If you don’t know what dropbox is, and you’re someone who has a desktop machine and a laptop and a flashdrive, you are in for a treat.  Dropbox gives you a 2 gig floating storage area out “in the cloud.”  (This goes up to 8 gig in 250 meg increments based on referrals, so please use my link to go check it out and thanks in advance https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTQxOTkzNjU5 )

Now let’s get back to the subject at hand.  Thinking Rock (http://www.trgtd.com.au/) is a very solid GTD implementation.  I’m not going to get much into what Thinking Rock and GTD are; this article assumes that you are familiar with both and have been having issues with trying to use Thinking Rock on a USB key and would like a better way.

Ok, “better” may be too strong a word for what I’ve put together, let’s just call it “a USB free way”.

My biggest issue with using a USB key with thinking rock was that my settings were being saved to the java application directory on each machine that I was using.  Little things like what screen does TR open up in, what order the action screens are in, what columns are in the action screens.  This solution has fixed that for me.

Step one: Copy your TR directory to your Dropbox directory and change its name to insure that you don’t find yourself using a different directory without knowing about it.

In my case I use the following directory name:

C:\My Dropbox\TR-3.1.2_mba

Add 3 files to your bin directory (C:\My Dropbox\TR-3.1.2_mba\bin)

cmd_here.bat

cmd

trbat.bat

tr.exe -J-Duser.home=”C:\My Dropbox\TR-3.1.2_mba\data” -J-Dtr.datafile=”C:\My Dropbox\TR-3.1.2_mba\data\MalcolmAnderson.trx”

readme.txt

double click

cmd_here.bat

to open a cmd window in this directory

in the command window enter “trb” and tab to bring up trbat.bat

press the enter key to start thinking rock

When updating version number update the “default_userdir” setting in the etc\tr.conf file

default_userdir=”C:\My Dropbox\TR-3.1.2_mba_data/.thinkingrock/tr-3.1.2″

Step Two: Follow the instruction in the read me and edit the C:\My Dropbox\TR-3.1.2_mba\etc\tr.conf file

#default_userdir=”${HOME}/.thinkingrock/tr-3.1.2″

default_userdir=”C:\My Dropbox\TR-3.1.2_mba_data/.thinkingrock/tr-3.1.2″

By putting a hash mark (#) in front of the original line comments it out, retaining it for future reference.

[Notice the convoluted combination of forward slash (“/”) and backward slash (“\”)]

That’s all I do.  On running it the first time, the _yourinitials_data directory will be created.

For a final check, open up TR on one machine, and change the opening screen to process, or the roadmap or some other screen you don’t normally use on start up.  Then exit out of the program.

Now open up TR on your other machine.  It should have opened up on your new start page.

There you go, it’s done.

As a last note, if any hard core java configuration geeks want to give me another solution, I’ll be happy to try it out.  I’m open to installing a second java installation that is local to my dropbox, it was beyond my skills and I’m just happy that this works.

All that’s left to do is join the let’s find out club and move forward.  I’m going to start with phpList.

Wish me luck.

[Break]

The install went easy enough, but it’s probably going to take me another hour to get things actually rolling.  I would have loved an install that fully got things going and at the end you had a 2 e-mail mail campaign that would be sent to the list admin as a test.  Oh well, hopefully I’ll get back to it before the end of the month.

Any other phpList admins out there?