Hello. I am using a computer without WIFI. Can I sync datas between this computer and my android smartphone via USB Cable and how? Thank you
Computer doesn’t need WiFi if it’s connected via wired Ethernet. If there’s a wirelesss router establishing a local network and your android phone can connect to the WiFi then the computer wired to the router and the phone connected via WiFi should be able to find each other and communicate.
See the following recent thread: Sync between a mobile phone(Cellular Network) and PC (tethered with a mobile phone via usb cable).
2 Likes
Amazing!
you have incredible organizational skills for recalling recent information threads and documents and everything.
What’s the secret? Do you keep track of all of the important posts in a special database of some sort?
How do you know how to paste the exact thread at the right moment?
Thanks! 
No secret – just a quirk in how my brain is wired. 
I couldn’t tell you what the order of a deck of playing cards is right after seeing it, but I could tell you what you had for lunch a week ago if I saw what you ate.
I don’t think it’s photographic memory. It’s closer to spatial memory. I have friends and family who call me to ask where an item is in their house/garage after I’ve been there. If I’ve seen it, there’s a pretty good chance I can recall where I last saw it.
Along the same lines, I read a question and if it reminds me of an earlier post that I’d seen, I can recall enough about the post to quickly find it again.
If you’ve ever drawn a mind map or used mind mapping software, I’m just able to do it in my head. Still, I do take notes to save time searching. Obsidian is popular, but I prefer Zim because it’s lighter weight while still having all of the features I want.
Ahh, I see.
I just loaded Zim under WSL. I’ll take a peek at it.
For keeping track of notes I use and subscribe to a product called Evernote.
Evernote is probably Zim on steroids.
Evernote has a free tier that you should check out. It even has a browser plugin for capturing web pages, and storing them in notebooks. Because this product is web based your content is available from all of your devices regardless of whether you’re running Windows Mac or Linux or cell phone or whatever. The notebooks themselves don’t need to be manually synchronized like I’m sure you’re needing to do somehow.
I have a notebook just for capturing important Syncthing threads. Then at any time I can search just that notebook for what I need.
It looks like that program Zim is no longer under active development. Doesn’t that concern you a bit considering you’re storing all of your information there? It looks like a neat program and I might have some uses for it I’m just concerned about future updates to the software considering it’s at less than version 0 and I can’t see any developer activity.
The same goes for Evernote. A cloud provider could drop its free tier at any time, or cease to exist altogether.
True, and I am indeed concerned specifically because Evernote was just purchased by a European company that laid off the US employees.
Joplin might be a better fit for people who prefer to stick with selfhosted services.
Thanks for the product referral this software product looks very interesting. I’ve already loaded the app on my Android and now I’m going to look into the cloud portion.
Thank you for the referral.
It claims to be able to import Evernote notebooks which is something that I have been looking for.
I’m a Joplin user myself and have been using it for years, but if you’re new to it, please make sure that it has all the functionality that you rely on. Especially the mobile version is extremely limited in this aspect in comparison to its desktop counterpart. The Android app is also very, very slow, unless you’ve got beefy hardware.
With Joplin, you can also just use Syncthing to synchronise notes with no cloud storage required. However, there is one nasty bug (see https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/issues/6517) which is very likely to occur when using Syncthing to sync the note files, requiring a hacky workaround to overcome.
All of this is of course completely off-topic here 
.
1 Like
Thank you for the advice.
I have it configured to sync via my Microsoft OneDrive account and it seems to be functioning.
It’s very basic compared to Evernote but I need something in case evernote goes away. It certainly is not a one to one replacement.
In some ways, that’s true. Zim doesn’t have quite as many features as popular alternatives.
I tried Evernote a while back. It was nice, but had features I didn’t need, and missing features that I needed.
Although I’m a fan of SQLite, storing notes in a database just seems less flexible (e.g., selective encryption).
With newer versions of Evernote, I’m not against building apps using Electron, but for a tool such as a PIM that’s frequently used throughout the day, it’s just a bit too resource intensive (Microsoft Teams for Linux is also an Electron app – I went back to the regular web browser version after about 5 minutes. When Microsoft axed the Linux desktop version last year all I thought was, “Good riddance.” 
)
That’s where Syncthing fits in. 
Because each note in a Zim notebook is a plain text file with wiki-style formatting, tools such as Syncthing, rsync, Duplicacy and so on are able to very efficiently sync them between devices.
Storing notes in a database versus individual files is a bit like Mbox versus Maildir for emails.
