Cleaning up some loose notes

I use Linux for my computer (specifically, a Gnome 3 desktop environment on top of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for those who are interested). Linux has a nice little note-taking program called Tomboy that makes it easy to cross-reference notes because it automatically creates hyperlinks to other notes when you mention them. For example, I have a note called "layout" where I put all my ideas for page layouts; when I type "layout" in another note, the word "layout" automatically becomes a link to the "layout" note. I stopped using it because the Ubuntu One cloud service (similar to Dropbox) stopped supporting Tomboy's online syncing. In addition, the only app for my phone that could sync with Tomboy would only allow reading notes and not editing/creating them. I found that to be only slightly better than useless.

I started using Evernote instead. Evernote doesn't automatically link your notes together like Tomboy, but it does have some other useful features. It's available as a desktop app (which I have installed on my Windows 7 partition for when I need to boot into Windows for something) and as a web application (which I have pinned in a Chrome tab so it's always at hand). It allows the use of tags to make it easy to categorize notes and sort them later. And it has a very neat browser extension that allows you to select part or all of a webpage and save it as a note. I've clipped a lot of interesting snippets with this feature: online articles, forum posts, pictures, or other things that sparked an idea.

I didn't have a lot of time to work on the game this evening, but I did try to do something useful to keep my promise. I exported my Tomboy notes to .HTML and put them into my cloud folders for safe keeping. Then I opened them in Chrome and clipped their contents to Evernote. My next project will be to use the Evernote app on my phone to sort through and upload scans of my loose paper notes and tattered notebooks. This will let me put everything in one place to more easily sort it out and put things together.

In the past, I always wanted to have hard copies because I've lost files in the past to hard drive failures or lost USB drives. Using paper notebooks felt safer to me, but now I'm satisfied that I have enough redundancy to go completely digital. I've got all my files backed up in several places at once (Evernote, Dropbox, Box, Ubuntu One, Google Drive, and--on the rare occasions I boot into Windows 7--everything gets backed up to Skydrive too). I've even got a portable 1TB hard drive for back ups too, so I'm not really worried about losing my files anymore.