An email search retrieved 100+ emails. I wanted to copy them to a separate folder for archival purposes. I know one can drag and drop a message and create a net standard ‘.msg’ format but when I tried that only worked for 1 message at a time.
Save As allegedly worked at one time, but when I tested both rich text and .mbox export they produced one large file that wasn’t very readable.
What worked was File:Export as PDF. That worked.
There are several heirs to app.net — I know of 10Centuries.org, pnut.io and Manton Reece’s micro.blog kickstarter.
Each of these efforts is a largely one person project. All good people. pnut.io’s creator is 33mhz/Robert. I believe the API is based on the app.net API, which means the many apps created for app.net can have a second life. I’m using ChimPnut.app for iOS and the https://noodle.s3rv.com web client to access pnut.io. I’ve been told the app.net client Riposte.app may reappear.
pnut.io has an interesting approach to social networking …
Our community network is a small, sustainable hobby. We are tied closely to our users and developers through their Patreon pledges and small opt-in features. When you invite someone, they are associated with you in the user tree and you may be responsible for them if they abuse the network.
I made a Patreon pledge at the $5/month level but anyone can use it for free. The spam protection is the user tree. It will be interesting to see how well that works.
If you know me from app.net days or elsewhere and need an invitation send a note to me at jgordon@kateva.org. Best to mention how you know me.
Back in 2010 I wrote Gordon’s Tech: Escape from Outlook Notes - ResophNotes, Simplenote for iPhone and Notational Velocity.
Seven years later ResophNotes, Notation Velocity (I now use nvAlt), and Simplenote are still around — despite lack of a revenue stream for any of ‘em. Not only are they still around, but it’s still possible to keep notes in plain text or RTF — which is as future proof as computing gets.
They are still around — but not in great health. ResophNotes was last updated in 2012 or so and it is donation ware (always was). Simplenote was purchased by Automattic (WordPress) and is now open source and apparently run as some kind of charity operation [1]. nvAlt is ancient but Brett Terpstra recently updated it to run on Sierra (a notoriously buggy version of macOS).
These apps are old and kind of worn — but so am I. So we’re a good fit.
Recently I had another set of Microsoft Outlook Notes files to move to Simplenote. Talk about old and kind of worn! Outlook Notes is old, odd, and useful. It’s a winner in a category of one. Functionally it’s a lot like Simplenote — though you can’t print from Outlook [2].
The problem with Notes isn’t that it’s old and odd, it’s that everyone has given up on it. Microsoft tries to make it invisible. Apple dropped support for Notes sync via iTunes/iCloud — though I think Exchange sync may still work. Google ignores them too.
Which is why I needed to again move a data set of out Outlook Notes. I think export to Outlook CSV them import to ResophNotes is still the best bet. From there to Simplenote and from Simplenote to nvAlt, etc.
There’s another way to go though. You can use VB to script export from Outlook to c:\notes:
Sub NotesToText()
Set myNote = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI").PickFolder
For cnt = 1 To myNote.Items.Count
noteName = Replace(Replace(Replace(myNote.Items(cnt).Subject, "/", "-"), "\", "-"), ":", "-")
myNote.Items(cnt).SaveAs "c:\notes\" & noteName & ".txt", OlSaveAsType.olTXT Next
End Sub
The key thing is this script creates file names with the note title. It’s not a perfect result because the top of each file looks like this:
Modified: Thu 1/12/2017 2:36 PM
accidents and injuries
In this case ‘accidents and injuries’ becomes both the file name and the third line of the note. The “Modified: …” bit is just annoying. I suppose it could be removed using regex and a text editor that can iterate over a set of files … or script the removal.
I imported the plain text notes into nvAlt where they got the title from the file name so it looks something like this:
accidents and injuries
Modified: Thu 1/12/2017 2:36 PM
accidents and injuries
A bit of redundancy in there, and, of course, the Modified string is still around.
Overall this doesn’t work quite as well as the ResophNotes method, but it’s helpful to have options.
- fn -
[1] Automattic recently released a redo of the macOS Simplenote client. I haven’t tried it, but I hope it fixes the perennially broken search of the current client. In any case, Simplenote is not dead yet.
[2] Outlook 2013 broke Notes by essentially removing the list view — I think this might have been fixed in Office 365.
Update 3/13/2017
Speaking of ResophNotes, the current version has an impressive set of import options. Outlook CSV, Toodledo Notes CSV, text files, single file with note separator …
I donated years ago, time to send another donation.
Comcast sent me an email offering a modem upgrade that would enable higher speeds. I figured I’d have to do it sooner or later so I accepted the offer. Higher speeds would fit with Comcast’s “pay to play” network non-neutrality strategy [1].
I got things working, but it was a bit of a cluster. Comcast tried to make this self-serve, but they didn’t quite hit the mark.
I’ll skip the boring details of things that didn’t work and chat advice that was misguided and just list the useful bits I wish I’d known:
I’m old enough to remember when it was inexpensive and convenient to time shift football games. In the US and Canada that died with the analog to digital conversion. In some other countries there’s push-button record to USB from every TV, but not in the US. (I blame a VW-diesel class conspiracy, we now know those can happen.)
Periodically I look to see what’s sold without a monthly fee. Today Amazon pointed me to a $140 Samsung security cam DVR. There’s no tuner of course, so it can’t be used to record OTA TV.
The time-shifting story seems a small thing, but it convinced me markets don’t work the way people imagine they work. And the world doesn’t work the way I once thought it worked.
My new $160 32” 2015 720p Roku TCL TV records up to 90 minutes of OTA TV. This “Live TV Pause” was added to Roku OS in Nov 2016 — just 3 months ago.
With a 16GB+ USB storage device you can pause OTA TV for up to 90 minutes. I used a USB thumb drive I wasn’t making much use of — easy setup and it works well.
Of course what I really want is the lost ability to time-shift OTA TV without paying a monthly fee. Like we used to do routinely in the 1980s [1]. If Roku added that in a future OS update they’d make me a crazed fan boy.
For now they recommend Tablo (requires $5/m guide?) along with the Roku Tablo Channel.
A few other notes on this ultra-cheap TV:
[1] The lack of consumer resistance to the end of convenient low cost OTA TV time-shifting now seems an early warning of Trump susceptibility.
I like Office 365 Personal. The Mac version has bugs of course, but it seems to improve with each incremental release. For $70 a year I have a version running on my Mac and a version running in a Windows 10 VM (in theory it only installs one either 1 Mac or 1 Windows machine, but in practice it seems to allow both at once). The cost seems entirely reasonable to me. There’s little data lock because so many apps read and write (more or less) Office files. It’s the kind of subscription software I love.
So I didn’t mind when I had to get another license to cover my son. I figured I’d just upgrade to Home.
Except it’s quite unclear how you do that. This 2015 article suggests there’s a bit of an underhanded trick to it: How I upgraded Office 365 Personal to Office 365 Home for $10. That’s sort of how it works except it’s as designed, it’s not a bug or trick.
I had a month left on my Personal (1 machine) subscription. I bought Home (5 machine) for $10/month (renewable). MSFT switched my remaining month from Personal to Home. Then a month from now, it was to start charging me $10 a month. In MSFT parlance the subscriptions “stack”.
I suppose the trick deal is to buy a year of Personal, then immediately get a $10/month subscription to Home. Then you’d get a year of Home at the Personal price.
In my case it took a call to support for me to understand what had happened. Microsoft could improve this process. Once I figured it out I switched from $10/month to $99 a year. That switch was easy — and MSFT threw in a free month (standard behavior).
