Trying a Personal Note-taking/Wiki System

After some thought about which personal note-taking and wiki system I'm going to try to use Zim, a python-built desktop wiki system.

The documentation and install files are given here: http://zim-wiki.org/manual/About.html. 

The point of Zim is to print a personal file/wiki system to your computer. I am going to use Zim on my desktop but stored in Dropbox or AeroFS to use as my online backup. We'll see how it goes. 

Saving terminal sessions

It's really frustrating when you're working on a coding project, opening all your nice tabs in the terminal in tmux to make your workflow awesome, and then for one reason or another your computer turns off. You lose all of your tabs in your terminal and have to reconstruct them, spending some time re-learning where things are mapped to in your terminal. I would love for there to be a terminal that preserves itself against a system reboot - when your computer turns back on for your terminal to reconstruct it's state.

A few suggestions I've gotten:

• Use tmux

http://blog.edsantiago.com/articles/tmux-session-preserve/
http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/2641409235/a-tmux-crash-course
Turns out, I already do. I tested this after a reboot and the tmux sessions don't get saved. This could have been because the last reboot I did was a linux kernel update, but I'm not sure.

• Use the KDE terminal emulator. There might be something good there, but I need to read a bit more about it before I try it out.

The Search for a Perfect Text Editor

I've used Vim for the last few years of text editing (basically since I've switched over to Linux to do programming) and I have mostly good things to say. I haven't über-nerded out and used all the plugins available, so I haven't fully used Vim to the fullest (I don't even use gVim...) but I'm always open to new tools that increase my productivity. 

I've been recently told about SublimeText2 for text editing, and I'm going to try it out on one particular project just to see what it's like. First, I should make sure to read about good workflow patterns in sublime: 
https://tutsplus.com/course/improve-workflow-in-sublime-text-2/

Note-taking tools

I'm looking for suggestions for a personal note-taking product to keep track of notes, ideas, links, images, and cool things. 

As best I can, here is a list of features I require:

• Some kind of offline editing or accessing
• Ability to upload images
• Searchable, or some kind of hierarchical structure so they can be referenced later
• Easy-to-use (flexible on this one, but it can't disrupt my workflow a bunch)
• Must be able to use on Linux

So far the suggestions I've heard are as follows:

• Personal blog
• Jekyll
• MediaWiki hosted somewhere
• EverNote (mac-only, so for Linux OneNote has been suggested)
• ORG-mode for Emacs (or Vim - I'm a vim user)
• SimpleNote
• GoogleDocs
• TiddlyWiki
• Asana
• Tomboy
• text files on Dropbox
• scanned PDF of notes uploaded to Mendeley or some other PDF annotation software
• http://www.webupd8.org/2012/09/everpad-integrates-evernote-with-ubuntu.html
• Zim (http://zim-wiki.org/manual/About.html)

I'm going to come back and make notes about each of these things later when I've had a second to look at them.

Awesome Opossum

Is so cute. Maddie decided that snarkiness deserves an animal, and alliteration was quite high that day.

Mt. Passaconway Adventure

I have been really bad about posting my hiking adventures here, but since I'm riding in the car back to Boston where the other two participants are driving and I can't think of much to say to the driver, I'm going to recount our adventures today.

This is the fourth weekend (Sunday) of Winter School 2012 and I'm nominally a leader, but I only led one trip this time around. This Sunday I wanted to hike Mt. Washington, but I signed up 3 minutes too late and had to be cut from the trip. So instead I went on my first winter bushwack at Mt. Passaconaway. The group was 9 big - 2 MIT undergrad leaders, 2 MIT undergrads, 1 MEng, 1 Northeastern undergrad, 1 MIT alum, and 1 BU grad student. This was easily the trip with the most undergrads I've ever been on during winter school.

Ben and John, our leaders, had been on an abandonded slide trail on Mt. Passaconaway this past fall that ran through a bunch of waterfalls. Of course they thought this would be awesome to see in the winter! So after leaving Boston at 5am and waiting at Dunkin Donuts for more than an hour while one of the cars dealt with a flat tire, we hit the trail around 9:30am.

We started up the Downes Brook Trail, eventually looking for a drainage that would lead to part of the abandonded trail. We had 4 stream crossing bushwacks we had to go and about 3 miles before we were supposed to hit the slide trail. Fortunately, the Sorel boots are super waterproof and there were no mishaps, so we found the drainage after a beautiful 2-hour hike. And when we started hiking up the drainage we put on our crampons and took out our ice axes to walk up the waterfalls. The view was gorgeous - every 100 feet or so therr would be a 50 degree crampon/scramble and then a small clearing featuring a beautiful frozen waterfall. In most cases, the water underneath the frozen waterfall was still flowing.

We hiked up another few hours, until we hit the split in the drainage. At this point it was 1:30 so we decided to turn around, but wlif we had kept going would have taken the right fork straight up to the summit of Mt. Passaconaway. My first winter bushwack was successful and fun. I definitely want to go back in the winter to bushwack up to the summit!

Pot Roast: An Experiment in Cooking

A few weeks back I got a free piece of beef from Camelot Keyholder training (Pavel didn't want to leave it in the fridge and didn't want to take it back with him). So I decided to (along with some of my free potatoes and free vegetable broth) to make a pot roast.

Earlier today I covered small potato pieces with salt, pepper, thyme, and oil to make roasted potatoes in the oven. I kept them in for about an hour and a half at 375. They were tender, perhaps too tender. Keeping them in the oven for half an hour less would have made them equally tasty.

For the pot roast, I did the following:

• Rubbed salt and pepper into the meat
• Stuck some baby carrots into slits in the meat
• Seared all the sides of the meat in a pan on medium heat to seal in the juices
• Put the meat on a cookie tray while using the pan I seared it in to bring vegetable broth, onion, salt, pepper, bay leaves, carrots, and potatoes to a simmer
• Put the meat back into the pan, cover with foil, and put it in the oven
• Keep it in the oven at 375 for 3.5 hours, checking on it approximately every hour
• Potentially uncover the meat and turn down the heat towards the end of the 3.5 hours (I turned the heat down to 250 for the last hour and a half - the important part is to keep the liquid at a simmer)

I started this process at about 8:30pm by rubbing the salt and pepper into the meat. I was originally going to use red wine for the liquid, but decided to use vegetable broth instead, and drink the wine with the pot roast instead. It will be done in about half an hour, after which I will try it, wrap it, and eat it for lunch tomorrow.