I am planning to buy a computer for the library at my kids' elementary school. The use will be cataloging and circulating books using Librarything (web-based; many here are or were users.) Theft is probably not a major concern (the library connects to a room with 20 shiny iMacs), so a laptop would work as well as a desktop. I can spend what I want (although there are always other things I want to do with the library money.)

Thoughts? Would a Chromebook be a good solution? I need durable and reliable and runs the internet, basically.

I know this doesn't apply to you, flea, but I just thought of it -- I have all my music in iTunes on my current laptop, and that's a no-go on a Chromebook, apparently. They helpfully suggest moving to Google Play Music, so something to consider.

I have set private cloud services for my family (wife, kids, and in-laws). My MIL really wanted to have shared calendars so we could all coordinate things, but my wife is a stickler for privacy and wanted something that was under our control, so no Google services.

I ended up setting up OwnCloud which does file sharing, calendars, tasks, contacts, and other stuff. I tried setting it up on our Synology NAS, but while it did work it was slow as hell. Our NAS is pretty low-end so that isn't too much of a surprise. I ended up compromising and running the server on a VM hosted on my home computer, but storing the databases and shared files on NFS shares on the NAS. So now it's sort of like Dropbox with effectively no limit on storage combined with Google-like shared calendars and tasks. (The UI isn't nearly as nice as Google, but it is private.)

Aside from getting the NFS permissions right, the only sort of tricky part was getting SSL set up. I ended up making my own root certificate to create a key and cert for the server and then installed the root cert as a trusted root in everyone's computers so they can use SSL to connect to the server without getting annoying security warnings.

I did upgrade from the Synology that you have, Gud, to the Drobo that Drew has. It's working great for all the boring stuff, but I'm thinking about working on the media server bits today. I mean, yes, I have lots of other work work to do, but it'll all go so much more swimmingly if I have media being served to me, yes?

Anybody have good task/to do software? Starting a new role that's even more high volume, but also more deadline driven. I need something visual that clearly shows due dates, has the ability to do warnings, and is easily updated.

We just started using Wunderlist here in the office and are quite fond of it. Links across multiple platforms, very flexible.

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I love Todoist, myself, since Astrid died.

I use the Android-only 'Open Tasks'

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However it's pretty basic and the big attraction for me is that it integrates with my private cloud. There are probably better featured apps, but if you like simple it might be worth a look and it's free.

I'll second Wunderlist. Started using it at the end of the school year. Share tasks with others on the list. Have private lists. Actually, rather useful.

Thanks! Doesn't need to be portable or sharable, this is for work.