Re: [O] syncing my life (orgmode :)) to a mobile (android) device..cant find a holistic reliable way..how do you guys manage to do it?

[Ramon Diaz-Uriarte]

On Sat, 05-12-2015, at 08:10, Xebar Saram  wrote:
>
> So my question is (sorry for the long intro :)) what do orgmode users (who
> also are heavy mobile users) do? do they give up on contacts and
> calendaring on the mobile? maintain 2 separate databases? what tools do
> people use to overcome this issue?


I make a fairly standard, non-sophisticated, usage of MobileOrg. I set it
to update the entries in the built-in Google Calendar: I find Google
Calendar easier to read than what is provided by MobileOrg. I sync the
Mobile org directory between computer(s) and tablet(s)/phone using
syncthing (https://syncthing.net/), which requires that at least two
devices be up (but I have a server that is supposed to be up all the time,
so no problem here ---having a tablet and a phone, a tablet and a laptop,
etc, would also do).

So the computer -> tablet way works just fine. The other way around is
slightly more cumbersome (I capture in the tablet and then, in the
computer, process the flagged.org file created by MobileOrg --- this has
been discussed in this list before, and other people have much more
sophisticated procedures here).

Contacts I do not worry about (I rarely do email on a tablet/phone).


>
> I once had a nokia n900 which ran basically Debian linux, and thus emacs
> could be run naively , these days it seems like all are android devices. I
> still haven't found a gui friendly way to run emacs there.
>

A few years ago I tried using emacs for android, etc, in the tablet, but I
eventually gave up using it since it was too cumbersome for me. MobileOrg
covers my needs pretty well.


Note, however, that you can install Debian (or several other Linuxes)
relatively easily in rooted Android devices and maybe even in non-rooted
devices. There are two or three apps available; I use "Complete Linux
Installer", and you should be able to get X in there, etc (I use it without
X), so you might do Emacs and even start it from a shortcut in a desktop
linux environment running inside your Android. But I haven't tried it (and
it seems to me it'd probably not be the smoothest and most efficient
experience).


Best,


R.

> thanks so much
>
> best
>
> Z


-- 
Ramon Diaz-Uriarte
Department of Biochemistry, Lab B-25
Facultad de Medicina
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid 
Arzobispo Morcillo, 4
28029 Madrid
Spain

Phone: +34-91-497-2412

Email: rdia...@gmail.com
   ramon.d...@iib.uam.es

http://ligarto.org/rdiaz

Re: [O] syncing my life (orgmode :)) to a mobile (android) device..cant find a holistic reliable way..how do you guys manage to do it?

[Samuel Loury]

Matt Lundin  writes:

> Xebar Saram  writes:
>>
>> So my question is (sorry for the long intro :)) what do orgmode users
>> (who also are heavy mobile users) do? do they give up on contacts and
>> calendaring on the mobile? maintain 2 separate databases? what tools
>> do people use to overcome this issue?
>
> There are lots of way to sync calendars. See
> http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-google-sync.html
>
> I've found the easiest method is a "poor man's sync" involving a
> read-only ics file (exported from org using the org-icalendar-*
> functions) and a writable calendar for new entries. (Trying to map org
> entries to ics entries gets messy.) The flow looks something like this:
>
> writable calendar (remote calendar for adding new items from android)
> > org files (with new entries pull from remote calendar) >
> read-only calendar (remote ics exported from org)
>
> I use a radicale server[fn:1] for this. Radicale has the advantage of
> using ics files as a backend (rather than a database), so I can pull new
> entries into org with Eric's ical2org.awk.

I do exactly the same thing, also with radicale running in a chrooted
debian in my android phone. I am not happy with this solution since it
is not bidirectional but I agree it is the easiest method as far as I am
concerned.

