Trilium – An Awesome Note-taking App

I’ve been a long-time user of WikidPad for personal note-taking. Unfortunately, development has slowed down over time and it was time for me to look for some alternative. And wow, did I find an alternative, that really ticks most (all) of my boxes: meet Trilium, the most feature-packed outliner / hierarchical note taking app I’ve ever encountered.

Take a look at the screenshot tour to get a feeling of what’s possible with Trilium.

The features I adore most about it:

  • Can act standalone and in a client/server model
  • Server provides a browser-based interface to the instance
  • Client-application can work offline and then sync back changes to the central server instance
  • It’s incredible scriptable using JavaScript
  • mermaid.js support for quickly creating diagrams
  • Linking, Cross-Linking, Cloning of notes in various places
  • Journal functions

There are also a ton of features that I don’t use personally, e.g. encrypted notes that are only available once you enter your decryption password.

I personally recommend that you give it a look and try very much!

Open Street Map

Today, German news-site Golem.de covered OpenStreetMap in a rather long article. OpenStreetMap is a project I have been watching for some time now as I think the availability of free maps is very important. I’d like to participate in the project but unfortunately I have got little time and no adequate GPS receiver.

Maybe anyone in the area of Linz, Austria would be interested in a little mapping party one day? The data in this area seems to be rather sparse 🙂 Anyways, I think the project or any similar project is definitely important and should be supported with all means. Anybody knows someone at a Austrian government body which could contribute data to such a project?

Organize Your Ideas and Thoughts with wikidPad

wikidPad is one of the very few applications I recently got really enthusiastic about. It is a single-user desktop wiki, written in Python. It is really fast to use and you can write down your ideas, organize your information and much, much more. This is the way I want a Wiki to work!

I got so enthusiastic about it that I am currently writing anything down inside it, organizing my contact data, appointments, schedules, etc. Together with this great Getting-Things-Done extension, I am really, really happy that I finally found a way to organize my thoughts, ideas, and TODOs. It all is becoming to make more and more sense now 😉

I am so addicted to the system that I installed the whole application inside my shared data environment. I am using the old style file format, where every page is stored as a .wiki file, which makes synchronization using Unison very fast and easy, and additionally allowing (limited) conflict handling.

While still being a Python application, wikidPad was written for Windows and got Linux support added later during development, after wikidPad itself became OpenSource. At the moment, I find the Linux version being too buggy for my everyday use, so I use wine to run wikidPad there.

TikiWiki and Active Directory Integration

If you want to authenticate TikiWiki agaist Microsoft Active Directory, have a look at this article.

The most interesting part in this posting is that if you are using a Windows 2003 Server, you need to patch the LDAP.php in the PEAR authentication module, as Win2k3 by default does not allow any anonymous queries against the directory.

In <tikiroot>/lib/pear/Auth/Container/LDAP.php search for the following line in function _connect():

if ((@ldap_bind($this->conn_id)) == false) {

and replace it with

if ((@ldap_bind($this->conn_id,"someuser","somepassword")) == false) {

Note, that someuser is in the form of user@domain.tld.

I also recommend to choose to authenticate your admin user against the internal database and not the LDAP (AD) container, otherwise you will lock yourself out easily.