A ToDo list for Gmail and Google Calendars: Remember the Milk

I'm a big fan of gmail and google calendar as my centralized PIM. One major feature is missing however: there is no support for ToDo lists. You can add a simple ToDo google gadget on your iGoogle page, but that todo list is only accessible from within iGoogle; there is no integration with gmail or calendar whatsoever.

Some greasemonkey scripts also add todo lists to google calendar. Unfortunately, they are very sensitive to site fixes and updates: any update can break those nice scripts.

As an alternative, I just signed up to Remember the Milk. 'RtM' provides a rich ToDo list that integrates well in gmail and calendar:

• nice ajax input
• extensive features
• firefox extension to integrate the todo list into gmail: your inbox-view is enhanced with a RtM list on the left
  
• integration with google calendar

Not a perfect solution yet, as you have to logon separately to RtM and the integration with gmail and calendar is a hack -- a very nice one, but still a hack. But it's ok for now.

Podcasts in Rhythmbox: removing special characters from the downloaded files

When Rhythmbox downloads podcasts, it uses the URL as a filename. I like to copy/paste the podcasts to my mp3 player with Nautilus. Unfortunately, my mp3 player has trouble with special characters like colons and question marks (':' and '?'). This is probably due to the FAT32 file system.

I use the following script (triggered from a launcher) to remove those chars from my podcasts:

#!/bin/bash
find $HOME/Desktop/downloads/ | while read f
do
  REN="$(echo "$f" | tr ":" "_" | cut -d '?' -f 1)"
  echo "mv $f $REN"
  mv "$f" "$REN"
done

After that, copy/paste of my podcasts goes fine.