LXDE on Ubuntu

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The laptop won’t let me dual boot. That’s coz the lappy isn’t actually mine, it’s the office laptop. So I was running Ubuntu in Virtualbox all this time. Ubuntu 9.10  (I know!). But then I switched to 12.04 – Precise Pangolin. Unity is pretty cool now compared to what it was back then in 11.04. However it’s a no-no for running in a VBox. Switched to gnome classic sans effects which improved the performance drastically.

I had used LXDE for a few months about an year back in my netbook. So I thought, why not give it a go again? Without removing the existing gnome packages, I typed,

sudo apt-get install lxde-core

into the terminal. It gave me the LXDE desktop, but that’s as far as it went. Just the desktop. No Leafpad, no PCMan, no LXTerminal, nothing. Hey, that isn’t LXDE! What’s LXDE without Leafpad or PCMan? So I went ahead and typed,

sudo apt-get install lxde

and, voila, here I have what I wanted. (Lesson: don’t install lxde-core, just use lxde and it gives you everything)

LXDE desktop on Ubuntu
From left to right, Leafpad, PCMan file browser and LXTerminal (click to enlarge)

Okay, the interface isn’t as polished as that of gnome, that’s a given. It’s only supposed to be lighter and faster. But unfortunately it felt like the system isn’t much comfortable having LXDE around. It felt like the kernel’s carrying a bulk. Not as smooth as the classic gnome experience. I know this isn’t the way it’s supposed to happen, so I’d try this for two or three days and switch back to gnome. Good thing I didn’t remove the gnome packages before installing.

Oh wait, perhaps it’s a good time to try out XFCE!

Evernote for GTD?

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Life is boring. It’s the little things in life that helps you keep the interest. To keep the embers burning. To make the mundane stuff exciting. To keep it real. To keep you diverted from… oh well, I love being redundant. And what a thoughtful way to start a blog post. 😛

Now to the real stuff.

Among the other bazillion things it can be used for, people have been using Evernote as a GTD tool. (For those who are unfamiliar with GTD, it’s the younger brother of to-do lists, who is dead, by the way. Faq here.) Had read a lot about this in blogs and forums, but never bothered to make the first move until three months back. Before this, I’d been using a GTD-optimized version of TiddlyWiki for a few months and doit.im for about two weeks.

The first attempt was a disaster; in fact, the project was given up three or four days later. The main reason being that I just wanted to implement a GTD system but didn’t have a solid idea how to carry on with it. But about six weeks ago I started the whole thing afresh and have been using it with good results ever since.

There are quite a few tutorials, rants and forum posts in the interwebs on how people set up GTD in Evernote successfully. So I wouldn’t go as far as to document my whole procedure here. If you’d like some inspiration, I’d recommend Ruud’s Evernote GTD How To and this shared notebook by bluecockatoo. Just search for ‘evernote gtd’ and you’d find dozens of other links.

One thing to keep in mind is that you’d have to make maximum use Tags and Saved Searches in Evernote for this. Just one notebook is enough for the whole system; it’s the powerful world of tags and saved searches that make the foundation of the whole scene. Ruud’s post mentioned above describes these things in great detail.

For reminders (ticklers, in GTD slang), I’m using FollowUpThen. Here’s a video on GTD + Evernote + FollowUpThen.

Wanted to write some more but I’m being summoned for dinner. So… another time! 🙂