I'd not even drank any...
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Not Inspired, Inspired
I realise that for a long time I have been very uninspired by a number of things that I used to be very passionate about. Music has become muted, the Internet is dial-up, visuals sepia. A few things have have made this uninspired state seem more dramatic, such that it is now identifiable. This coming into focus has sort of inspired me to write this post, and then do something about it!
First up: The Internet, or more correctly the World Wide Web. There was once a time when those three W's would make my neurons explode with ideas. I had things I wanted to find out there in cyberspace, things I wanted to put out there (other than random blog posts). Now it seems the web is just a place to sell things on various "social networking" sites. The user experience has become homogenised to the point of being an identical set of click-throughs. Where once I saw dreams, ideas, new horizons now I just see cheap CD's.
I do occasionally get excited about webby things but they are either mundae, work related or more about some technology geek-out. In most places the content of a page leaves me cold. I'm as bored of the internet as I am of TV - probably for similar reasons. I guess I've moved out of the target market, so that content is no longer aimed at me. I suppose that is a good thing (who wants to be a target) but as someone who has historically been quite "into" the web it leaves me at a bit of a loss.
Visuals, or more specifically me creating them and actively engaging in that process, is a tough one. I don't think I'm disconnected from it, or bored of it, more that I don't have time to engage as deeply as required. A ten minute flick through DA or Flickr every few weeks isn't really enough to consider oneself engaged. I do a bit more photography than before, but nothing like enough to satisfy any creative urge. I haven't done a photo-manipulation for years (well there were two a month ago...), likewise for any kind of design/typographical stuff.
Music is a tricky one. I've probably bought more music in the past year than in the past 6 or 7 years preceeding it, mainly due to having a salary these days. But a lot of the CD's I've bought have been back fill - getting the CD of the MP3's I've had for ages, filling in gaps in an artists discography. There's very little "new music" in what I've bought. Why is that? Well, partly I don't have the time to trek through record stores and go to empty gigs every week night.
There's also a massive failing in radio and music press to cover anything I'm interested in either intelligently enough to make me want to read/listen or at all. Music magazines/websites are either painfully pretentious or aimed at the pre-pubescent. (One exception is Stereogum!)
Last but not least, there's a lot of shit out there, and wading through it gets you rather smelly. People don't have (and don't need) and kind of quality control they record songs on their laptop, using free/pirate software and upload to MySpace. Don't get me wrong, I've stumbled upon some amazing music on myspace for which I am extremely glad, but there's not an easy way to interact there (the site is dreadful, admit it!) and I can't dial up a bunch of new tunes at random.
I've used podcasts a bit (again Stereogum!!) but they don't really solve the problem (I'm not sure what the problem is...). I have more than three weeks worth of solid music on my computer - why do I need more? It's like a crack habit.
The catalyst to this post was reading a NY Times article on Trent Reznor. Love or hate his music, you've got to admit this guy is a genius, a generous one too! The whole way that Year Zero was "marketed" was phenomenal. More like a piece of Brecht theatre than an album launch. The recent releases of Ghosts and The Slip really brought NIN into the "digital age", and set a high benchmark for what people should expect. These MP3's were beautifully packaged, for want of a better word. Each track with individual art work. Splendid. Inspirational.
So, what to do? Where to go? How to progress? What is my "next action"?
Well first up, I want to get inspired by the internet again. I want to create things with the wide-eyed amazement of my 16 year old self. One thing I plan on doing is writing a little script that makes a podcast from a bunch of artists on MySpace. Half of the code has already been done (must remember to blog that...) so it'd really just be making the podcast xml - simple!
Next, Visuals. Hmm, well YANU need a decent web presence. Time to get on that, I think. I worked out how blogger style sheets work a while ago to help Chloe with a web page so maybe it's time to put that knowledge to good use! This place could do with finishing off, too. I've also got a ton of photos from Iceland to sort through.
