Free and Open Source Software

More of a showerthought, but still.

Yesterday, I just pulled out from the dead my opendesktop account and discovered that they are now offering multiple online services as well: There is GitLab, Mastodon and Nextcloud for pretty much anything you want. I, myself, am not a developer, so the most useful for me would be the latter two - specifically Nextcloud, where they offer a whopping (for me) 5 GB free storage.

I am not new to Nextcloud, as my Friendica node admin also provides a Nextcloud instance with some storage available, and the availability to increase it by mounting external storage sources, such as Amazon S3, WebDAV or even other Nextcloud mounts.

For note-taking, I am using Notable and keeping my notes in .md files, as this allows me to use just about any program I want to edit them on other devices (or switch from it seamlessly if I don't like it), but the way it works is to have a subfolder called notes on every "data directory" that you point it to. However, the Nextcloud notes app just wants to use the folder named in your default locale (in my case, it was called "Note")

So what did I do? I mounted the folder "Note" on opendesktop, as "notes" back on my node's Nextcloud server. On my phone, I do not have this issue, so I can use it with whatever name I want.

Now, I know I could simply use another note-taking app instead on my desktop, or just switch the locale on the other side. But I am sure there are plenty of use cases where a program just expects a certain folder to be somewhere, but you're unable to rename it there or use a different folder, so that is a welcome feature. And I now have the ability to access my notes both online and on whichever device I use, which is super handy.

Next-up, I plan to store some music there, as it also has a music app. Then I want to mount the folder as WebDAV on my phone, for foobar2000.

I just love Open Source 😁

Below there are some pics with the whole setup in action: