Tag: macosx

Sending Mail to Evernote on MacOSX

I still can’t figure out why this isn’t baked into the Evernote application as a Service available system-wide, but there’s a way to add a Service to send messages from Mail into Evernote as notes for archive. There was a previous applescript solution, but I hadn’t used it (and it apparently borked on the 10.9 upgrade anyway).

I’d been using the Evernote email address feature, to just forward messages I need to archive for automatic importing into Evernote, but it’s a pain. I have to remove the *FWD: * prefix on the note title. I need to decrease the indented quote level of messages. etc… It works, but it’s funky.

Some quick searching turned up this post on the Evernote website. It talks about using an Automator app as a GTD workflow. Awesome. Except the app they provide includes a step to move archived messages into an “Archive” mailbox in Mail. I don’t want to do that, so I modified the app ever so slightly, to remove that step.

Now, I have it set up as a Service, and have followed the instructions on the Evernote post to add a keyboard shortcut. Command-option-E sends selected message(s) to Evernote. Done. Awesome.

Here’s my modified Automator app – download the .zip, extract it, and double-click on the app inside. It’ll ask you if you want to install it. If you haven’t already turned off the “Allow Apps from Anywhere” setting, you’ll get a warning saying that you haven’t done so. Easy fix. Open System Preferences, click “Security & Privacy” and then click the lock at the bottom left. Then, click “Allow apps downloaded from: anywhere”. Done.

The one wrinkle I’ve seen so far is that the current version doesn’t pull attachments over. That sucks. Attachments are one of the reasons I archive stuff. Looking into solutions for that now…

paywall crumbles

2011 03 20 paywall crumbles

the New York Times is piloting their paywall system in Canada. I thought I’d click around the website until it got triggered. Eventually, I got a warning pop-in, saying I had only one article left. Click. You must subscribe to see more.

I don’t actually have a problem with their paywall model. It’s their newspaper. It’s their content. It’s their website. They can do what they want. But, it was a ridiculously trivial process to thwart the paywall and regain full access to the NYTimes without subscribing. A couple of CSS overrides, and a javascript toggle.

I have no intention of leaving my blockerblocker in place. It works fine, but I don’t really have much use for full access to the NYTimes website. As others pointed out, it’s also trivially possible to bypass the paywall by enabling “private browsing” mode in a browser. Not an impressive way to design the “drm” to base the fortunes of a multimillion dollar news enterprise on.

more Papers love

I’ve been slowly working on my MSc research proposal. Still **far** to early to post any of it online, but it’s starting to take shape. I’m using [Papers](http://mekentosj.com/papers/) to gather journal articles for reference as I’m working. Today, I added 33 articles to the stack, on top of the 63 I’ve already gathered. That’s not manageable. But Papers has some great tools to help cut through stuff quickly. I can sort the articles by the number of citations they have, which pushes “important” articles up to the top of the list. Then I can work through them all more effectively, without worrying about missing anything important.

Of course, Papers is also to blame for the tall stack of papers to read. It makes it almost **too easy** to find articles.

A giant list of 96 papers with 33 new additions becomes a filtered list of 31 papers to read first, sorted by “importance”. Now, if I had an iPad to read the papers without being tethered to a computer (or killing a forest of trees, and draining several unicorns of their blood for inkjet printer cartridges…)

Papers_sorted.png

how to fix Java WebStart on MacOSX 10.5.7

I don’t know when this broke – maybe around the time Safari 4 was released? Anyway, Java WebStart stopped working. Downloading a .jnlp file and doubleclicking it brought up an editor (Dashcode) rather than the application launched via Java WebStart. I tried using Spotlight to find “Java WebStart” so I could manually launch the app. But nothing was found. WTF?

Apparently, the solution, of course, is to navigate in the Finder to /System/Library/CoreServices and click on Java WebStart.app – an entirely intuitive and obvious solution. This triggers some hidden magic to somehow restore access to JWS. Who knows. It works after doing this.

cruz rocks

Oh, yeah. Cruz is easily the nicest browser I’ve used. I’ve got it running in fullscreen mode on my MacBook Pro – laugh at me for using full screen mode if you like, but I’ve always enjoyed BIG browser windows… It’s not perfect, to be sure, but it sure is niiice…

cruz

Cruz is a new webkit-based browser that supports Greasemonkey scripts, plugins, and stuff like integrated tinyurl creation and a full screen mode. It can generate thumbnails for search results on Google, and has a CoverFlow view of search results. Very cool stuff. I think I’ll be switching…

Hey! You got Firefox in my Safari! You got Safari in my Firefox! 2 great tastes…

why I love my Network

I’m firmly in the @injenuity “The Network is People” camp. And I freaking LOVE my network.

I’ve been experiencing an annoying glitch on my MacBook Pro since upgrading to MacOSX 10.5 – nothing serious, but occasionally it’d bug me. What happened was, if I opened a Finder window to /Users – it would show every user’s home directory except mine. I mean, I know it’s there, because all of my files are there. And if I used Terminal or remote SSH login, the directory was certainly there, as were all of my files. If I used Finder’s Go to Folder command (Command + Shift + G) I could enter “/Users/dnorman” and all was well.

But it was annoying.

Every once in awhile, I’d try to debug. I’d use Terminal and navigate to /Users. I’d run ls -l and I’d see this:

$ ls -l
total 0
drwxrwxrwt   7 root     wheel     238 23 Mar 15:17 Shared
drwxr-xr-x  13 demo     demo      442 14 May  2006 demo
drwxr-xr-x@ 47 dnorman  dnorman  1598 31 Mar 18:12 dnorman

The other user directories had either a + or no symbol after the file mode section. My directory had a @. WTF. I’ve tried looking through man. man ls. man chmod. Couldn’t find any mention of @. Try googling for @. Not helpful. This is where the gaping holes in my *NIX geekery are exposed. I was completely stumped.

Finally, I decide to try checking with the LazyWeb. I posted a tweet to roughly describe the problem – as best I could in the 140 character limit – and…

Waited 3 minutes before @thepatrick responded with a hint, and another one.

So, a few seconds later, I was running a new (to me) command via the command shell, finding out about xattr to list extended attributes about files.

$ xattr -l /Users/dnorman
com.apple.FinderInfo:
0000   00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 40 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    ........@.......
0010   00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00    ................

Bingo. There’s some funky bit set. So, how to nuke it. I ran man xattr and found it has a -d flag, which is used to delete attributes by name. So I ran this:

$ xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo /Users/dnorman

Done.

My home directory now properly shows up in Finder. Everything’s hunky dory.

The power of my Network, harnessed with a simple LazyWeb plea, solved in 3 minutes what I’d struggled for 5 months to solve on my own.

I love my Network. It’s the people.

Thanks, Patrick. I owe you a $beverage.