Music, well again it's about time, and making the most of what you've got. I'm playing in two bands, one as a hired gun (The Uphills) and another where I'm more central (YANU) - I should be making more of this! With The Uphills I get to goof around and play loud solo's, fine. In YANU I used to write more of the music. Recently I've not been as involved, busy boy, and I think I'm going to put my mark back on what we do. I think that we've lost some of our experimental edge and are kind of rehashing the same ideas. Time for a change!
One common thread in this is a lack of time. But these past two days I've got loads done, I just had to get off my arse and do it. So, I think next time I'm mindlessly clicking through the web, bored to a coma, I'll stop myself, think about what I'd like to see or hear, and go off and make it!
First up: The Internet, or more correctly the World Wide Web. There was once a time when those three W's would make my neurons explode with ideas. I had things I wanted to find out there in cyberspace, things I wanted to put out there (other than random blog posts). Now it seems the web is just a place to sell things on various "social networking" sites. The user experience has become homogenised to the point of being an identical set of click-throughs. Where once I saw dreams, ideas, new horizons now I just see cheap CD's.
I do occasionally get excited about webby things but they are either mundae, work related or more about some technology geek-out. In most places the content of a page leaves me cold. I'm as bored of the internet as I am of TV - probably for similar reasons. I guess I've moved out of the target market, so that content is no longer aimed at me. I suppose that is a good thing (who wants to be a target) but as someone who has historically been quite "into" the web it leaves me at a bit of a loss.
Visuals, or more specifically me creating them and actively engaging in that process, is a tough one. I don't think I'm disconnected from it, or bored of it, more that I don't have time to engage as deeply as required. A ten minute flick through DA or Flickr every few weeks isn't really enough to consider oneself engaged. I do a bit more photography than before, but nothing like enough to satisfy any creative urge. I haven't done a photo-manipulation for years (well there were two a month ago...), likewise for any kind of design/typographical stuff.
Music is a tricky one. I've probably bought more music in the past year than in the past 6 or 7 years preceeding it, mainly due to having a salary these days. But a lot of the CD's I've bought have been back fill - getting the CD of the MP3's I've had for ages, filling in gaps in an artists discography. There's very little "new music" in what I've bought. Why is that? Well, partly I don't have the time to trek through record stores and go to empty gigs every week night.
There's also a massive failing in radio and music press to cover anything I'm interested in either intelligently enough to make me want to read/listen or at all. Music magazines/websites are either painfully pretentious or aimed at the pre-pubescent. (One exception is Stereogum!)
Last but not least, there's a lot of shit out there, and wading through it gets you rather smelly. People don't have (and don't need) and kind of quality control they record songs on their laptop, using free/pirate software and upload to MySpace. Don't get me wrong, I've stumbled upon some amazing music on myspace for which I am extremely glad, but there's not an easy way to interact there (the site is dreadful, admit it!) and I can't dial up a bunch of new tunes at random.
I've used podcasts a bit (again Stereogum!!) but they don't really solve the problem (I'm not sure what the problem is...). I have more than three weeks worth of solid music on my computer - why do I need more? It's like a crack habit.
The catalyst to this post was reading a NY Times article on Trent Reznor. Love or hate his music, you've got to admit this guy is a genius, a generous one too! The whole way that Year Zero was "marketed" was phenomenal. More like a piece of Brecht theatre than an album launch. The recent releases of Ghosts and The Slip really brought NIN into the "digital age", and set a high benchmark for what people should expect. These MP3's were beautifully packaged, for want of a better word. Each track with individual art work. Splendid. Inspirational.
So, what to do? Where to go? How to progress? What is my "next action"?
Well first up, I want to get inspired by the internet again. I want to create things with the wide-eyed amazement of my 16 year old self. One thing I plan on doing is writing a little script that makes a podcast from a bunch of artists on MySpace. Half of the code has already been done (must remember to blog that...) so it'd really just be making the podcast xml - simple!
Next, Visuals. Hmm, well YANU need a decent web presence. Time to get on that, I think. I worked out how blogger style sheets work a while ago to help Chloe with a web page so maybe it's time to put that knowledge to good use! This place could do with finishing off, too. I've also got a ton of photos from Iceland to sort through.
