• 6 Posts
  • 59 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: March 24th, 2024

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  • I’ve been using todo.txt for tasks for about a month now—it’s dead simple, supports all the bells and whistles you mentioned; and, with the topydo CLI, you can very easily make yourself a kanban interface using its columns UI. I sync the files with my iPhone and use Todooo on iOS, which works beautifully.

    As for notes, I just write simple text files with my favorite editor. Maintaining complex systems of interconnected notes, I’ve found, most often does not pay off for the enormous time investment required (some specific use cases aside); tags, links, etc. I have all found to be superfluous—any kind of grep integration in the editor is all that’s needed for finding things. I write in either markdown or Typst, because basic Typst is essentially the same as markdown anyway, and because I’ve found it very useful to keep notes in the same format I write longer-form documents in.



  • My final straw was getting a new MacBook Air (I was at that point fine with how UNIX-y macOS was) and realizing I couldn’t dock the laptop to more than one external monitor without some weird hacky third-party software fix. Why, you ask? Well not at all because the laptop technically couldn’t do it, but because Apple said it can’t, because they want to overcharge you on a Pro.

    I promptly returned the MacBook, bought a Framework on eBay, and learned NixOS.

    10/10, I haven’t looked back since.







  • The people I know in my program (undergrad History) use their computers for little more than Google Chrome (specifically Google’s Office suite), a PDF reader (sometimes also Google Chrome), sometimes Zotero, and sometimes MS Word. We get a lot of Mac’s around here, so one can imagine Microsoft products are not highly relied upon, generally speaking.

    Everything’s through the browser nowadays, so I’d say just pick a stable distro, install 2 or three browsers in case something doesn’t work (like Google Docs with Firefox in my experience…), and submit everything as PDF.

    Can’t speak much to LibreOffice as I write my papers in Typst (and before that in LaTeX, which got me brownie points with some of the older professors), which I find much faster, easier, and more flexible than WYSIWYG word processors.