Please note: I am no longer using Windows nor Outlook, so unfortunately I cannot offer any help with problems you encounter using these scripts and techniques.

Over the last few days I have been redoing my GTD-under-Outlook setup, based on the instructions available in the "GTD and Outlook" guide from DavidCo (I will write more about my setup later). One of the tricks the guide suggest is creating a mail rule on outgoing mail, which scans the message body for a special tag (/wf or *wf* are suggested) and automatically adds the message to the @WAITING FOR email folder.

As you may know, I'm a reluctant switcher from Mac to Windows. I am also a fan of GTD. I had been using Jello Dashboard (JD) to implement GTD under Outlook. JD is a very nice system, the developer is friendly and responsive, and I had even written several patches to adapt it to my way of working. I was even in the process of drafting a series of blog posts titled "My GTD under Outlook setup".

One thing I missed since I moved from a Mac (using The Hit List for GTD) to Outlook (using Jello Dashboard for GTD) was the availability of a global hot key that I could use to bring up a text entry box which I could use to quickly add things into my electronic Inbox, for later processing.

I have found a way to achieve this, and here is the setup I am using now:

1. Download and install AutoHotKey, if you don't have it already (it's a really useful free application, well worth exploring).
2. Add the following line to your default AutoHotKey.ahk file (normally in ~/Documents/AutoHotKey.ahk):
   

   	; AutoHotKey configuration to open my Inbox in OneNote.
   	; To use this, change the file path to the path of the GTD notebook
   	; you want to use. You may also want to change the key to which it
   	; is assigned (I use Win-i).
   	#i::Run c:\Users\zambonid\Documents\OneNote Notebooks\GTD\INBOX.one

   view raw gistfile1.txt hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Since I started at my new job and moved to a new machine and OS, my old GTD setup has fallen by the wayside and I have found myself at a loss trying to keep track of things. I have found OneNote to be a very useful tool for keeping notes and reference material, and Outlook 2010 is actually not that bad as a task/calendar/email management tool.

So, as a first step, here are some links I have found and which I am in the process of reading and digesting for creating my own setup:

I am the author of two books: Learning CFEngine and Learning Hammerspoon, both self-published using Leanpub. The source of my books is kept in GitHub repositories. In this post I will show you how I use the Leanpub API together with Hammerspoon and CircleCI as part of my workflow, to automate and monitor the building, previewing and publishing of my books.

Leanpub basics

First, some basic concepts about the Leanpub API. See the documentation for the full details, I’m only mentioning clear some things you need to know to understand the rest of this post.

Here’s how to fix the breakage caused by one of the recent updates to Microsoft Outlook in the Outlook-to-OmniFocus AppleScript included with my SendToOmniFocus spoon.

Yesterday my external Western Digital disk (which I use for Time Machine, among other things) stopped mounting automatically when I plug it in. This may *cough*definitely*cough*have something to do with me unmounting it forcefully while it was doing a backup, since I was in a hurry.

I recently posted a snippet to perform hierarchical copying in cfengine3. As I was attempting to integrate this mechanism into my copy of cfengine's COPBL, I realized that no additional functions or body components are needed. Thanks to cfengine3's list expansion, all you need to do is include in the existing copy promise the list containing the desired list of suffixes to try. For example:

Becomes:

While this looks at first sight even longer than the original (and of course, in this case you could just specify ${sys.flavour} directly in the copy_from statement), it is much more flexible. Instead of defining different sections for each class that you want to handle (e.g. suse_9, redhat_5, etc.), the same code is able to copy the corresponding binary directory for any operating system, you just have to put the corresponding bin.* directory in your repository.

Cfengine (tested 3.2.0) installs easily on OS X (tested 10.7), given that it's Unix. One problem I encountered was that it does not compile with the bundled version of Berkeley DB (it recognizes it during configure, but produces compilation errors). The solution is to use some other DB engine. I chose Tokyo Cabinet. Using homebrew, the process is simple

brew install tokyo-cabinet

After this, configure --with-tokyocabinet, and then compile and install as usual.

Here is how to set up Nix in single-user mode on macOS.