Music, well again it's about time, and making the most of what you've got. I'm playing in two bands, one as a hired gun (The Uphills) and another where I'm more central (YANU) - I should be making more of this! With The Uphills I get to goof around and play loud solo's, fine. In YANU I used to write more of the music. Recently I've not been as involved, busy boy, and I think I'm going to put my mark back on what we do. I think that we've lost some of our experimental edge and are kind of rehashing the same ideas. Time for a change!
One common thread in this is a lack of time. But these past two days I've got loads done, I just had to get off my arse and do it. So, I think next time I'm mindlessly clicking through the web, bored to a coma, I'll stop myself, think about what I'd like to see or hear, and go off and make it!
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Another neat Quicksilver trick
You can choose an application, put it on the shelf (,) then choose another (and another, and another...) and open them all at once. Handy if you need to fire up a bunch of things first thing in the morning!
Monday, June 02, 2008
Hiveminder scripts
I've made a couple of little scripts that hook into hiveminder. Hiveminder is a really nice web based GTD tool. I've pretty much replaced Omni Focus with it, mainly because I need something that works across multiple machines easily - web based is the way to go! It also has a well documented API - which is always nice to see. So, the scripts...
First off there's a simple todo script, which'll add a new todo (like filling in the brain dump box, but from a script). There are two neat features to this script, which I like.
Firstly you can hook it into Quicksilver (a must for all Mac users!) by placing it in
Then tab to the second pane type todo (or as much of it as you need to) and press enter:
If the task gets created Quicksilver will give you a nice "Task Created!" message - ahhh:
But what happens if the task isn't created? That's the second neat feature. If for whatever reason a task can't be added (for instance you are on a plane without network) it'll write the task to a little SQLite database. The next time you sucessfully add a task to hiveminder the database is polled and all the tasks you've queued up locally will be uploaded too - neato!
The second script was something I'd discussed with Tim Barrass - some kind of GTD shuffle. We thought it's easy to write a bunch of lists, but if everything is about as important as everything else choosing what you do becomes quite hard. So we went all Apple and decided to make a simple shuffle program. We then remembered that we both had full time jobs, busy lives and didn't live in Silicon Valley. The idea was sort of shelved. Until now!
The Hiveminder API made coding up a quick task shuffle dead simple. Again put it in the Quicksilver actions folder, invoke it (type taskshuffle in QS) and it'll randomly choose a task from your todo list and take you to the appropriate page on Hiveminder. Slick. At the moment there's no weighting by priority (patches welcome, I'm not very good at setting priorities so it's not that useful to me) but it shouldn't give you a task you can't do before completing another.
The scripts are both available from my subversion repository, leave a comment if you use them/have problems with it etc.
First off there's a simple todo script, which'll add a new todo (like filling in the brain dump box, but from a script). There are two neat features to this script, which I like.
Firstly you can hook it into Quicksilver (a must for all Mac users!) by placing it in
~/Library/Application\ Support/Quicksilver/Actionsto use it invoke Quicksilver, press . to enter text mode, write your "brain dump":
Then tab to the second pane type todo (or as much of it as you need to) and press enter:
If the task gets created Quicksilver will give you a nice "Task Created!" message - ahhh:
But what happens if the task isn't created? That's the second neat feature. If for whatever reason a task can't be added (for instance you are on a plane without network) it'll write the task to a little SQLite database. The next time you sucessfully add a task to hiveminder the database is polled and all the tasks you've queued up locally will be uploaded too - neato!
The second script was something I'd discussed with Tim Barrass - some kind of GTD shuffle. We thought it's easy to write a bunch of lists, but if everything is about as important as everything else choosing what you do becomes quite hard. So we went all Apple and decided to make a simple shuffle program. We then remembered that we both had full time jobs, busy lives and didn't live in Silicon Valley. The idea was sort of shelved. Until now!
