I have been through several different ways of keeping track of our schedules digitally, from home-made lists in Libre Office, or various markdown apps, to paid subscriptions to Todoist.

In an end-of-the-year list somewhere on the web I finally found a completely free, open source alternative, that does (almost) everything that Todoist does, as well if not better.

Cory Doctorow published a piece on July 31. I just reread it, and decided that I didn’t want to lose it, and that other people might benefit from reading it too. So I have posted it here, which achieves both aims at once.

He begins: “I need to tell you something unsatisfying: your personal consumption choices will not make a meaningful difference to the amount of enshittification you experience in your life”.

The idea of representing ideas or thoughts diagrammatically is not a recent one. As early as the third century, Porphyry of Tyros produced map-like images to demonstrate the structure and workings of Aristotle’s philosophical concepts.

However the current usages of the terms “mind mapping” and “concept mapping” are relatively recent. Both terms have known inventors, who have spent many years developing their ideas, and both terms arise from theoretical assumptions or research. Despite the apparent similarity of the terms, and despite the fact that both describe methods of representing ideas diagrammatically, they have completely different aims, and work in very different ways.