WebNotes

I just came across WebNotes, which looks interesting. It provides tools for collecting and especially annotating web pages. Its in invite-only beta at the moment, and I haven't tried it, only watched the demo. Worth keeping an eye on though if you're interested in web-based research.

Google Notebook to Evernote

I'm sad that Google has discontinued its Notebook application, I was a fan. Evernote announced an import path to get Google notebooks into Evernote today. It works really well. Although they say "We even maintain the creation date", but that didn't work at all, the imported notes had today's date on them, but otherwise it was fine.
I really like Evernote, it is powerful and very well-designed. But it makes me nervous. There is still no decent export. If Evernote goes extinct would I be able to recover the information? Probably not. Yes I can export in Evernote's weirdo xml format but then what? The GNotebooks are exported as atom xml from Google then imported into Evernote. I only hope that this means that Evernote have solved their note to xml translation problems and a sensible export will appear very soon.

iPod won't sync photos

I've just had a problem syncing my iPod Touch. I would get an error mid sync "The iPod "iPod Name" cannot be synced. An unknown error occurred (-50)."
I've done a lot of Googling for explanation and a fix, it took quite a while, so I thought I'd share.
The crash always happened when syncing photos. So after not getting very far with the usual suggestions I ignored all causes and fixes not relating to photos. The problem seems to have come from me replacing my iPhoto library with a different one since my last iPod sync. The solution (for me) was to delete the iPod photo cache folder.

1. Find your current iPhoto library in the Photos folder
2. Right (ctrl) click and select 'show package contents'
3. In the new window delete the folder iPod Photo Cache

Tried syncing again. It told me that I had my iPod synced to a different library and did I want to delete all photos and sync with the current library. Yes! Sync worked fine after that.

This link helped more than any other.

G(oogle)Mail

I was investigating using GMail as online storage space today. It gives 7.2 Gigs of space now! I haven't decided on this or tested anything, but I came across a curious warning on the Gspace FAQ site. It said to be very careful that you put name@googlemail.com not name@gmail.com if that was your address otherwise your files could potentially be sent to someone else's account!

I was momentarily panicked, thinking about all the mails I had been missing- I use both interchangeably when giving my email address. After a bit of testing (sending emails to both addresses from a different account) it turns out this is absolutely false. Both just work. I remember when I signed up it gave me the @googlemail.com address but @gmail.com does exactly the same in all emailing and logging on options I have found.

Maybe there is some complex situation regarding the specifics of Gspace that I haven't appreciated but in terms of direct access to my mail account the two addresses seem identical. I'm considerably more relaxed now, but I still think I will set up a second account if I do decide to use it as a file server mostly in case uploading activity causes the account to be temporarily blocked.

Zotero under fire

Zotero the excellent, free, open-source reference manager is under fire from its closed source competition via a law suit. Thomson Reuters the makers of the unstable and expensive market-leading Endnote software have sued George Mason University, the developers of Zotero, for "violating its license agreement and destroying the EndNote customer base" (Courthouse News Service). The complaint comes primarily from the fact that the latest version can import Endnote styles. I picked up on this from Neil Saunders' blog post who puts it really well

"Here’s my simple, black-and-white view of the world. The greatest achievement of the internet is the potential to set information free. There are free-thinking, forward-looking organisations like GMU who see this potential and act upon it. There are also organisations who see only threats to their corporate interests. Publishing corporations no longer control the flow of information to consumers and some of them seem to be struggling to accept this, adapt and move on."

Our support should definitely go to George Mason University who have moved the world forward and improved it with not just a piece of software but a great implementation of the open-source idea. This is software driven forward by users, in this case initially at the GMU's Center for History and New media. Comically there is also a claim that "GMU reverse engineered Reuters' EndNote software to create Zotero". I don't see any signs of that, thankfully they are not very similar in any meaningful respect, Zotero is generally much better. Zotero works nicely from within a web browser, Endnote works when it feels like it.