The Hiveminder API made coding up a quick task shuffle dead simple. Again put it in the Quicksilver actions folder, invoke it (type taskshuffle in QS) and it'll randomly choose a task from your todo list and take you to the appropriate page on Hiveminder. Slick. At the moment there's no weighting by priority (patches welcome, I'm not very good at setting priorities so it's not that useful to me) but it shouldn't give you a task you can't do before completing another.
The scripts are both available from my subversion repository, leave a comment if you use them/have problems with it etc.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Quicksilver just got a whole load better
So, I've got a bunch of mp3 files that I downloaded with my little myspace fetching script (*). I want to put them into itunes, but they're hidden away in some random directory structure. What's this? Quicksilver command line? qs *.mp3 enter enter? They're in iTunes you say? Wowzer.
(*) to be blogged at a later date...
(*) to be blogged at a later date...
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Friday, March 14, 2008
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Well done me
I've reached the end of the internet! Well, not quite. I've reached the end of my posts in Google Reader, which is a really nice app.Basically, you can pile in a load of rss feeds from all over the web and it then sorts them into one long feed (not so unusual). Then you can add it to your google ig page - neat - and add a bookmarklet to firefox so you can click through the posts in the feed - neater.
You can even categorise (tag) your feeds, so you only see what you want to. The only criticism of it is that it doesn't filter/merge posts. I don't want to see lots of posts on the same thing from different news vendors (or the same one if they provide different feeds), I'd rather Google Reader merge them up, and show a single post for that thread.
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Python Course
So tomorrow is the big day: I'm running my first course. This one is for the ACRC and is called "Data Analysis With Python" (you can download the slides and material from my CERN home page) and I hope it'll be good.
It was quite hard cramming everything into it (and maybe next time it'll be shorter) and the description is pretty broad. I decided to keep things fairly brief, and just point the attendees in the direction of useful material. I'll let you know how it goes....
It was quite hard cramming everything into it (and maybe next time it'll be shorter) and the description is pretty broad. I decided to keep things fairly brief, and just point the attendees in the direction of useful material. I'll let you know how it goes....
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Leopard X11 on multiple monitors fix
The X11 that comes with Leopard seems to not work across multiple monitors. The following is a fix given to me by James Jackson, a PhD student here...
cp /usr/X11/bin/Xquartz ~/Documents/Xquartz-backup
curl -LO http://people.freedesktop.org/~bbyer/x11app/xorg-server-1.2a10/Xquartz-1.2a10.bz2
bunzip2 Xquartz-1.2a10.bz2
sudo install -b Xquartz-1.2a10 /usr/X11/bin/Xquartz
curl -LO http://people.freedesktop.org/~bbyer/x11app/libX11.6.dylib.bz2
bunzip2 libX11.6.dylib.bz2
sudo install -b libX11.6.dylib /usr/X11/lib
curl -LO http://cloud.cs.berkeley.edu/~jeremy/X11/X11.bz2
bunzip2 X11.bz2
sudo install -b X11 /Applications/Utilities/X11.app/Contents/MacOS/
cp /usr/X11/bin/Xquartz ~/Documents/Xquartz-backup
curl -LO http://people.freedesktop.org/~bbyer/x11app/xorg-server-1.2a10/Xquartz-1.2a10.bz2
bunzip2 Xquartz-1.2a10.bz2
sudo install -b Xquartz-1.2a10 /usr/X11/bin/Xquartz
curl -LO http://people.freedesktop.org/~bbyer/x11app/libX11.6.dylib.bz2
bunzip2 libX11.6.dylib.bz2
sudo install -b libX11.6.dylib /usr/X11/lib
curl -LO http://cloud.cs.berkeley.edu/~jeremy/X11/X11.bz2
bunzip2 X11.bz2
sudo install -b X11 /Applications/Utilities/X11.app/Contents/MacOS/
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
[The following was a post to the 43folders forum, but I realised it ended up more like a blog post than a question, so copied it here, with a few more links...]