Here’s how to fix the breakage caused by one of the recent updates to Microsoft Outlook in the Outlook-to-OmniFocus AppleScript included with my SendToOmniFocus spoon.

via https://medium.com/@mrdoro/fast-translation-with-google-translator-and-mac-osx-817e32233b7a

via https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/spotlight-use-package-a-declarative-configuration-tool

I needed to copy a directory between two git repositories while preserving its history. I found some good instructions at http://gbayer.com/development/moving-files-from-one-git-repository-to-another-preserving-history/, which got me started, but I figured out a way to avoid having to move all the files into their directory again (lines 5-6 in Greg’s instructions) by reversing the filter to remove everything I don’t want instead of only including the directory I want. Here are the steps (the idea is the same as in Greg’s post, so please read that to get the explanation, I’m only listing the commands here for reference):

If you are using docker on Mac OS X using boot2docker (http://docs.docker.io/installation/mac/), you may see truncated output from docker run, and also may have noticed that docker attach does not work properly, producing only some output and then exiting. This bug is documented here: https://github.com/boot2docker/boot2docker/issues/150, where I also found the following workaround. Documenting it here in case anyone finds it useful:

Instead of using the default value of DOCKER_HOST provided by boot2docker up, establish the docker connection through an ssh tunnel:

Cfengine (tested 3.2.0) installs easily on OS X (tested 10.7), given that it's Unix. One problem I encountered was that it does not compile with the bundled version of Berkeley DB (it recognizes it during configure, but produces compilation errors). The solution is to use some other DB engine. I chose Tokyo Cabinet. Using homebrew, the process is simple

brew install tokyo-cabinet

After this, configure --with-tokyocabinet, and then compile and install as usual.

Please note: I am no longer using Windows nor Outlook, so unfortunately I cannot offer any help with problems you encounter using these scripts and techniques.

Over the last few days I have been redoing my GTD-under-Outlook setup, based on the instructions available in the "GTD and Outlook" guide from DavidCo (I will write more about my setup later). One of the tricks the guide suggest is creating a mail rule on outgoing mail, which scans the message body for a special tag (/wf or *wf* are suggested) and automatically adds the message to the @WAITING FOR email folder.

Today I ran into the problem that symlinks created under cygwin using "ln -s" are not understood by Windows, and of course Windows shortcuts are seen by cygwin as regular files. Happily, this is a (semi-)solved problem. For reference, this is what needs to be done:

1. Add "winsymlinks" to your CYGWIN environment variable. For example, in my .bashrc I have the following:
   export CYGWIN="nodosfilewarning winsymlinks"
   
   This makes cygwin create symlinks differently, in a form that is understood both by it and by Windows.
   This is the main step, and the only one if you just need access from the shell and from the Windows explorer. However, emacs still sees those symlinks as regular .lnk files. To fix this, follow the next step.

Update (2011/09/05): Updated the instructions for cfengine 3.2.0, cygwin 1.7.9, and tested them on a clean cygwin install.

Installing the cfengine community edition under Windows (the commercial version includes native Windows support) is fairly easy under cygwin, you just need to have the appropriate dependencies installed. Here’s how I did it.

Versions  

• cfengine: 3.2.0
• Windows 7 Enterprise SP1/64bit
• cygwin: 1.7.9-1

Additional cygwin packages needed 

To install these, run cygwin’s setup.exe, search for each packages in turn, and install them. Make sure you agree to install any additional packages that are listed as dependencies (setup.exe will ask you about it).

Apple released iOS 4.3 a few days ago, and if you follow this topic at all, you have probably already heard all about the Personal Hotspot feature, AirPlay enhancements, and whatnot. But buried in the notes for this release was a new feature that caught my attention:

Single tap conference call dialing with a pause to send a passcode

I have found almost no mentions of this new feature online (most reviews focus on the "bigger" features), so I thought I'd explore it a little bit.

I’m doing some cleanup and reorganization, and captured my current app setup as a reference point. Here they are.

Quick note: The first screen is my most-used apps (some are going out now, like 2Do which I've never liked too much, but was the best way to sync tasks with Outlook, which I'm no longer forced using). Second screen is all my folders. Third and fourth screens are my girls' screens, with the games they use when they borrow my phone. The games I play are mostly in the first "Games" folder.

Apple released iOS 4.3 a few days ago, and if you follow this topic at all, you have probably already heard all about the Personal Hotspot feature, AirPlay enhancements, and whatnot. But buried in the notes for this release was a new feature that caught my attention:

Single tap conference call dialing with a pause to send a passcode

I have found almost no mentions of this new feature online (most reviews focus on the "bigger" features), so I thought I'd explore it a little bit.

As you may know, I'm a reluctant switcher from Mac to Windows. I am also a fan of GTD. I had been using Jello Dashboard (JD) to implement GTD under Outlook. JD is a very nice system, the developer is friendly and responsive, and I had even written several patches to adapt it to my way of working. I was even in the process of drafting a series of blog posts titled "My GTD under Outlook setup".

I just switched from Carbon Emacs (which is old Emacs 22.x) to Emacs for OS X Modified on my Mac (which is a Cocoa app, and Emacs 23.3).

A couple of days ago I finished reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. I thoroughly enjoyed it (I may post a longer review later on, but I really liked learning the "behind the scenes" of much of what I witnessed from the outside over so many years).