I've come to realize that flexibility is very near the top of the list for me as well, to the point that a pay increase would have to be pretty large for me to give up flexibility.
To Do lists:
emacs org-mode and agenda. I have one 'todo.org' file with top-level headings for each project. I keep an org-agenda buffer open to display the todo's scheduled for the current day. I try to go through my todo file once a week and clean it up, archiving 'DONE' items and deleting items that are no longer relevant or haven't been touched in a while. All my emacs org files are synced via dropbox. BTW, org mode really is amazing. I keep finding little nuggets that delight when reading about others' org-mode setups.
Bookmarks:
Pinboard, as well as pocket/instapaper for offline reading of bookmarks.
Financial tools:
Mint by intuit to keep track of all my accounts, numbers/excel for budgeting.
Calendar/Reminders: Google calendar and macOS calendar. I use siri/google assistant to capture spur-of-the-moment things that I don't want to forget.
Files on Disk:
Dropbox. Backblaze for backups. Google photos and icloud photos for extra photo backups.
Wikis/General Notes:
Emacs org mode. I keep a journal.org file, that I sporadically update, as well as an ideas.org file for things I'd like to investigate/try build in the future.
I use evernote for lists/notes from mobile devices as I haven't figured out a good way to use org files on iPhone/Android.
There isn't much overall integration, I just know that for important files I reference dropbox, Financials and Bookmarks have their own services, and then notes are going to be in emacs or evernote. Events/reminders handle themselves as I typically schedule them in the stock calendar/reminder apps and forget about them until I get a notification. I don't find the lack of integration to be a problem actually, as long as I know where to look for something based on what it is (e.g. notes -> orgmode/evernote, events -> calendar/reminders, files -> dropbox etc.)
Ymmv but I sync my notes files via Dropbox across several computers. I wrote a simple elisp function that runs on startup and opens my "todo.org" file. The only unsolved piece of the puzzle here for me is mobile: I haven't found a good way to view/edit org files on iOS.
Just finished atlas shrugged. It got a little long, but for the 1st 80% of it I was pretty engrossed by the plot line, themes and all aside. I enjoyed it
I've run into problems with large-ish files in git repos, binaries accidentally committed etc. I'm genuinely curious, is there a good way to use git for the size repositories that you mention?
Git is great for smaller binaries. Ideal in fact, given that it stores differences between revisions as binary deltas. For large >1GB files, I believe the diffing algorithm is the limiting factor (I would be interested in getting confirmation of that, though). For those files something like git-annex is useful (http://git-annex.branchable.com/)
I've used git to push around a lot of binary application packages and it's very nice. Previously I was copying around 250-300MB of binaries for every deployment--after switching to a git workflow (via Elita) the binary changesets were typically around 12MB or so.
I've had no trouble with non-github git repos handling text files well into the hundreds of megabytes. I haven't pushed the limit on this yet, but for me, personally, my datasets are often many hundreds to thousands of individual files that are medium sized. So it tends to work fairly well. Singular large files may not scale well with git.
I don't know of a great solution for Git, but I've heard that Perforce is more suited to handling large binaries - I believe it's used in many game development studios, where binary assets can number in the high gigabytes.
I'm with you on the coding comment especially when non-coding people use it to describe programming/coding as a menial, mindless task. I've also had the same thought that maybe I just want my job to sound cooler...
Your concerns about quickly flipping through pages are valid. I regularly read programming books in ebook form, mostly since they are cheaper, but it isn't a perfect experience. I tend to get used to searching and setting a lot of bookmarks. One other note: Charts, graphs and tables tend to not translate well to a smaller screen (I have a nook simple touch, YMMV)