I stumbled upon this tip to "attach" files to an iCal event - very useful. But not that useful, I can't drag an drop the file I want to use, so my big clumsy fingers have to go through a number of contortions to do it. Immediately I thought "I bet I could do this with Quicksilver" (I'm new to it and think its great), but it seems I can't. I can find the file and copy the file name to the clipboard, but I can't update/modify the iCal event. Is there something simple I've not turned on?
Also, while I like the neat little two pane window of quicksilver, if I have a complex action (capture file name, prepend file:// to it, add that as this events url, in this instance) I'd like to be able to define this as a new action associated with files (or whatever), so I just call quicksilver once, find the file and type attach (or whatever). Is it possible to define such complex actions (chains of actions) and set them to a known command name? What would be really nice is if quicksilvers adaptive learning could work such complex actions out for me (I'm very lazy), and create new actions on the fly. Maybe now I'm dreaming!
Last but not least, I have an applescript that takes a message from mail.app and makes it an iCal event, I think I can pretty quickly make it save attachments somewhere sensible and attach them to these new events. I guess 90% of the time the files I want to attach are from mail ("The meeting is on Tuesday, the agenda pdf is attached") so maybe I don't need quicksilver to do it in this instance, though I'd really like it to!
[EDIT: after making this post to the forum it spat out a few related links, one being this - sounds perfect! Time to play...]
I stumbled upon this tip to "attach" files to an iCal event - very useful. But not that useful, I can't drag an drop the file I want to use, so my big clumsy fingers have to go through a number of contortions to do it. Immediately I thought "I bet I could do this with Quicksilver" (I'm new to it and think its great), but it seems I can't. I can find the file and copy the file name to the clipboard, but I can't update/modify the iCal event. Is there something simple I've not turned on?
Also, while I like the neat little two pane window of quicksilver, if I have a complex action (capture file name, prepend file:// to it, add that as this events url, in this instance) I'd like to be able to define this as a new action associated with files (or whatever), so I just call quicksilver once, find the file and type attach (or whatever). Is it possible to define such complex actions (chains of actions) and set them to a known command name? What would be really nice is if quicksilvers adaptive learning could work such complex actions out for me (I'm very lazy), and create new actions on the fly. Maybe now I'm dreaming!
Last but not least, I have an applescript that takes a message from mail.app and makes it an iCal event, I think I can pretty quickly make it save attachments somewhere sensible and attach them to these new events. I guess 90% of the time the files I want to attach are from mail ("The meeting is on Tuesday, the agenda pdf is attached") so maybe I don't need quicksilver to do it in this instance, though I'd really like it to!
[EDIT: after making this post to the forum it spat out a few related links, one being this - sounds perfect! Time to play...]
Monday, November 19, 2007
Fixing a broken update
So I screwed up an update (due to having a full system disk - oops!) and all of a sudden my mac will only boot to a flashing bue screen of doom. Not good. So I did some searching around and found out that:
1. Mac updates aren't rollback-able
2. You can run software update as a CLI tool
3. You can mount and install things from DMG's via CLI tools
Skipping over point 1, here's how I restored my system:
First, I was a bit lucky. I could log in from a remote terminal. I ssh'ed in and looked in /var/log/system.log to see what the hell was going on - seemed that the login window was somehow crashing - nice:
I was fairly sure that the problem was due to the failed update, so looked for a rollback tool (404 really useful tool not found). I then looked for a way to reinstall that update.
Following this life hack I tried to reinstall the update. Sadly this isn't possible using the softwareupdate tool, but I include it here for completeness - it might be a useful thing to know one day...
Next up I downloaded the DMG of the update from the apple site (wget is so good), mounted it:
Checked I had the room:
And then set it installing:
It seemed to take a while (it took some time with the GUI interface, too, though there I could see a progress bar), but it seemed to do the trick, the update completed and the login ran fine. I rebooted the machine, to finish the update, and after a wait that was a bit to long, everything was back to normal - phew!
