Hey Tom, > I'd like to move away from my wonderful, integrated, proprietary, > web-based Google Services Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Lists and > Google Docs. I ask for suggestions of what to move to.
Great plan! I just finished doing the same, more or less. :) And sorry in advance for the linkdump, just trying to help. > Email is probably the most important as my whole life is in there. > Proprietary Google searches lead me to > http://www.gnumail.org > http://www.runbox.com > http://www.fastmail.fm > These don't seem any cheaper than running a mail server on a virtual > private server, which would be more flexible. I don't think that would > be too annoying either. Thoughts on that? I haven’t heard of those at all. At the moment, I have a domain at https://gandi.net/ They use Roundcube as frontend, which is awesome but unfortunately has no own hosting service: http://roundcube.net/ I am going to move over to my account at http://tuxfamily.org but the domain is still at Gandi. So, what you want is probably a mail account at https://riseup.net/ (big thanks to Parker for recommending them to me again!). But I don’t know about their exact approval criteria. The sole reason I am not using them is that they only have SquirrelMail and IMP which I am both a bit sick of. :) By all means let me know how it works out if you’re going for them. > There are a bunch of desktop calendar applications, and I'm sure some > of them are more awesome than Google Calendar. How does one sync them > across computers and version/backup them? My inclination is to use git > on a plain text calendar file if I'm not satisfied by the more > conventional approaches. If you plan on using git, you might want to look at http://sparkleshare.org/ – it is basically a frontend for git in the style of Dropbox (made by an awesome GNOME guy). You can sync to http://gitorious.org as well as GitHub and your own server. For public events, you can do as I do and use http://grical.org/ They have groups, I made one for me and add any event I plan to go to there. > I *love* Google Lists for entering school assignment due dates, but > it's currently very closed, with no importing or exporting. It may be > less useful once I graduate in May as I'm likely not to have > assignments due every day, but some more advanced equivalent would be > wonderful. Does anyone know of an equivalent for this? I have not heard of Google Lists, do you mean Google Tasks (in Gmail)? Currently, I manage any personal events or todos by just putting them in an EtherPad. I have an account at http://titanpad.com/ , an awesome EtherPad instance hosted by 3 Debian guys. You can lock the document up with a password so everything’s cool. > I don't use Google Docs much except for short-term collaboration with > mortals, and I don't mind using it that for situations like that. For > other situations, git and ssh is better. And I can use Gobby for > brainwriting. For any kind of text collaboration, EtherPad is way superior to Google Docs (the document part). It does not need login, has a dead-simple and beautiful interface, integrated chat, nice colors to see who wrote what and can export to free formats. So here as well, http://titanpad.com/ is the way to go. If you need anymore freedom; I currently build a directory of free and open web services at http://libreprojects.net/ Let me know how it goes and feel free to mail me when you have any problems. :) _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freeculture.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss FAQ: http://wiki.freeculture.org/Fc-discuss