-- 
Konubinix
GPG Key: 7439106A
Fingerprint: 5993 BE7A DA65 E2D9 06CE  5C36 75D2 3CED 7439 106A


signature.asc
Description: PGP signature

Re: [O] syncing my life (orgmode :)) to a mobile (android) device..cant find a holistic reliable way..how do you guys manage to do it?

[Eric S Fraga]

On Saturday,  5 Dec 2015 at 23:13, Bingo UV wrote:

[...]

> Hi Eric,
> Do you not find pandora too slow to run Emacs? My Asus EEEPC with
> celeron 900 MHz takes over a minute to generate agenda with 100-150
> kB of org files, not too complicated. Exporting to HTML too takes
> minutes for 30 kB org file. My guess is that 1GHz ARM of pandora
> should be much slower than this.
>
> Do you have some trick up your sleeve to speed it up, or do you make do
> with slow pandora? Have you hacked it to increase memory?


The Pandora is indeed slow when compared with some of my other systems
and, to make matters even more extreme, I only have the 600 MHz rebirth
edition, overclocked to 800 MHz.

I do alter my working approach when using it but I do so not only
because of the speed but also because of the keyboard and the
display.  It is very much not a desktop or laptop replacement.  For me,
it's about data at hand anywhere/everywhere and for taking notes and
processing emails.  Oh, and listening to music :-)

The only concession, with respect to org, that I make is to use sticky
agenda views to avoid the long delay in generating each view.

The Pyra will help, being significantly faster, but the screen and
keyboard will still be small so I doubt my use will change dramatically.
-- 
: Eric S Fraga (0xFFFCF67D), Emacs 24.5.1, Org release_8.3.2-362-g11291f

Re: [O] syncing my life (orgmode :)) to a mobile (android) device..cant find a holistic reliable way..how do you guys manage to do it?

[Detlef Steuer]

Am Sat, 5 Dec 2015 14:08:19 +
schrieb Eric S Fraga :

> On Saturday,  5 Dec 2015 at 09:10, Xebar Saram wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > all this is great yet i travel alot to conferences and meeting and
> > do rely on a mobile device (in my case a android nexus 6) in many
> > situations. I check my emails on it as much as i do on my PC, look
> > at upcoming and schedule appointments, look at timed TODOS, add new
> > contacts i meet and collect info on the go (web links, food recipes
> > etc).
> >
> > Out of all the things i do only email (via offlineimap and mu4e)
> > seems to be able to Sync correctly.  
> 
> Yes, this is probably a valid summary of the current state of the art
> re: org and Android devices.
> 
> > So my question is (sorry for the long intro :)) what do orgmode
> > users (who also are heavy mobile users) do? do they give up on
> > contacts and calendaring on the mobile? maintain 2 separate
> > databases? what tools do people use to overcome this issue?
> >
> > I once had a nokia n900 which ran basically Debian linux, and thus
> > emacs could be run naively , these days it seems like all are
> > android devices. I still haven't found a gui friendly way to run
> > emacs there.  
> 
> I have two different working environments, depending on which mobile
> device I use:
> 
> Case 1: if I use an Android device (nexus 4 or 7), I rely on mobileorg
> heavily to synchronise my calendar.  I have mobileorg suck in any
> events I create in Google calendar and export all org events to
> Google.  This works quite well.  However, creating notes etc. on the
> mobile device in this case is not ideal as mobileorg is not a full
> implementation of org (and, to be fair, it wasn't intended to be).
> 
> Although there is an emacs distribution for Android, I've never really
> managed to get it working satisfactorily, with or without a bluetooth
> keyboard.  Android is a crippled Linux unfortunately... (in my
> opinion).
> 
> In the end, I primarily use my nexus devices as phones (really?) and
> for facebook (as one must).
> 
> Case 2: this is my preferred mobile solution.  I have an OpenPandora
> palmtop computer [1] running the full Debian testing distribution with
> Emacs and the org from git, not to mention gnus, LaTeX, Libreoffice,
> Octave, ...  The Pandora has WiFi and bluetooth but not 3/4G
> connectivity.  I use my phone to tether the Pandora to the 'net when I
> need to connect outside a WiFi zone.  In this case, the Pandora and my
> other systems are fully synchronised using unison.  Finally, the
> Pandora has 2 full SD slots which allow me to walk around with 128 GB
> of disk space.

