There a standard formats for the things we use everyday, such as email, music, calendars, and photos, and this is so that they can easily be manipulated and shared through different programs and operating system; however, although there are many note-taking tools out there, there is no one standard format, and as such, our note data becomes fragmented through incompatible mediums. It would be much easier for developers and end users to have a single format that everyone used when developing note applications.

I’ve tried to come up with a basic, open framework for notes that anybody can use, and it can be easily extensible so third party features can be coded in. It also provides version IDs and author information, so developers can provide functions to sync and share notes. I think that it’s important not to define too much information in a notes format because a lot of things should be handled by the client, and so therefore they can all intergrate it into their own clients.

I’ve published my initial idea to Google Docs, but I’d like lots of feedback so I can develop it further, so feel free to give me your input & criticisms; the first draft is very rough and I’d like to improve it a lot in the future. Anyone’s welcome to use it and build upon it but please link back to me if you do, and I’ll give you a mention on my blog.

[https://docs.google.com/View?id=ah7rdrmx7vm4_60hrpdxwct]
Photo: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/yggg/130617196/]

Maybe this’ll be the solution to my notes dilemma?

Things I used:

• GMail
• Thunderbird

Is it really that simple? Here’s what I did.

1. Created a ‘Notes’ folder in my GMail account. Set it as the default templates folder in Thunderbird.
2. Created a plus sign GMail address, and a GMail filter to put all email to here in the Notes folder.
3. Write my note in a new email. A sample one might look like this:

To: Me+notes@someone.gmail.com
Subject: @Music @Money @ToDo
Message: Ask Dan about that £10 I lent him – maybe use it to buy tickets for that Gig?

Now, to save the note, either hit the send button, or save it as a ‘template’ in Thunderbird.

Checklist: Offline access? Yup, through iMap I can access the notes offline. Online web access? Yeah, just log in through GMail. Portability? Of course! Email can go anywhere, so I can have my notes on any platform, sync’d whenever I need them. Features? Uh huh, the subject line acts as tags, and I can search the notes through GMail’s powerful search front-end. I also have permanent notes (when I send the email) and ongoing editing notes (by saving them as templates). I can embed HTML into them, too.

Ok, it ain’t perfect…yet. It’s the best solution I have so far, and I intend to stick to it for a while – Google are managing my email, my calendar, my search, my photos, and now my notes!

Recently I’ve spent a lot of time on my deviantArt page as opposed to my blog.

As well as submitting new poems and content to deviantArt, I’ve also completely revamped my page and gallery. It’s now a lot more organised with categories and more information about the work.
I’ve also posted to my dA journal, and favourite’d a lot of new pieces on dA too.

I’d be grateful if my blog readers that have dA accounts would hop on over to my page and give me critique on my stuff, subscribe to me, whatever.

Thanks everyone.

[http://clibra.deviantart.com/]

Between working and being with my friends, I want to express my more creative side this summer.
Chained and bound, my creativity doesn’t come out much. It’s a meeker part of me with amazing ideas, but not much skill – hopefully I can change that this summer.

My checklist:

• Make myself an awesome Mario Quilt
• Buy some cheap canvas shoes and make them personal
• Write chapter 2 of my epic poem (I wish), Angel’s Epitaph [http://clibra.deviantart.com/art/Angel-s-Epitaph-2-Interlude-100810501]
  
• Mod myself a NES Belt
• Write a poem, then translate it into Italian, Spanish and French [http://clibra.deviantart.com/art/The-Autumn-Life-93878661]
• Do something useful with my old floppy disks. [http://www.cutoutandkeep.net/projects/floppy_disk_pen_holder]

Here goes nothing. I hope I have time to do everything I want to do this summer, everything I need to do, be with all of my friends, and have some “me” time.

With Plaxo being bought by Comcast, people I know are feeling uneasy about trusting their data in Comcast’s hands.
But how many alternatives have we got for syncing? .Mac? Google? There a possibilities, but Plaxo is probably the best in it’s field.

I actually stumbled across a solution by accident – a fit of dragging and dropping in Outlook Express turned out to be viable.

What do we need?

• An iMap account of sorts (GMail?)
• Contacts stored on a computer

1. Get your contacts in a workable format – export them as VCF files. This will take a while if you’ve got a lot, but it’s worth it.
2. Open the VCF file in a text editor. You’ll get something like the following:

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
N:Doe
FN:John
NICKNAME:Jonny
EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:john.doe@gmail.com
etc

     3. Copy this into an email. Put the person’s name as the subject, and send it to your iMap account – store all of them in their own folder, maybe using filtering rules.

Now all of your contacts can be searched with your email – you can access them on any client (even the web if it’s a provider like GMail), and if you need to import them into a program, simply copy the body of the message into a text file and change the extension to *.vcf

Sync. Good. Observe:

[And by that I mean, here's my Sync set-up. As it changes, I'll update this post]

Notes: GMail
You may think it’s bizarre, but see my reasoning here.

