Journaling, a simplistic view

Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 13, 2018 at 01:03 PM

The biggest thing for me about journal writing was about getting into the daily habit of it, and the biggest obstacle to that was needing to boot my Windows PC or laptop at the end of the day (which was associated with work in my mind, and therefore not relaxing, and took a long time to boot and was too big and heavy and noisy), just before I was trying to transition to sleep.

The search for a solution was the main factor that led me to trying out Chromebooks for this (I had a bad experience with iPads), with the main attraction being that it’s light, instantly on, silent, and the files are automatically synced with the cloud (to avoid data loss), and there is a physical keyboard.

My setup hasn’t changed for the past four years. I write the diary entry in plain text using a text editor called Caret (free from the Chrome Web Store), which is saved to Google Drive, and has nice dark themes. It’s one continuous “tape” with the latest entry on the top, starting with some ConnectedText syntax such as this

@@20181012
Friday, 12 October 2018

so I can import that file directly into CT (which I do a few times a year) to be parsed into “date topics”, which, as CT users know, have all kinds of magical properties in CT for further processing, display, and manipulation to get different views.

So Caret with Chromebook is the data capture end of the system, and CT thus becomes a database destination (on a Windows laptop, which gets backed up separately), as well as a sophisticated analytical platform for the diary data (allowing for interesting aggregation, e.g. pulling out and comparing only all the Monday entries, or viewing them by day, week, month etc.).

One effect of using a Chromebook for this was that my diary entries got longer and more involved, which I can put down to a Chromebook having a built-in keyboard and thus amenable to typing, lying within arm’s reach (the long battery life means it doesn’t have to be tethered much), and being instantly on when I open the lid.

Obviously by now the Chromebook is also the main entertainment centre, so I would be reading the news or watching some entertainment on it before the diary writing anyway.

Sadly CT is no longer being developed, but it works perfectly well on my Win 7 laptop.

There have been rumours that the next generation of Chromebooks will be able to dual boot into Windows 10, so one day I could have CT running on the Chromebook as well.