Sunday my laptop’s harddrive crashed. Everything had been working fine. Then I sat down and was getting some weird errors running things on the command line. I decided to reboot and it was gone; completely unrecognized by the system. It seemed like professional recovery was the only option and was far out of my price range. I’d heard putting the harddrive in the freezer would sometimes get it running long enough to backup critical data, but no such luck. So, I finally gave up and order a new drive.

In addition to now having a larger drive, reinstalling Ubuntu has my system running more smoothly than before. Hibernate was working out of the box and following some simple instructions I was able to switch to the accelerated Nvidia driver and maintain the working hibernate feature.

Also, I was attempting to redownload GTDTiddlyWiki Plus, which seems to have disappeared. In the process of looking for it I discovered another GTD-customization of TiddlyWiki: MonkeyGTD. It’s a bit more structured than GTDTiddlyWiki (Plus). It makes heavy use of tags to organize your contexts and tasks and seems to integrate a bunch of plugins to make managing tasks much simpler. So, at least in the process of recovering from the drive failure I’ve gotten a few benefits.