Lessons learnt:
1. Never turn off sshd
2. Install Leopard, run regular backups
3. Never install a software update with a full system disk
1. Mac updates aren't rollback-able
2. You can run software update as a CLI tool
3. You can mount and install things from DMG's via CLI tools
Skipping over point 1, here's how I restored my system:
First, I was a bit lucky. I could log in from a remote terminal. I ssh'ed in and looked in /var/log/system.log to see what the hell was going on - seemed that the login window was somehow crashing - nice:
Nov 19 14:15:01 Hilbert crashdump[5914]: loginwindow crashed
Nov 19 14:15:01 Hilbert /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow: Login Window Application Started
Nov 19 14:15:02 Hilbert crashdump[5914]: crash report written to: /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/loginwindow.crash.log
I was fairly sure that the problem was due to the failed update, so looked for a rollback tool (404 really useful tool not found). I then looked for a way to reinstall that update.
Following this life hack I tried to reinstall the update. Sadly this isn't possible using the softwareupdate tool, but I include it here for completeness - it might be a useful thing to know one day...
Next up I downloaded the DMG of the update from the apple site (wget is so good), mounted it:
hdiutil attach MacOSXUpd10.4.11Intel.dmg
Checked I had the room:
df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2 74G 73G 1.1G 99% /
devfs 100K 100K 0B 100% /dev
fdesc 1.0K 1.0K 0B 100% /dev512K 512K 0B 100% /.vol
automount -nsl [201] 0B 0B 0B 100% /Network
automount -fstab [212] 0B 0B 0B 100% /automount/Servers
automount -static [212] 0B 0B 0B 100% /automount/static
/dev/disk1s3 205M 144M 61M 70% /Volumes/Mac OS X 10.4.11 Update (Intel)
And then set it installing:
sudo installer -pkg MacOSXUpd10.4.11Intel.pkg -target "/"
It seemed to take a while (it took some time with the GUI interface, too, though there I could see a progress bar), but it seemed to do the trick, the update completed and the login ran fine. I rebooted the machine, to finish the update, and after a wait that was a bit to long, everything was back to normal - phew!
Lessons learnt:
1. Never turn off sshd
2. Install Leopard, run regular backups
3. Never install a software update with a full system disk
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Weirdness
Had some weirdness with my google account today, wouldn't let me sign in and was really unresponsive. Any one else see similar?
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Militant Canadians
I got a DVD in the post today from Play (Last Star Fighter - sweeet!) which had come all the way from Canada. I know this because it had a sticker on the side saying "Only for sale in Canada - Security device enclosed!". Needless to say I opened the case with some caution. I had visions of a maple syrup bomb going off in my face, but no, nothing.
I took out the DVD all was fine. Then I noticed an RFID chip. My first reaction was one of mild disdain - how is that going to stop international DVD sales? But, I thought with increasing fear, this RFID could be really strong, beaming out the location of this illicit DVD to a Canadian spy satellite! I await a call from the Mounties, they always get their man....
I took out the DVD all was fine. Then I noticed an RFID chip. My first reaction was one of mild disdain - how is that going to stop international DVD sales? But, I thought with increasing fear, this RFID could be really strong, beaming out the location of this illicit DVD to a Canadian spy satellite! I await a call from the Mounties, they always get their man....
Friday, October 12, 2007
Applescript to make an iCal event from an email
So after much gnashing of teeth and swearing about Applescript I got my little app to work. I have an Act-on key binding which triggers a script. The script takes the email and dumps it into iCal, for further correction (e.g. setting date/time of the event). If I was feeling brave/stupid I'd get the script to parse out the date, but I really don't want to do that! The script was based on a mail to todo item script I found.
