Andrew Wippler's Sketchpad - Blabbering

feeling super productive

2025-09-12T15:55:56.778969+00:00

Since August, I have been updating my digital life, which began with organizing my digital collection of books. I had never truly looked too indepth at Calibre before August 2025, but I am clearly blown away at its capabilities. I feel a bit awkward keeping the library on my desktop computer, but I have a script to periodically backup my home folder to my NAS. Today I finished organizing them in Calibre. I have discovered that I have 458 digital books - I have read 131, and have 135 on my reading list. The remainder are my wife's digital collection and reference material.</p>

I read books for information. Sometimes the information is good, so I highlight it for later consumption. I have build SpeakerWindows</a> as a means to organize those highlights and other thoughts for later use. This past month, I created two importers - readwise and play books. Readwise gathered my highlights from the Amazon's kindle, while Google Play Books sync their highlights in Google Drive. The end result was over 5,000 highlights that needed to be sorted.</p>

At first, I updated 5 a day through a prompts to ChatGPT, but that process was slow. So, I built a script that asked a local LLM to categorize the content of my notes and thoughts. It took about 2 hours to churn through those notes and create relavant tags for all of them. In the end, I am very happy with the results.</p>

I am now motivated to read books as fast as I can in Google Play Books, export them to Google Drive, and import them to SpeakerWindows.</p>

Word processor to replace Google Docs

2025-09-06T16:22:14.660761+00:00

The problem</h2>
I have a few frustrations with Google Docs</a>. It has gotten slow over the years. There is now a sudden push to migrate to Google Workspaces, which is something I do not want to do. There a few routes I can go in an endeavor to switch away from Google Docs.</p>

Web Options</h3>

Office 365</li>
Etherpad-lite</li>
Hedgedoc</a></li>
OnlyOffice</li>
Other various options that do not support footnotes</li> </ul>
Desktop Options</h3>

LibreOffice</li>
VSCode</li>
Geany</li>
Other options not as good as the ones listed</li> </ul>
The Direction</h2>
I really only need a word processor. I do not need a full blown office replacement. LibreOffice is nice, but I would like something that looks more modern. Hedgedoc is a great option, but footnotes are a bit clunky.1</a></sup> Etherpad-lite says it will do what I need, but all of the plugins that I would want to use do not work with the latest version. VSCode and Geany do not support footnotes as I would need them. That left me with only one option to try OnlyOffice.2</a></sup></p>
OnlyOffice</h2>
OnlyOffice is bundled with well known third-party solutions, such as CryptPad, NextCloud, and OwnCloud. Those options offer more than a document processor, and I am only looking to add a word processor. This meant I had to custom supply my own OnlyOffice solution.3</a></sup> In a followup post, I will post how I accomplished to vibe code middleware to handle the Document server oddities behind an OAuth2 authentication flow.</p>
Conclusion</h2>
I thought there would be more free wordprocessing options available in 2025, but it appears everyone stopped developing new things once Google created their free Google Docs product. It appears others paid OnlyOffice to write competitive software in 2015. I am just thankful there is an AGPL v3.0 license .... even if the Documentation is difficult to understand.</p>

I would have to manually type the references. While this is what I do on this blog, when I write, I want fast footnote insertion. If Hedgedoc had a button I could press, it would have switched to it in a heartbeat. ↩</a></p> </li>

Worst case scenario, I could code my own option, but this is not ideal. ↩</a></p> </li>

This is more difficult than it seems. The Docs were lacking in this area. ↩</a></p> </li> </ol> </section>

An open letter to Google

2025-09-06T16:17:10.887031+00:00

Dear Google,</p>

I want a functioning product that is fast. That means I do not want to participate in your “simulate slowness experiments.” I use your product because I think it is good. You do not have to annoy me about trying your new Google workspace. If I want to try it, I will try it.</p>

When I dismiss your notifications, it means I have acknowledged your banner, read the contents, and do not want to try this new offering. It does not mean you need to prompt me about Google Workspace at every opportunity. This behavior has become very annoying to me and has now caused me to seek other options for word processing.</p>

I wish I could stay with your Google Doc application, but my writing time needs to be without interruption. Even the little change (such as nesting page numbers in a sub menu, which adds another click) can be tolerated for a time, but this 90px banner is just too much for me.</p>

Sincerely, Andrew</p>

Andrew Wippler's Sketchpad - Blabbering

feeling super productive

Word processor to replace Google Docs

The problem</h2> I have a few frustrations with Google Docs</a>. It has gotten slow over the years. There is now a sudden push to migrate to Google Workspaces, which is something I do not want to do. There a few routes I can go in an endeavor to switch away from Google Docs.</p>

Web Options</h3> Office 365</li> Etherpad-lite</li>

Desktop Options</h3> LibreOffice</li> VSCode</li> Geany</li>

An open letter to Google

The problem</h2>
I have a few frustrations with Google Docs</a>. It has gotten slow over the years. There is now a sudden push to migrate to Google Workspaces, which is something I do not want to do. There a few routes I can go in an endeavor to switch away from Google Docs.</p>