Comment on How do you capture things quickly across devices in a self-hosted setup?
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Syncthing functions as a sort of decentralized Dropbox or Google drive, by keeping folder content synchronized across any number of devices. I haven’t tried the iOS clients, but android, Linux, and windows work great.
oldany@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah Syncthing solves the “where does the data live” part really well.
What I kept struggling with is the step before that — actually capturing something in the moment, from whatever context you’re in.
Even with sync in place, I always felt like I still had to decide where to put things and which tool to use.
That’s where it starts to break down for me.
lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Pictures go in the pictures folder. Videos go in the videos folder. Documents go in the documents folder. Etc, etc…
All of these folders live in your
$USERfolder.oldany@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Good question 🙂
For me it’s mostly the small, in-the-moment things:
Not really structured notes — more like “things that appear during the day” that I don’t want to think about organizing right away.
That’s also why tools like Joplin or OneNote never quite fit for me in that specific moment — they work great once you sit down to write something, but not as much as a quick, frictionless entry point.
lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Right on. I actually saw your response to the other person down lower right after posting this 😂
I’m curious to see how you tackle this puzzle. I just text myself, but I know that doesn’t work for everyone…
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 1 day ago
On my phone, my Screenshot folder is syncthing’d to my desktop, so most of the time, capturing something in the moment is as simple as dragging three fingers down my screen. My Camera and default Download folders are also syncthing’d, so just taking a picture or saving something from a browser has it captured across my devices.
I also use Tududi, which has Telegram integration, for the quick note. Taking the note is just a matter of sending a message in Telegram, which is available on all my devices. Signal’s “Note To Self” feature is also useful; I trust it more than Telegram for sensitive data. In Firefox on my desktop, I have “Automatic Tab Opener” (Browser extension) pulling up my Tududi inbox every hour, reminding me to actually deal with the notes I have previously taken.
oldany@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That’s actually a really solid setup.
What always got me personally is exactly that — over time I’d end up with multiple “entry points” depending on context (screenshot, chat, browser, notes…).
Each one works, but I’d still need to mentally switch between them depending on what I’m capturing.
I kept wishing for something where the entry point is always the same, no matter the context.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 1 day ago
So long as you’re manually processing everything, screenshots work for all of that. You can take a note in any text box anywhere, and screenshot it. Chat message? Screenshot. Browser? Screenshot. Notes? Screenshot. You can even take a photo and then screenshot it to capture it into your workflow.
I have Shutter (apt install shutter) on my desktop, and I’ve changed the Print Screen key to shortcut to “shutter -s”. This lets me capture an area of my screen with one button (and a mouse drag). Bam, more screenshot.
The downsides of screenshot are obvious, of course: Extracting the text from the screenshot is a bit of a pain in the ass. If you really want to keep the same entry point, though, you could setup a script to OCR newly captured screenshot/photos to extract the text. An OCR-friendly font might make that pretty reliable.
Now I want to improve my setup…