Orgzly Revived: a community-maintained version of Orgzly
github.com
github.com
These days, I prefer (fountain) pen and paper, but I still like to throw org-mode syntax across notebooks - it is a no-brainer to retype it or try with some OCR in the future.
Synchthing is mentioned often with Orgzly, so I looked into Syncthing. I've been disappointed to find Syncthing drains the phone battery excessively if you enable continuous (event-driven) two-way sync between phone and server.
The problem is Syncthing doesn't hook into the phone's notification delivery service, so it can only pick up changes by keeping a socket open to the server and sending packets often, throughout the day, to keep the socket alive. Even if there are no file changes to report. That drains the battery much faster than, say, a chat app that uses the notification service to send triggers from the server to the phone when there's a new message. (I wrote about technical reasons why that's more battery-efficient here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38661294).
Does anyone have a recommendation that will keep notes in Orgzly two-way synchronised with Org files on my server, reliably, without draining the phone battery excessively, and without a long delay for changes on the server to propagate to the phone?
Edited to add: In Orgzly Revived go to Settings -> Sync -> Repositories and add https://myfiles.fastmail.com/subfoldername/ (I use "Org")
It very much depends on your workflow. Some people may need to use different org files for quickly capturing notes on both phone and desktop while avoiding conflicts. (Luckily, both Orgzly and org-mode has good support for combining content from multiple files.)
But in general, the git repository type (still in beta) allows two way syncing without unnecessary conflicts.
This version also ships and Android Quick Settings tile that will start Syncthing for those X minutes and stop it outside of that schedule, so I'll hit the button as I'm putting on shoes to go out after making a shopping list on my phone or what have you
You can use more restrictive run conditions, and limit how much time it spends per hour active.
You can also limit it to run only when charging or on specific networks.
[0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.catfriend1.syncth...
I used Joplin for about a year and ended up taking a lot of notes. But after a year it was so full of garbage that I found it increasingly difficult to keep things tagged, clearing my "inbox" of quickly taken notes. And it ended up looking like my work email inbox.
The catalyst for giving it up was a subtle policy change at work that made me worry about using a personal note taking app with sync to my personal cloud service. I decided to fork my notes into work and personal. Midway through, I just stopped taking long lived notes entirely. I now have one less chore to do.
The same thing happened with my RemMarkable 2. in fact I tired of the RM2 in a much shorter time because it was such a nightmare to sync, search handwritten text etc etc. Pity, because regular note taking apps suck at drawing and diagramming.
Sure, I will forget stuff, but whatever. Most people forget stuff.
Perhaps it's time to revive Joplin and use that Zen-thingemy that was on HN today, the AI tool that gulps your notes and browser history and provides a summariser / searcher? Perhaps that's the only way to take the pain out of note taking apps?
If you want to take notes seriously you need a desktop.
Emacs on android and a keyboard also lets you take notes seriously.
You could use big text, so you can't see that much text onscreen, but it could ironically make it easier to write productively.
On a touch any human type a limited fraction of WPM than with a computer keyboard and the mental effort is much higher. They are just consumption devices, Emacs is meant more to produce than consume, like classic desktops vs modern ones.
We are human, able to consume, but also to produce content, not to be driven by a remote platform but to drive ourselves with the computing to help, see the classic http://augmentingcognition.com/assets/Kay1977.pdf this is the model...
...Ok, they didn't say Bluetooth, but why else would they mention a keyboard?
Mobile is pushed for a reason: it's the best platform for surveillance capitalism, the best solution to profile users and assure they only consume, not create anything significant. For users mobile stuff are just complement of real desktops, those who tried the capitalism narrated model "go mobile, it's the future" never do well except maybe for a short honeymoon timeframe.
Desktop side unfortunately 90% of the substantial development was stopped decades ago, but we still have something and we need it, similarly the "homeserver" model never really took off, but we have something and we desperately need it. The cloud+mobile path is the common Clod Cam you can see on insecam and on the logs of a DDOS attack together with many commercial domestic NAS devices and other "smart" stuff, is the path where "your photos, music, ebooks, ..." exists as long as the third party service managing them exists "for life", of the service, not yours, at the condition the service decide to offer until it change the offer and the price or simply change APIs and your nice app crash and you have to rush to implement something and keep it going IF is still possible, take a look at some Chrome extensions upon Chrome API changes...
Notes might be just the digital equivalent of a scrap paper note to remember the milk, but might also be your college and professional notes for a lifetime, so they potentially hold a BIG value, no wise person can endanger such value rooting it on mobile/cloud land. Oh, and that value is not just the mere text, but also the tools that enable a certain workflow, so the ability to download some MD files does not suffice, at all.
> clearing my "inbox" of quickly taken notes
I always have a note pinned on top called "Clipboard". Sometimes I name it "Snippets". Earlier I used to call it "Jottings".
Long running tasks that get rewritten enough times get put in the calendar or a reminder. Anything else that seems important goes in the personal wiki of choice but honestly a lot of the notes are just ephemeral and don’t survive when I switch to a new notebook. And that’s perfectly fine!
That said, my wife bought a hardback diary/planner that has a really nice layout for days/weeks and she uses it every evening.
I simply cannot imagine leaving the comfort of org-mode for something inferior like markdown, even though there are cool plugins in the Obsidian ecosystem.
Question if you are an Obsidian user - what are your most important plugins?
I use it for obsidian and I had quite a bit of annoyances with it until I started having a node running on a VPS that was always on and set the IP address /domain in the mobile application so that it connects almost instantly. Then it didn't matter what my phone and laptop were doing because they could both always connect to the VPS and syncing happened within a second or so.
- enable save/sync on resume orgzly
- ensure inotify based sync enabled on orgzly folder
- enable polling every minute on syncthing folder
- sync files by most recently modified
I wish there was something to make some sort of CRDT for modeling org though. I feel that the operation that ended up causing text conflicts in the past had obvious resolutions with the right structure and Metadata, but yeah, resorting to having a peer always on gets around it more easily that writing my own thing and deviating from emacs and orgzly
Internet disappearances have become more and more common since COVID times. Honestly scares me
- Against Georgia (2008)
- against Ichkeria, twice (1994, 1999)
- against Afghanistan (Dec 24, 1979 – Feb 15, 1989)
Just to name a few. ‘As a Russian, I’d rather avoid any responsibility for the actions of my government and play a victim card, telling everyone I didn’t vote for it, so it’s everyone else’s problem.’ Yeah, sounds very Russian to me. Very Russian indeed.
We care about Ukraine and its people, the US care about money and power.
[0]: https://linmob.net/using-the-pinephone-pro-daily-despite-hav...
At the moment I have a script that calls org-html-export-to-html which I sync to view, but obviously can't update on the device (without setting up emacs).
And Keep has a nearly perfect sync, but it's on Google for this. While with orgzly you are on your own, which can be annoying depending on how you sync.