Well, there is hope for Android users, too:

I bought an used ASUS TF 101 (but any such android tablet should do)
especially to try out various ways to install a real Linux on this
class of machines.

With linuxdeploy I was able to install a complete Linux (TeX, R, emacs,
git, rsync ...) on a *rooted* machine. Using a VNC viewer (bvnc in my
case) I get a complete graphical environment. emacs works nicely in the
terminal emulater session, too. Linux runs besides Android in a chroot
and I`m quite happy with this setup. 

On another *unrooted* machine (Galaxy Note something) I use gnuroot.
Only got it working without X11, but did not try too hard, because
solution 1 was working fine. According to the docs I´m just too stupid
to get a local X11-server working.

Both machines have physical keyboards attached, but in tablet mode
using HackersKeyboard emacs is usable, but obviously a keyboard is a
Good Thing(tm) for emacs users.

May be that helps someone
Detlef

> 
> I bought my Pandora specifically because I wanted a full org mobile
> experience!  I am awaiting the release of the Pyra, the upgrade of the
> Pandora, very eagerly indeed!
> 
> Oh, and the Pandora has a fantastic audio system :-)
> 
> Sorry if I have come across as an advert for the Pandora but I am
> obviously a satisfied customer.
> 
> HTH,
> eric
> 
> 
> Footnotes: 
> [1]  https://boards.openpandora.org/pandora/pandoramain.html/
> 

Re: [O] syncing my life (orgmode :)) to a mobile (android) device..cant find a holistic reliable way..how do you guys manage to do it?

[Jorge A. Alfaro-Murillo]

Xebar Saram writes:

So my question is (sorry for the long intro :)) what do orgmode 
users (who also are heavy mobile users) do? do they give up on 
contacts and calendaring on the mobile? maintain 2 separate 
databases? what tools do people use to overcome this issue?


I have a computer always running an emacs server, and I connect to 
it from my android phone using JuiceSSH. To see the org agenda in 
my google calendar I export every now and then the agenda to an 
ics file in the cloud using org-icalendar-combined-agenda-file. In 
google I have the address to that file as one of the calendars 
(from the calendar "Other calendars", "Add by URL").


--
Jorge.

Re: [O] syncing my life (orgmode :)) to a mobile (android) device..cant find a holistic reliable way..how do you guys manage to do it?

[Bob Newell]

I take a slightly different approach. Google calendar is my main
calendar and this works across devices including my Android phone and
tablet. 

However I use the old-fashioned emacs diary, which org-mode of course
easily incorporates. Diary is simple to work with.

When I start up emacs, I use gcalcli and some custom elisp to fetch my
Google calendar and regenerate the diary file completely, every time.

On exiting emacs, I run a diff (through custom elisp) to find changes to
the diary file and again use gcalcli to push those changes back to
Google calendar.

I don't try to sync contacts or notes bidirectionally. I do use
mobileorg to make sure my tablet/smart phone has a copy of all my
org-mode stuff. If I do happen to edit on the tablet/smart phone, it's a
manual process to put that back to the master, but this is not my usual
working mode. I have a lightweight laptop (Asus Zenbook) and carry that
whenever possible.

Overall I sync to and from a master at strongspace.com, which supports
use of rsync.

I suppose some day I should get away from diary, but it works really
well.

-- 
Bob Newell
Honolulu, Hawai`i
* Sent via Ma Gnus 0.14-Emacs 24.3-Linux Mint 17.2 *

Re: [O] syncing my life (orgmode :)) to a mobile (android) device..cant find a holistic reliable way..how do you guys manage to do it?

