Comment on How do you capture things quickly across devices in a self-hosted setup?

• lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  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.

  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 $USER folder.

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  • oldany@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Good question 🙂

    For me it’s mostly the small, in-the-moment things:

    • a link I want to check later
    • a quick thought or idea
    • a snippet of text or code
    • something I see on my phone that I don’t want to lose
    • sometimes even just a reminder or “I should look into this”

    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.

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    • lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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…

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      • oldany@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Yeah exactly — that’s pretty much the pattern I kept falling into too.

        “Texting myself” works, but it still feels like you’re bending a tool to do something it wasn’t really designed for.

        What I was trying to fix was that exact moment before that — when something appears and you either capture it instantly… or lose it.

        So instead of choosing the tool each time, I tried to make the entry point always the same, and push the “what is this?” decision later.

        Curious if that resonates with how you use it day-to-day.

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• Rivalarrival@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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.

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  • oldany@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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.

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    • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      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…).

      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…

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      • oldany@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        That’s actually a really interesting direction — using screenshots as a universal entry point.

        It kind of shows how strong the need is for a single capture flow, even if it means bending everything into one format.

        What always stopped me there is exactly what you mentioned — once you need OCR, scripts, post-processing… it starts adding friction again.

        I kept wondering if the entry point could stay just as universal, but without needing to transform the content first.

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