Tag Archives: phone

From Chandler to Sunbird, Goosync and my Nokia

Some time back I posted a little review of my experience with Chandler and the Getting Things Done. I liked Chandler, but it ended up being a bit slow for my old PC. I found the Lightning add on for Thunderbird, which is an implementation of Sunbird, the Mozilla calendar. After having some installation problems with Lightning under Ubuntu, I went full Sunbird and I have not looked back. It stands alone, integrates seamlessly with Google Calendar, it seems to have very little overhead. It has alarms that beep at me when I have meetings and it has a Task List that works really well for a GTD workflow.

Hard Landscape Items go in the Calendar. Tasks get added to the Task list. Subordinate task get added to the “notes” section under the current Task. I only see the 5 Next tasks for my 5 projects. The backlog of 25 other tasks that will come up later are not visible until I move them up. I like that because it makes me feel less overwhelmed by choice.

I had a problem before with my uncommon Nokia phone. There is not a super-easy to sync my phone’s calendar with my Sunbird calendar. Enter Goosync. Goosync is a paid service that (for a very small yearly fee) syncs my phone’s calendar with my Nokia calendar. My Nokia was a bit of a pain to set up, but it’s on a pay-as-you-go service and it wasn’t easy to get the data service to work. So if you have data access with your plan, I expect that Goosync can make life easy. So now my phone beeps along with my computer. Perfect. I need all the help I can get.

Cheers,
Peter

Nokia, Goosync, Google, Thunderbird: a winning combination

I use an unlocked Nokia phone, the Supernova 7310. I like the phone. It will act as a modem if I want to get online in a crunch, and supposedly it will work in Ukraine, which is high on my agenda to try out. Having internet access there is important and sometimes painful to get.

But the phone’s compatibility with linux is limited to file transfer, and I want to sync its internal calendar with my Firefox/Lightning calendar. What to do?

I love Thunderbird/Lightning. It’s the Sunbird calendar ported as a add-on to Thunderbird, a slick email client. It works great in linux and it’s quite fast. If you use the google calendar add-on (a separate download available from this link) it can do bi-directional syncing with any google calendar. Then, to get the information too and from the phone, you need to sync the phone with google. There are a number of ways, but I found Goosync to be my favorite. It has compatibilities for many phones.

That’s a “bucket” I can trust. If I put it in anywhere (via Google, phone, or at my PC) it shows up everywhere.