[Xebar Saram]

Thx Eric

I am also really looking forward to the new Pyra, im seriously considering
buying it when it comes out :D
it seems that that would be the easiest solution to orgmode on the go.
shame i will have to carry 2 devices though, brings me back to the days of
a crappy cell and a PDA :)

best

Z

On Sat, Dec 5, 2015 at 4:08 PM, Eric S Fraga  wrote:

> On Saturday,  5 Dec 2015 at 09:10, Xebar Saram wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > all this is great yet i travel alot to conferences and meeting and do
> rely
> > on a mobile device (in my case a android nexus 6) in many situations. I
> > check my emails on it as much as i do on my PC, look at upcoming and
> > schedule appointments, look at timed TODOS, add new contacts i meet and
> > collect info on the go (web links, food recipes etc).
> >
> > Out of all the things i do only email (via offlineimap and mu4e) seems to
> > be able to Sync correctly.
>
> Yes, this is probably a valid summary of the current state of the art
> re: org and Android devices.
>
> > So my question is (sorry for the long intro :)) what do orgmode users
> (who
> > also are heavy mobile users) do? do they give up on contacts and
> > calendaring on the mobile? maintain 2 separate databases? what tools do
> > people use to overcome this issue?
> >
> > I once had a nokia n900 which ran basically Debian linux, and thus emacs
> > could be run naively , these days it seems like all are android devices.
> I
> > still haven't found a gui friendly way to run emacs there.
>
> I have two different working environments, depending on which mobile
> device I use:
>
> Case 1: if I use an Android device (nexus 4 or 7), I rely on mobileorg
> heavily to synchronise my calendar.  I have mobileorg suck in any
> events I create in Google calendar and export all org events to
> Google.  This works quite well.  However, creating notes etc. on the
> mobile device in this case is not ideal as mobileorg is not a full
> implementation of org (and, to be fair, it wasn't intended to be).
>
> Although there is an emacs distribution for Android, I've never really
> managed to get it working satisfactorily, with or without a bluetooth
> keyboard.  Android is a crippled Linux unfortunately... (in my opinion).
>
> In the end, I primarily use my nexus devices as phones (really?) and for
> facebook (as one must).
>
> Case 2: this is my preferred mobile solution.  I have an OpenPandora
> palmtop computer [1] running the full Debian testing distribution with
> Emacs and the org from git, not to mention gnus, LaTeX, Libreoffice,
> Octave, ...  The Pandora has WiFi and bluetooth but not 3/4G
> connectivity.  I use my phone to tether the Pandora to the 'net when I
> need to connect outside a WiFi zone.  In this case, the Pandora and my
> other systems are fully synchronised using unison.  Finally, the Pandora
> has 2 full SD slots which allow me to walk around with 128 GB of disk
> space.
>
> I bought my Pandora specifically because I wanted a full org mobile
> experience!  I am awaiting the release of the Pyra, the upgrade of the
> Pandora, very eagerly indeed!
>
> Oh, and the Pandora has a fantastic audio system :-)
>
> Sorry if I have come across as an advert for the Pandora but I am
> obviously a satisfied customer.
>
> HTH,
> eric
>
>
> Footnotes:
> [1]  https://boards.openpandora.org/pandora/pandoramain.html/
>
> --
> : Eric S Fraga (0xFFFCF67D), Emacs 25.0.50.2, Org release_8.3.2-363-g5c13a6
>

Re: [O] syncing my life (orgmode :)) to a mobile (android) device..cant find a holistic reliable way..how do you guys manage to do it?

[Eric S Fraga]

On Saturday,  5 Dec 2015 at 09:10, Xebar Saram wrote:

[...]

> all this is great yet i travel alot to conferences and meeting and do rely
> on a mobile device (in my case a android nexus 6) in many situations. I
> check my emails on it as much as i do on my PC, look at upcoming and
> schedule appointments, look at timed TODOS, add new contacts i meet and
> collect info on the go (web links, food recipes etc).
>
> Out of all the things i do only email (via offlineimap and mu4e) seems to
> be able to Sync correctly.

