascript ninja, but that doesn’t stop me from voraciously collecting bookmarks to jQuery plugins and tutorlals. I’ve vowed to myself to become better acquainted with the library this year, and what better way than to follow 14 Days of jQuery? 14 Days of jQuery is launching on, wait, for it January 14^th, to celebrate the release of jQuery 1.4, which happens to also be the birthday of the incredibly useful, lightweight library.

What is particularly nice about this event is that it it’s being managed by the actual jQuery team, and not just some people looking to cash in on its popularity, so I look forward to the new releases, videos and tutorials that will be announced over the two weeks.

They are also doing a promotion where if you donate $20 or more to the project, you get your choice of one of several jquery/javascript e-books. Budget permitting, I may cash in on that, as donating to an open source project is always good karma, and a book would go far towards my goal of becoming more familiar with jQuery. I’ve got my eye on the jQuery for Designers, which probably would cover what I’m most interested in learning.