Ditto for me. I note threads that combined with the official documentation help me better understand and use Syncthing.
Once upon a time I equated point-releases with “alpha” or “beta” status since it seemed to be a common pratice. But over the years I’ve used a lot of 0.x software (including the early Linux distros) that were more production-ready than much of the expensive commercial software I’ve had to suffer with.
Zim is one of those slowly evolving tools that might never get a 1.0 version label, but I wouldn’t put too much meaning into it (most recent release was about two months ago in July 2023).
After using other alternatives, I tried Zim when it was still in beta back around 2009/2010. At the time, although it occasionally crashed under certain conditions (an issue with the parser that converted WYSIWYG to markup), I never lost any data, just some minor formatting.
In no particular order, some of the things I like about Zim:
- Written in Python (upgraded for compatibility with Python 3.x).
- Each wiki page is an individual plain text file that’s accessible outside of Zim (I use Vi on a desktop and Markor on Android but a screen reader would also work).
- Zim can export a page or notebook to HTML (Zim can also use Python’s mini web server for ad-hoc sharing of a notebook).
- Search and replace supports regular expressions using Python’s RE syntax (similar to Perl’s).
- Optional integration with Git and other version control via a plugin.
14 years and 8,300+ wiki pages later, my ramblings… uh… notes… should still be accessible when an archeologist unearths one of my archival CD-Rs (gold instead of aluminum for the reflective layer) hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of years from now. At some point I’ll upgrade to optical quartz storage. 
So since this is a Syncthing forum, I’ll mention that after I was satisfied with my Syncthing setup, I deleted my Dropbox and pCloud accounts (I still use rsync and rclone as part of my backup routine).
Thanks for yet Another detailed and informative response.
Do you have a solution for opening your Zim data on your Android cell or tablet? I’m trying to get Kiwix to work, Only I can’t figure out how to tell it to look for files that I would replicate to my phone would sync thing.
One of my requirements for a note taking app is that it run natively on every platform that I need and Evernote does this. I can even publish my notes to the web.
I will load Markor, and take a look at it. Perhaps, first on my Kindle.
And someone else’s suggestion and recommendation I did load and configure for synchronization the program called Joplin. I think it claims to be able to import Evernote notebooks so I will give it a try.
For clipping web pages and saving them for archival purposes nothing is better than the Evernote Web Clipper Extension for browsers.
Way to go with the Archival (Gold) CD’s. Way better than standard for permanent storage. You might want to consider switching to DVD archival format because my understanding is they are better quality because they have anti-scratch coatings on both sides of the disk typically and Cds typically are only protected on one side.
Here is an example of the DVD hard coat products on Amazon:
These are supposed to be good for 100 years. The problem in 100 years is no one will have a drive capable of reading them I don’t think.
I’m aware of Kiwix but haven’t used it. I thought it was only for cloning Wikipedia articles.
Since a Zim notebook is a reflection of the underlying filesystem directory – i.e., each page is a text file, each sub page is a directory with a corresponding text file – it can be easily navigated via file managers and a command-line.
For example, a subset of the tree output from my primary Zim notebook:
Syncthing
└── Zim
├── gadget
│ └── Todo.txt
└── gadget.txt
The notebook is stored in a directory named “Zim” with a sub page named “gadget”, so Zim created a subdirectory (gadget) and matching text file (gadget.txt). I also have a to-do sub page (Todo.txt) under gadget.
I store the notebook under my primary Syncthing folder which is synced in full to multiple devices but only a subset synced to my Android devices.
Markor reads/writes Zim-compatible text files so I can browse and edit pages from my phone. I don’t need all of Zim’s features on my phone, so a native app on Android isn’t necessary.
Zim already runs on Linux, macOS and Windows. The CPU type doesn’t matter as long as there’s a Python interpreter and GTK+ libraries.
There are already high-res optical scanners that can image CD/DVD/Blu-ray discs and platters pulled from HDDs. Images are fed into a program that “reads” it, converting the pits/dots into 0’s and 1’s, reproducing the original string of bits.
Now whether or not future generations will be literate enough to understand what’s on a CD/DVD is for a different discussion. 
It likely is. I was hoping it would read zim-wiki files but its not looking that way. I posted this question in the forum for the software I’m just waiting to see if anybody responds.
It would be super cool if there were a way to import the zim-wiki data.
my research shows that it is unlikely that there will ever be a dedicated Android app for Zim. you’re Super Smart you could probably bang out an app in an afternoon for Android.
I was going by this information:
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.