Yes, this is probably a valid summary of the current state of the art
re: org and Android devices.

> So my question is (sorry for the long intro :)) what do orgmode users (who
> also are heavy mobile users) do? do they give up on contacts and
> calendaring on the mobile? maintain 2 separate databases? what tools do
> people use to overcome this issue?
>
> I once had a nokia n900 which ran basically Debian linux, and thus emacs
> could be run naively , these days it seems like all are android devices. I
> still haven't found a gui friendly way to run emacs there.

I have two different working environments, depending on which mobile
device I use:

Case 1: if I use an Android device (nexus 4 or 7), I rely on mobileorg
heavily to synchronise my calendar.  I have mobileorg suck in any
events I create in Google calendar and export all org events to
Google.  This works quite well.  However, creating notes etc. on the
mobile device in this case is not ideal as mobileorg is not a full
implementation of org (and, to be fair, it wasn't intended to be).

Although there is an emacs distribution for Android, I've never really
managed to get it working satisfactorily, with or without a bluetooth
keyboard.  Android is a crippled Linux unfortunately... (in my opinion).

In the end, I primarily use my nexus devices as phones (really?) and for
facebook (as one must).

Case 2: this is my preferred mobile solution.  I have an OpenPandora
palmtop computer [1] running the full Debian testing distribution with
Emacs and the org from git, not to mention gnus, LaTeX, Libreoffice,
Octave, ...  The Pandora has WiFi and bluetooth but not 3/4G
connectivity.  I use my phone to tether the Pandora to the 'net when I
need to connect outside a WiFi zone.  In this case, the Pandora and my
other systems are fully synchronised using unison.  Finally, the Pandora
has 2 full SD slots which allow me to walk around with 128 GB of disk
space.

I bought my Pandora specifically because I wanted a full org mobile
experience!  I am awaiting the release of the Pyra, the upgrade of the
Pandora, very eagerly indeed!

Oh, and the Pandora has a fantastic audio system :-)

Sorry if I have come across as an advert for the Pandora but I am
obviously a satisfied customer.

HTH,
eric


Footnotes: 
[1]  https://boards.openpandora.org/pandora/pandoramain.html/

-- 
: Eric S Fraga (0xFFFCF67D), Emacs 25.0.50.2, Org release_8.3.2-363-g5c13a6

Re: [O] syncing my life (orgmode :)) to a mobile (android) device..cant find a holistic reliable way..how do you guys manage to do it?

[Bingo UV]

On Sat, 5 Dec 2015 14:08:19 +
Eric S Fraga  wrote:


> Case 2: this is my preferred mobile solution.  I have an OpenPandora
> palmtop computer [1] running the full Debian testing distribution with

> Oh, and the Pandora has a fantastic audio system :-)
> 
> Sorry if I have come across as an advert for the Pandora but I am
> obviously a satisfied customer.
> 
> HTH,
> eric
> 
> 
> Footnotes: 
> [1]  https://boards.openpandora.org/pandora/pandoramain.html/
> 

Hi Eric,
Do you not find pandora too slow to run Emacs? My Asus EEEPC with
celeron 900 MHz takes over a minute to generate agenda with 100-150
kB of org files, not too complicated. Exporting to HTML too takes
minutes for 30 kB org file. My guess is that 1GHz ARM of pandora
should be much slower than this.

Do you have some trick up your sleeve to speed it up, or do you make do
with slow pandora? Have you hacked it to increase memory?

thanks

Re: [O] syncing my life (orgmode :)) to a mobile (android) device..cant find a holistic reliable way..how do you guys manage to do it?

[Matt Lundin]

Xebar Saram  writes:
>
> So my question is (sorry for the long intro :)) what do orgmode users
> (who also are heavy mobile users) do? do they give up on contacts and
> calendaring on the mobile? maintain 2 separate databases? what tools
> do people use to overcome this issue?