Favourites: del.icio.us
The famous del.icio.us is plain and simple, but works great.

Browser: Mozilla Weave
Makes all your FireFox’s feel like one.

Files: Foldershare
Microsoft’s creation is distinctly un-evil. A fast, no-nonsense internet folder sync.

Email: GMail iMap
Storage increasing every day, and now I can have my email wherever I want.

News: Google Reader
So you can keep track of where you got up to reading feeds. It beats Offline clients with Gears, and I extend it with Read it Later and Better Greader.

Contacts: Plaxo
Anywhere you want your contacts, Plaxo will have them.

Tasks: Remember the Milk
Also uses Gears, Remember the Milk has gotten better and better over the years – and it was always great to begin with.

Chat logs: IM-History
Consolidate, sync, and access your Chat logs anywhere, on or offline.

Calendars: GCal
With tools such as Plaxo, Spanning Sync, Google Calendar Provider, and plain old Prism, Google Calendar syncs across anything. It also will SMS you reminders.

SMS: TreasureMyText
No bells & whistles, just simple SMS archive and synchronizing.

Passwords: PassPack
A very secure, very versatile password manager on the web.

Got some Holiday snaps? Wanna share photos without email? How about accessing photos on more than one computer?
Then PhotoCasting is for you.

PhotoCasting is a bit like a PodCast, only that instead of Audio files, Images are sent.
To view them, you just need an RSS reader (IE & FireFox both work fine), or if you’re using a Mac, iPhoto can organise your subscribed PhotoCast in many ways.

So how do we do this, without shelling out a .Mac subscription? Our good friend Google of Course!

You will need –

• Collection of photos
• Internet connection, Broadband recommended
• A Google Account
• Picasa Uploader (Mac) or Picasa (PC)

This guide is for PC users, but is essentially the same for the Mac.

Assuming you’ve already got your photo library into Picasa/iPhoto, let’s start.

1. Highlight the photos you want to include in your PhotoCast. Click the Web Album button.
2. Log in with your Google Account if prompted. From here, you can chose to create a new Album or Upload to an existing one, as well as other settings. Each Album will become a PhotoCast, so sort them however you like.
3. Click OK, and wait. Depending on the amount of photos, it could take a long time.
4. When that’s done, go to http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/home and navigate to your album. Scroll down to the bottom right hand corner, and click the little link labelled RSS. Distribute this link however, it’s your PhotoCast.

That’s all there is to it! One drawback, however, is that you manually have to add new photos to the PhotoCast, but the subscribers receive them automatically, and the maximum size of each PhotoCast is 500 photos.

Google Browser Sync is a gem. Google has the power and means to expand it, making it a complete sync system.

• Google desktop indexes files, right?
  So save the index online (possibly to the users GMail account) and sync specified parts of the index. If a file is requested – providing the ‘master’ computer is switched on and connected, it should be able to transfer over.
• In addition to the above, there should be a way to sync settings from one computer to another. This could cause a little hiccough on a Windows & Mac infrastructure, but it doesn’t need to be perfect.
• GMail iMap can be used to sync other email accounts, applying labels and rules to keep it out of regular GMail. Contacts can also be sent to GMail to be stored for syncing.
• iCal and Outlook could both be synchronised via Google Calendar. Notes could possibly be exported and converted to Google Notebook.
• Browser sync could be expanded to include FireFox extensions and settings. Once again, these could be stored by Gmail.

A lot more things could be done. Essentially, you just need to store files using GMail, or text-based items using Google Docs. If anybody wants to work on this idea, feel free, just post in the comments when you’re done. Failing that, I hope Google reads this!

As previously mentioned, I’m learning Japanese, and as a personal aid, I’ll be posting the notes I make to my blog.
Anyone can use these if they wish.

Hello – konichiwa
I am Chris – boku wa Chris desu
How are you? – genki desu ka?
I’m fine – hai, Genki desu.
Me too – kochira koso
Yes – hai
No – iie
Pleased to meet you – hajimemashite
Thank you – arigato
Very much – domo
Goodbye – sayonara

• Asking someone how they are is less common in Japan, used if you really want to know (ie if they look ill).
• The last letter of ‘desu’ is not pronounced.
• ‘Ka’ is a question internation particle, similar to a question mark.
• ‘-San’ is added onto the end of names, similar to Mr & Mrs.

That’s all for now. Will revise from these later. Sayonara!

This is something that I got from a friend a few years back, and I shunned the idea at first, but after I while I found out that it’s truly useful.

Like many other peoples desktops, mine was littered with files, downloads, programs and folders. It looked a mess, and you could hardly see the background.

The picture above is (with my background removed) what I did.
I created an overflow folder, with several category folders inside.
Now I just drag my desktop rubbish into these.