iPhone Notes - solved

Posted on August 17, 2008
Filed Under Mac | 1 Comment

So, I finally broke down and got an iPhone. I’ve been a Palm user almost as long as it’s been possible to BE a Palm user, culminating with a Treo regifted to me by a good friend, but that gorgeous little landscape screen, the convergence of G3 and Wi-Fi, and the recent announcement of a working SSH client for the iPhone finally sold me.

Imagine my shock and horror at finding that there is no recognized way to put memos (notes) onto the iPhone from your computer, meaning no way to migrate them from an older device, other than kludging them into fake Contact or Mail records. “You have GOT to be kidding, Steve!” Migrating the contacts, almost trivial. Migrating the calendar and keeping it in sync with Apple’s iCal or even with Google Calendar (my favorite choice for sharing), also trivial. “You wanna migrate text into Notes? Go pound sand, or your iPhone keyboard, ’cause you’ve got a lot of typing to do.”

Well, took me most of today and cost me a few bucks that I should not have spent, but there is a way to get your memos off of a Palm and onto an iPhone.

The expense was “The Missing Sync for iPhone” by MarkSpace, which will not upload Notes to the iPhone. Let me repeat that. Missing Sync WILL NOT upload Notes to the iPhone. What it will do is download them from the iPhone to your Mac or PC, and put them into a standalone “Notebook” application, unrelated to anything else on your computer. MarkSpace will allow you to use a demo of the companion product, “Missing Sync for Palm,” which will populate the MarkSpace Notebook app with your Palm memos. Which in and of itself, gets you exactly nowhere.

Enter Ecamm.com and their lifesaver, Phoneview.

Quite simply, it will load data to or from any iPhone app, much as Music Rescue will allow you to grab music from an iPod and save it back to your Mac or PC.

Phoneview was exactly what I needed to get my Notes onto my iPhone.

Cost? About twenty bucks, but the fully-functional demo version was all I needed. It happily copied my 54 entries without a single interruption to say “You gonna pay for this?”

Simple as this:

In MarkSpace Notebook, highlight all your memos and do File > Export. Save them into a new folder, because it’s going to create one new .txt file for each memo.

In Phoneview, select all those new .txt files and tell it to send them to the iPhone Notes application. It’ll want to restart your iPhone. That’s it.

I frankly think MarkSpace should send Ecamm twenty bucks out of my payment for Missing Sync, since Ecamm did what MarkSpace could not.

Home away from home

Posted on December 2, 2007
Filed Under Networking, Unix, Windows | Leave a Comment

I don’t drive a flashy car, own a fancy house, or even watch a big screen TV — but boy, do I have nice computers. When I worked in a cubicle, it chafed me that the equipment I was supposed to use was quite a bit clunkier than what I was used to at home.

One of the many wonderful things about high-speed Internet is that I can get to my home setup from darn near anywhere. It’s easier with Linux or Mac, of course, but since PC laptops are a commodity, the ability to do it with Microsoft Windows is also a good tool to have in the kit.

CGI 101 - What does CGI mean?

Posted on November 14, 2007
Filed Under Unix | Leave a Comment

Sometimes the toughest thing about learning something new and useful is figuring out what other people call it. You may have wanted to do a small project like the one I’m about to describe, and you would have been able to do it long before this — if only you had known what to type into Google. Read more

Understanding Email

Posted on November 1, 2007
Filed Under Mail | Leave a Comment

If you have ever set up an email program, you may have seen that it breaks the mail handling process into two parts — getting your mail from somewhere, and sending mail. The “getting” part is usually called POP (which stands for Post Office Protocol), while the “sending” part is called SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). Read more

Leopard-like “Time Machine” for Linux

Posted on November 1, 2007
Filed Under Mac, Unix | 3 Comments

Imagine my surprise when I found out that the “Time Machine” backup in OS X Leopard is essentially using the same technique that Mike Rubel documented for use with Linux and BSD Unix almost a decade ago. Apple added a classy graphical interface… but Linux users can also have multi-generation backups that take minimal space, storing new versions of files as they change but keeping the old versions around. Read more

Spam mail bad. Procmail GOOD.

Posted on October 31, 2007
Filed Under Mail, Unix | Leave a Comment

Porkchop <porkchop@example.com> wrote:

>I'm looking to get a procmail thingie setup. I spent a
>few minutes looking at the manpage...seems to be
>written using a non-roman alphabet...!

>Took a quick run on search engines with no luck...so does
>anyone know of a 'procmail for idiots' type webpage?

Automated SSH login with lussh

Posted on October 31, 2007
Filed Under Unix | 1 Comment

If you replace passwords with SSH keys, your scripts can access a remote machine more securely; also, you can set your password to something preposterously long and complex, or disable SSH passwords altogether, thus making it flat-out impossible to break your password by “brute force.” It’s not hard to set up key-based SSH access, but lussh makes it even more convenient. Read more

A practical iptables firewall in Linux

Posted on October 30, 2007
Filed Under Networking, Unix | Leave a Comment

“We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone,” and iptables is how we do it. Rather than spend a lot of time trying to explain how ipchains begat iptables, let’s jump in. There are enough comments in the code so that everything will make sense, even if we skip much of the theory.
Read more

Introduction to DNS

Posted on October 30, 2007
Filed Under Networking | Leave a Comment

If you could ask your computer how it feels about domain names, it would say “Looking up domain names is a big pain in my shiny metal tush.” Domain Names were not invented for the benefit of computers. They are purely for people.

Let’s say your name is Bob, and you want to register the domain name “example.com”.
Read more

Unix 101

Posted on October 30, 2007
Filed Under Mac, Unix | Leave a Comment

In the old days, when people walked to school uphill both ways in the snow, the only way into your computer was by using a Command Line Interface, otherwise known as a console. Ah, just you and a blinking cursor. No wallpaper, no stupid, cryptic icons… that’s how computers were meant to be used! Read more