There are lots of way to sync calendars. See
http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-google-sync.html

I've found the easiest method is a "poor man's sync" involving a
read-only ics file (exported from org using the org-icalendar-*
functions) and a writable calendar for new entries. (Trying to map org
entries to ics entries gets messy.) The flow looks something like this:

writable calendar (remote calendar for adding new items from android)
> org files (with new entries pull from remote calendar) >
read-only calendar (remote ics exported from org)

I use a radicale server[fn:1] for this. Radicale has the advantage of
using ics files as a backend (rather than a database), so I can pull new
entries into org with Eric's ical2org.awk.

If you use google calendar you could accomplish something similar with
the following workflow:

a) Export your org data to an ics file and put it in dropbox. In
dropbox, grab a secret link to share that file.

b) Point google calendar to the secret link. This will create a
read-only calendar in google calendar.

c) Script a tool like gcalcli[fn:2] to pull and delete new items from a
writable google calendar. Convert the data to org markup and add them to
an org file. (This is the part that will involve just a bit of basic
shell scripting.)

For syncing contacts from BBDB to google or carddav, asynk works
well.[fn:3]

> I once had a nokia n900 which ran basically Debian linux, and thus
> emacs could be run naively , these days it seems like all are android
> devices. I still haven't found a gui friendly way to run emacs there.

For fun (but not much profit) you can set up a chroot linux environment
on a rooted android device and install all your favorite software
(emacs, org, etc.). See https://github.com/guardianproject/lildebi for
instance.

By far the easiest way to access org mode is to set up some sort of ssh
access to a computer running emacs. There are several good ssh clients
for android. The hacker's keyboard app offers all the familiar modifier
keys (Ctrl, Alt, etc.)

Footnotes:

[fn:1] http://radicale.org/

[fn:2] https://github.com/insanum/gcalcli

[fn:3] http://asynk.io/

[O] syncing my life (orgmode :)) to a mobile (android) device..cant find a holistic reliable way..how do you guys manage to do it?

[Xebar Saram]

Hi all

I have been using emacs/orgmode for nearly 3 years now. since i cant really
code to save my life (im in the humanities field..i have an excuse :)) i
still feel like a newbie but i still use emacs/orgmode for nearly all
aspect of my computing life. With the help of the wonderful orgmode
community and #emacs IRC channel i now use mu4e for email, org-reveal to
prepare my classes, orgmode for all my academic/personal TODO's, i use
org-ref and helm to manage my references, use it for R analysis (we do
statistics in humanities to! ;-), I use it for my password management, and
then of course use orgmode to collect all possible information i can think
of: i use it to collect food recipes, linux tips etc. I am interested also
in using org-contact and or bbdb for contact management.

all this is great yet i travel alot to conferences and meeting and do rely
on a mobile device (in my case a android nexus 6) in many situations. I
check my emails on it as much as i do on my PC, look at upcoming and
schedule appointments, look at timed TODOS, add new contacts i meet and
collect info on the go (web links, food recipes etc).

Out of all the things i do only email (via offlineimap and mu4e) seems to
be able to Sync correctly.

I have tried various ways of syncing my calander/TODOS (via orgmobile) and
my notes (via git) with not much success. these methods with my crappy
coding skills are not rock solid and are quite cumbersome to setup and
maintain. also there dosent seem to be a solid way to sync contacts to the
mobile.

So my question is (sorry for the long intro :)) what do orgmode users (who
also are heavy mobile users) do? do they give up on contacts and
calendaring on the mobile? maintain 2 separate databases? what tools do
people use to overcome this issue?

I once had a nokia n900 which ran basically Debian linux, and thus emacs
could be run naively , these days it seems like all are android devices. I
still haven't found a gui friendly way to run emacs there.

thanks so much

best

Z