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Pimutils: The coreutils of personal information management

pimutils.org

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Re: Pimutils: The coreutils of personal information management

#3
2/3 of these Perosnal Information Management tools were featured on a recent "my desktop" set up from noted command-line user Hund[1]. Bunch of other great console tools here too, if folks are interested.

Makes me think a bit of one of the original-ganger XML namespaces, pim/space[2]. Spaces for your personal information management. There are very old threads for this, going way back.

I'd say Atom Publishing Protocol came close. We think of Atom as an RSS competitor, but it was part of a broader general information organization & manipulation effort with Atom Publishing Protocol, which included more about ways to manage & append & write information, into feeds, which existed in collections, across workspaces[3].

Tim Berners-Lee is still hard at work, trying to distill out a useful, general means of wrangling one's & other's information. The team seems to have just released Inrupt, their implementation of the Solid specifications for linked data[4]. Which is helping power some of the latest BBC & NHS & NatWest (a bank) systems[5].

Personally I think Personal Information Management is a wonderful white whale for folks to chase. We can land it, & it will make a huge difference to all if we do. As for where we are now, I rather enjoy the JSON-LD & SOLID & Linked-Data world, think there are great specs there, for building better general systems atop, and hope we can start to rebalance some of the questions of control over computing & data with these more general systems.

[1] https://hunden.linuxkompis.se/2020/11/13/my-desktop-november...

[2] https://www.w3.org/ns/pim/space

[3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5023#section-8.1

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25211816

[5] https://money.yahoo.com/nhs-data-creator-sir-tim-110816726.h...

Re: Pimutils: The coreutils of personal information management

#4
I've been looking for a kanban tool for which I can own the data (self hosted), and preferably that the data is a human manipulated format (Markdown ideally).

Does anyone know of something like that? I haven't found a satisfactory solution so I've been building one, but I keep feeling like I'm wasting my time and that there must be something else available. In any case I am planning on releasing it as a desktop app and mobile (Android, iOS) at some point. Right now I just use Syncthing to sync across devices - you just point the app to a directory of Markdown files.

Re: Pimutils: The coreutils of personal information management

#5
post #2

khal looks quite cool. Does anyone have some experience with it?

I have khal (calendar), khard (vcards) and todoman (todo on caldav) installed and use them occasionally. I mostly use my phone and thunderbird to manage contacts and calendars - so they don't find regular use. However, they all are really nice curses/cli tools if you live on the terminal. I don't have any complaints when I do use them. The biggest attraction though is vdirsyncer, a service used to synchronize CalDAV and CardDAV to a directory. Khal and others interface only with this directory and not directly with the server. Vdirsyncer allows you to easily backup and migrate your calendars and contacts between different servers. This is a huge relief if you consider how opaque and locked-in most calendar/contacts services are.

Re: Pimutils: The coreutils of personal information management

#6

I've been looking for a kanban tool for which I can own the data (self hosted), and preferably that the data is a human manipulated format (Markdown ideally). Does anyone know of something like that? I haven't found a satisfactory solution so I've been building one, but I keep feeling like I'm wasting my time and that there must be something else available. In any case I am planning on releasing it as a desktop app a…

possibly a candidate for an Ask HN post - I don't use one so can't recommend but "self hosted kanban" does produce some pretty clear top results.

Re: Pimutils: The coreutils of personal information management

#7
Spec for a tool I want written but am too lazy to make happen: journal - an append-only personal log.

Timestamps all input and appends it to a log file. Inputs can be either arguments to the command, or read from stdin if piped to.

Log file should be parseable with grep and other coreutils, but an indexed option might be useful for time range queries.

Re: Pimutils: The coreutils of personal information management

#8
post #7

Spec for a tool I want written but am too lazy to make happen: journal - an append-only personal log. Timestamps all input and appends it to a log file. Inputs can be either arguments to the command, or read from stdin if piped to. Log file should be parseable with grep and other coreutils, but an indexed option might be useful for time range queries.

https://jrnl.sh/ ?

Re: Pimutils: The coreutils of personal information management

#9
post #7

Spec for a tool I want written but am too lazy to make happen: journal - an append-only personal log. Timestamps all input and appends it to a log file. Inputs can be either arguments to the command, or read from stdin if piped to. Log file should be parseable with grep and other coreutils, but an indexed option might be useful for time range queries.

To write:

    systemd-cat -t mylogs 
To read:

    journalctl -t mylogs --since yesterday

Re: Pimutils: The coreutils of personal information management

#10

I've been looking for a kanban tool for which I can own the data (self hosted), and preferably that the data is a human manipulated format (Markdown ideally). Does anyone know of something like that? I haven't found a satisfactory solution so I've been building one, but I keep feeling like I'm wasting my time and that there must be something else available. In any case I am planning on releasing it as a desktop app a…

There are a few single file kanban scripts that store in your browsers local storage.

https://github.com/linuxcaffe/tw-kanban-js https://greggigon.github.io/my-personal-kanban/ -- I use this sometimes

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