Vyanne went all out and prepared a tea party on Sunday. She was nearly finished making her cupcakes, tarts, scones and sandwiches before deciding on who to invite for tea. Fortunately our friends all live within walking distance of our place so it was easy to get people to just waltz over.

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First free day I get due to the perks of where I work and I didn’t even plan what I was going to do with today. Was planning to get the car serviced (the car dealership picks up the car, so eventhough I pay a bit more, I save time on having to send the car to service myself) so I decided to take today off. Heh, will try to get as much done as possible today.

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(Side rant for archiving purposes)

I’ve been looking for a way to jot down notes on the fly where ever I may be and MyTextFile is pretty decent to use but it gets a little cluttered after putting too many thoughts into it. The other problem with it was that if I had no access to the Internet, I can’t really jot down anything. Now I have two applications that help, with MyTextFile useful as a quick and dirty method to note stuff down. The apps I’m referring to are Dropbox and TiddlyWiki. Heh, they don’t sound like inspiring names, but when used together, they are pretty helpful.

Dropbox is basically a sort of filing system in the cloud, where you can install this little app in your computer, and have it sync the Dropbox folder. Basically you just drag and drop files into the specified Dropbox folder and it automatically syncs to the Dropbox server. Now, if you are working on another computer with Dropbox installed, when you start it up, it automatically connects and syncs the files that you changed on another computer. There is also a web interface (which I use for work as I don’t want to install stuff on my work computer) where you can access all the files you have in your Dropbox folder. Upload an edited file from work in the Dropbox website, go home, and you get the latest version synced to your desktop when you login to it. No need to carry USB sticks to sync files or forget to unplug it when you leave for home.

So Dropbox solves the problem of having a physical copy of the file when you are offline and syncing it to whatever device you are using when you are online. Now to explain what TiddlyWiki is, which is basically just a SINGLE html file that works like as a wiki to note stuff. This is as portable as it gets as you don’t need to install any software (any browser can render a html page) and being a single file, syncing it to Dropbox doesn’t get messy.

There is a slightly steep learning curve involving learning the syntax to format words but once you get used to it, it’s fairly quick to setup globs of information that link to each other in a coherent manner.

Now I’m just keeping daily thoughts, links to properties I’m looking, guides to setup Linux on systems etc. all in the one file. It is easily searchable too so it makes for a fairly useful notebook.