As mentioned in a previous post about todo.sh / manager I wanted to remove colours for done items. For me it seems a bit pointless to have colours in items that don't need any more attention. It took me some fondling but I managed to get it done, yaay! Uploaded a .diff for the original todo.sh and changed the manager-diff to include these changes. To apply the patch, download the .diff to the directory that contains 'todo.sh' and type: patch todo.sh < todocolours.diff

The script goes from this output:

to: !

Recently I discovered Texmate, after searching for a nice text-editor for my mac. As I planned to save most of my personal files as plain text, I wanted something that could handle my needs and wants. I love a well implemented drawer and even though Textmate doesn't show a drawer by default, it does give me one with my Projects (aaah Projects! such a wonderful feature!).

I very much like the perl-bundle and the other programming bundles. Those make the cake. The icing, however, consists of the blogging bundle, the fact that while typing an e-mail I can press ^⌘E and the entire text goes into textmate where I can edit it, the fact that I can use snippets to easily create replies to e-mails without having to type the same paragraphs over and over (yes, I know about mailtemplate, it just doesn't do it for me), and that I can learn about handy little macros on other blogs.

Now, only mission left for today, making manager/todo.sh not display colours for done items.

The todo.txt manager by Gina Trapani moved to a new site recently and has a nice short film to show you what you can do with it and how to use it.

I wrote previously that I edited the script to work as my own text-file manager. I updated the script and created a new .diff

Same changes apply.

A few years ago I sorted through my photos and put all my prints in boxes, sorted per year, month and event (rolls seperated by the indexprint).

With digital stuff, I tend to sort based on Category:

• friends & family
• work
• party/holiday/birthday
• vacation
• dog
• fun stuff

I have more categories in some other areas of my life, these basically apply to nearly all areas, nearly all the time. If I don't use it, I'll just not use it.

The problem with digital photos: I have many, I want them sorted in various way, cause I want to use the digital aspect, I want photos sorted into birthday and family and dog at the same time. With my computer I should be able to find a photo easily if I type 'sister birthday'. That searchstring should just give me all the birthdayphotos of all my sisters.

Except it doesn't, because until recently 'tagging' didn't really happen on my computer. Not that I didn't want to, I just couldn't find a way to do it in a way that came natural to me.

Yesterday, I realized my good old print system would work quite well for my basic digital sorting, as a start.

I created a tree-structure looking like this:

• 2005
• 02_zoo
• 03_momsbirthday
• 06_eurotrip
• 2006
• 03_puppy
• 05_Rome

Basically, I go for $year, and then for $month$event. The files inside the directories I have renamed to $mm$dd$event$number.jpg (month and date based on EXIF data).

I then created the basic category, along side the yearfolders, but also with years as subfolders, so I get this:

• friends & family
• 2005
• 2006
• work
• 2005
• 2006
• party/holiday/birthday
• vacation
• 2005
• 2006
• dog
• 2005
• 2006
• fun stuff
• 2005
• 2006
• 2005
• 2006

Any image of an event I bump into that falls into one of the categories (99% of the photos covered), I'll put in these folder by creating an alias (symlink) of the original photo and move it to the sub-yearfolder. This way, one photo can go in multiple categories and I'll never have to do funky stuff to open it, opening the link leads to opening of the file.

Yesterday I installed Remind after reading the article at 43folders.

I do like to know when the sun rises and sets, but somehow I couldn't get it to work straight away for Amsterdam, NL. The times were completely off. After putting a - in front of the longtitude it turned out fine.

Duh.

I put this in my ~/.reminders:

show sunrise/sunset
SET $LongDeg -4
SET $LongMin -55
SET $LongSec -6
SET $LatDeg 52
SET $LatMin 23
SET $LatSec 26
MSG sunrise at [sunrise(trigdate())],
MSG sunset at [sunset(trigdate())],
MSG next full moon at [moontime(2)] on [moondate(2)]%"%"%

My cell-phone provider lets me send messages to e-mail using txt and the reply will then come back to my cellphone through their e-mail to txt gateway.

This made me think of a setup where I'd send a message to my mailserver (txt message that gets forwarded to e-mail), requesting my shoppinglist. With all the new phones around a special phone e-mailaddress would also work.

First I activated the address by putting list@mydomain.com list in /etc/postfix/virtual and /etc/postfix/virtual-mailbox-maps

then I postmapped both: postmap /etc/postfix/virtual and postmap /etc/postfix/virtual-mailbox-maps (this step can wait till after the next one, but as it didn't really matter, why not straight away)

In the file /etc/postfix/aliases, I added: list: |/Users/tannie/bin/list.sh

This points the user 'list' to a script (the | puts it through) in my ~/bin directory called 'list.sh' View the content of that script

Anything else than 'list' will ofcourse work as an alias, you'd just have to set it up like that.

If I send a message to 'list+shop@mydomain.com' with the subject 'list @supermarket' it'll send back a message with the body:

potatoes @supermarket
 milk @supermarket @farmer
 eggs @supermarket

The script will only allow listing, it does pretend to 'do' things if you make the subject 'do 3' or something like that, but due to rights it won't actually do it. I don't mind, I just need it for listing anyway.

After discovering the todo.txt manager by Gina Trapani from lifehacker I decided to give it a try. All todo-applications annoyed the hell out of me, even though I really do like a good GUI. It just never did what I wanted to do, involved a lot of mouse-clicking and most of the time took too much time to set up and adjust to my needs. I don't mind using a mouse, but using only a mouse makes my arm hurt.

The project has since moved to todotxt.com and I joined the mailinglist. My version has a few additions the current official version doesn't have and I've uploaded the .diff.

The most important changes I made:

• Removed the need for a temporary file
• Items marked as 'done' get 'x:done ' in front of them. I prefer x:done over just plain x, x:done immediately means 'marked done' in my brain
• The x:done part gets stripped when archiving / reporting.
• The reportfile has a year attached, so it looks like report2006.txt
• The donefile gets created per week, looking like 2006-25.txt
• Creating multiple lists by using symlinks. I use 'manager' as a name for the script, and created symlinks to keep a shoppinglist and a todolist seperately (ln -s manager todo). The archive directory and the lists use the linkname to create the names, running 'todo' means it checks 'listtodo.txt', running 'shop' means it checks 'listshop.txt'
• The script does not yet create the archive directory, this needs a 'mkdir archives/shop' (or todo or whatever)
• Pretty outlining:

 1 do laundry
10 wash windows
 5 hoover

It all should 'just work' but be sure to backup your existing copy of your todo-list and your todo.sh.