Zotero is not alone however. There are a growing number of free (though often not open source) web based reference management systems. Maybe Thomson Reuters are just trying to mark out some territory and delay the inevitable a bit longer. Ultimately they are going to fail, I just hope their lawyers don't hurt Zotero too much on their way down.

Mobile Blogging

I'm trying out blogging from my iPod touch. I just downloaded the free app life something. Quite straightforward to set up.

Don't yet know the important details like if I can save drafts or edit posts or what the app is really called (it doesn't say on this page and i've forgotten). Will press "Done" and see what happens! LifeCast, that's it.

Posted with LifeCast

Google for pirates!

Apparently today is international talk like a pirate day. Google are always keen on adding languages and today added Pirate to their list of interface languages. Good.

How to migrate away from WordPress

Well it wasn't as straightforward as I first imagined. Google-searching found a lot of stuff, but it was almost all to move in the opposite direction. My reasons for moving back to Blogger are outlined in my previous post, maybe I was a bit naive to expect all the good stuff in the free version, plus I am becoming a huge Google fan and just feel good about being back at Blogspot. Ok not quite so many features in some places, but more in others, and much more reliable in my experience.

To try and import my previous posts from WorPres to Blogspot I chose to use the wxr2blogger python script found here. It worked quite well after two fairly obvious (in retrospect) modifications. First remember to prefix the command with "./" (this may be specific to Mac?). Secondly I needed to use the workaround detailed in the README file. After that, and repeating from the beginning, the conversion to something that blogspot could import was complete.

There were sill quite a lot of things to do however and I started to wonder if it was worth all the effort. On balance I still feel it was.

Images migrated, but as links back to the original post images. I didn't like that, they didn't look quite right, text didn't wrap, so I exported them all to my desktop and reimported them to the new blog.

Comments migrated perfectly! I wasn't expecting that. Unfortunately some spam comments also carried over and needed to be deleted. Strange really since they weren't visible as comments on the WordPres site.

The script unfortunately exports posts in small batches, since apparently blogspot refuses to import large batches of posts. It took a while to import, check and post everything. Many "posts" were created that were blank, and I had to delete. I had about 4x as many posts after using the script as I actually had on Wordpress.

Anyway, all done now. Thought someone might find my experiences useful.

WordPress no more

This is my first genuine post on compumunkey.blogspot.com. All the previous posts were imported from the WordPress version of the blog. I wanted to try WordPress because of all the really nice looking blogs I had seen. It never really worked for me though.

None of those nice templates are available on the free version, nor can you import templates.

There was always weird stuff going on. The font would change on different days. Why? At least one link just evaporated.

Most annoyingly of all WordPress intercept me trying to log on and redirect me to a screen persuading me to set up a second blog. Entering the same url a second time however does get me on. Anyway that bit of marketing was the last straw.

iPod fix

I recently had a problem with my iPod touch where some (but not all) applications would refuse to launch or immediately crash back to the main screen. Downloading them a second time did not change anything. I'm running version 2.0.1 software. I didn't find anything useful when searching the web yesterday. One of the reasons to post on this blog was to add to the Google searchable pool of stuff that is out there. I followed a link to the iPod touch troubleshooting page, and decided to restart the iPod by holding the top sleep/wake button until the red "Restart" slider appeared. After restarting everything worked just fine, some applications for the first time. Yet another triumph for the turn it off and on again strategy! It hadn't actually occurred to me that I had NEVER retarted my iPod, only toggled it between wake and sleep.

Amazing things the iPod touch (and iPhone). I almost never put the headphones in, just use it as a mobile internet device. Typing is very quick and very intuitive. The screen quality is sensational for photos. I use Google notebook, Evernote and Zenbe lists as productivity devices. Gmail, Google reader, and Safari web browser are excellent too. Email yourself a PDF and you can browse it at leisure, even if offline. Yes the screen is big enogh for this. Lots of new (often free) applications appearing daily, it reminds me of how Palm was years ago before they fell asleep.