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[personal profile] andygates
My ISP is down.  There is vexation among the masses, particularly as I need one set of contact details soon or a real-world transaction will bork.  C'est la risk of putting a bunch of stuff on a wiki online; it's available everywhere, but it's very unavailable if the ISP does the dying fly.  So I'm sat here like a lemon, fighting the urge to go to treeware despite its many and obvious suckings.

"Munky!  We need more technodgeoly"
"No silly man, we need better technology."

A wiki is my preferred freeform PIM.  Perfectly good wikis exist which just use text-files as their data.  Here then is the spec for my downtime-inspired disaster-and-zombie-apocalypse-proof PIM from Hell:

  • Phyisical hosting on a ruggedised USB stick with a universal (Windows & *NIX) file format; a device that'll survive being on a keyring, thrown into a bike bag and puked on by the cat.  Repeatedly.
  • Text-based data storage.
  • Two executables which can serve the thing, one each for Windows and *NIX. 
  • Some security measures on the stick; HTTPS on the served pages.
  • Absurdly clean vanilla HTML so it'll run anywhere.
Okay, the IronDrive is rugged (nuke-proof, even), but at $700 it is full of fail for my non-milspec budget.  One of the great things a popcorn device like a USB stick is that you can clone it and bury one in your ammo cache for when the zombies come.  That'd be $1400 and even with the dollar tanking, that's just bonkers.  Maybe one of these cute Iocell ones.

But for putting software on a stick, I become once more the eternal noob.  Any ideas?

Date: 2007-08-21 09:49 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] andygates.livejournal.com
Paper doesn't back up. Paper doesn't edit nicely. Paper doesn't embed stuff nicked from elsewhere. Paper gets physically heavier the more data you have. Paper is harder to share with others when the main medium for sharing is the internet...

Every so often I have a luddite phase and put my Stuff onto trees, usually as a filofax. After a few months, I get bored of all the crossing-out and I spill tea on a bit I wrote with the wrong ink, and can't recover from backups, and I get grumpy.

Paper has its place. This ain't it.

The stickwiki (which works *great* btw) already has my contacts, work technical notes, and crackpot project notebook on it. That's three books, paperwise.

Date: 2007-08-21 11:16 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] skean.livejournal.com
Hey, what can I say? I live on my Palm TX.

Date: 2007-08-21 01:12 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] andygates.livejournal.com
Well exactly, you big geek.

Paper is for survivalist nutters expecting the Russians / Chinese / Arabs to pop a high-altitude EMP over Wall Street or Google's datacentre.

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