The following script does similar work, but creates a todo item instead of a new event. It also doesn't delete the original mail.
using terms from application "Mail"
on perform mail action with messages selectedMessages
try
set theCalendar to "WorkEvents"
repeat with mail in selectedMessages
set theSummary to the subject of the mail
set theDescription to the content of the mail
set theDate to the date received of the mail
tell application "iCal"
make new event at the end of events of (every calendar whose
title = theCalendar) with properties {summary:theSummary,
description:theDescription, start date:theDate}
end tell
set read status of the mail to true
delete the mail
end repeat
on error errMsg number errorNumber
display dialog ("An error occurred: " & errorNumber as string)
end try
end perform mail action with messages
end using terms from
The following script does similar work, but creates a todo item instead of a new event. It also doesn't delete the original mail.
using terms from application "Mail"
on perform mail action with messages selectedMessages
try
set theCalendar to "WorkEvents"
--say theCalendar
repeat with mail in selectedMessages
set theSummary to the subject of the mail
set theDescription to the content of the mail
tell application "iCal"
--set theCalendar to choose from list every calendar with
prompt "Choose name or cancel"
make new todo at the end of todos of (every calendar whose
title = theCalendar) with properties {summary:theSummary,
description:theDescription}
end tell
set read status of the mail to true
--delete the mail
end repeat
on error errMsg number errorNumber
display dialog ("An error occurred: " & errorNumber as string)
end try
end perform mail action with messages
end using terms from
Thursday, October 11, 2007
iCal appointments from Mail
Some links for making iCal entries from Mail using Act-On
http://kleinware.net/software - Didn't work, or I didn't set it up right.
http://www.cyberhq.nl/2005/12/10/mail-yourself-ical-todos.html - Became the base of my script.
http://www.hawkwings.net/2005/10/04/fuhgeddaboutit-make-a-to-do-from-an-email/ - Didn't work, or I didn't set it up right.
http://kleinware.net/software - Didn't work, or I didn't set it up right.
http://www.cyberhq.nl/2005/12/10/mail-yourself-ical-todos.html - Became the base of my script.
http://www.hawkwings.net/2005/10/04/fuhgeddaboutit-make-a-to-do-from-an-email/ - Didn't work, or I didn't set it up right.
Email woes
So I was watching a video of a talk given by Merlin Mann about "Inbox Zero" and it's got me thinking. I have a lot of email. A LOT. 
In fact much of my day is spent dealing with mail. It comes at me from all directions, and can get to be too much. I can't "just check" my mail - it will always trigger some sort of action (writing another mail, usually). I know this annoys Chloe, too, something must be done! So I've decided to put some of Merlin's ideas into action.
First I deleted all the mails from various lists I'm on. They're archived at CERN so if I need to I can trawl them online, but I don't think I ever will. It was quite satisfying deleting over 6000 mails that were of no real direct relevance to me.
Next I created two DMZ regions in my CERN and Bristol mail accounts, and put all the mails in those two inboxes into them. My inbox is now slimline. One day I'll sort through all those mails (or just delete them if I don't go into the DMZ's much in the next month or so).
Third I've taken it on myself to delete any mail that comes my way once the appropriate action has been taken. I've also set the email check time to 30mins instead of 5. I might up that to an hour depending on how things go... If it's urgent people can still get me on IM (though maybe that will change in the future...).
Next is to set up the Mail Act-On rules and see how they go. I'm also going to write a little automator script to take an email and make it an entry in iCal.
In fact much of my day is spent dealing with mail. It comes at me from all directions, and can get to be too much. I can't "just check" my mail - it will always trigger some sort of action (writing another mail, usually). I know this annoys Chloe, too, something must be done! So I've decided to put some of Merlin's ideas into action.
First I deleted all the mails from various lists I'm on. They're archived at CERN so if I need to I can trawl them online, but I don't think I ever will. It was quite satisfying deleting over 6000 mails that were of no real direct relevance to me.
Next I created two DMZ regions in my CERN and Bristol mail accounts, and put all the mails in those two inboxes into them. My inbox is now slimline. One day I'll sort through all those mails (or just delete them if I don't go into the DMZ's much in the next month or so).
Third I've taken it on myself to delete any mail that comes my way once the appropriate action has been taken. I've also set the email check time to 30mins instead of 5. I might up that to an hour depending on how things go... If it's urgent people can still get me on IM (though maybe that will change in the future...).
Next is to set up the Mail Act-On rules and see how they go. I'm also going to write a little automator script to take an email and make it an entry in iCal.
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