George's Weblog

I spent some time today trying out Evernote. It seems to do some things well but I'm still forming my overall opinion. One of the things I wanted to do was to be able to send emails from my Entourage client into Evernote. A quick Google search revealed a script from Veritrope that does just that.

It took me a while to get it going though. I use Entourage 2008 on Mac Snow Leopard. I followed the instructions which were fairly straightforward but I was not able to get the script to execute, nor did it show up on the Entourage script menu. Here are the things that I found that may be helpful for someone else who is trying the same thing.

First of all, you do want to put the script in the /Users/yourusername/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items folder. You can also rename it the way it's outlined in the instructions so that a shortcut key can be assigned. You should keep the filename extension however because the system won't recognize it as an Applescript without it. Here is how my filename looked from a shell:

[email protected] 1 george  staff  30252 May 17 02:33 Entourage to Evernote\msE.scpt

I did chmod it a little to make it match the rest of the files in that directory although I don't think it's necessary. Now you will notice that the script does not appear in the Entourage menu. That's because you need to compile it. So fire up the Applescript editor (found in Applications/Utilities) and do a File Open and navigate to the file. Then hit the compile button and then do a Save As. I chose the Script Bundle option. It then created a directory and put the required resources including the compiled script inside:

[email protected]  3 george  staff    102 May 17 02:45 Entourage to Evernote\msE.scptd

Afterward, everything works from the Entourage script menu and also by using the keyboard shortcut, in this case Command-Shift-E.

It would be really nice if this script could also send attachments but alas it only does text (and not even pictures). So I guess I still have to do things a roundabout way to get the entire message in there such as forward it. Except for the attachments I suppose I could print it to a PDF. Evernote sets up a PDF-to-Evernote option for printed output.

I got an email today from Skype with the subject line, "Your Skype subscription has been cancelled." Now I just bought an unlimited year of landline calling. Why would my subscription be cancelled? In the body of the email it said my credit card expired. Okay, so it did. But I still have ten months of service left.

I logged in to my account, clicked on purchase history and it says, "Your subscription is active."

Completely lame. Also, clicking on the link in the email that says you can update your credit card information doesn't go anywhere useful. I have yet to find a link anywhere on the site that says anything about changing the payment for the account.

 

It's been a while since I've used my Philips DVP5992 DVD player. It plays DIVX files and all kinds of other media. I got the idea that I would upgrade it to the latest firmware if there was any, just for kicks.

A quick search for firmware yielded an upgrade right from Philips. They recommended that I use a USB drive to load it up and added that I needed it to be FAT32. This makes sense and is the same as my PS3. I remembered that I had a small flash drive that was a handout at some trade show so I found it.

The trouble that I found was that MacOS X 10.6.2 wanted to format it FAT16 and there was no option for FAT32. I figured it might just be looking at the size of the drive and deciding that FAT16 would be more appropriate since this thing was only 512MB. Well, that might have been fine under different circumstances but I wanted FAT32.

A Google search yielded a few worthwhile links but nothing that had all the steps listed so here goes:

First, you want your drive inserted, a partition on it (via Disk Utility) but you don't want it mounted since you can't format the filesystem when it's mounted. You can find out what's mounted and where though by using the mount command. My drive was mounted as follows:

 

/dev/disk2s1 on /Volumes/TURIN (msdos, local, nodev, nosuid, noowners)

To dismount the volume, I used the diskutil command (as root):

 

diskutil unmount /dev/disk2s1

Volume TURIN on disk2s1 unmounted

Then I could create the filesystem:

 

newfs_msdos -F 32 -v TURIN /dev/disk2s1

 

newfs_msdos: warning: /dev/disk2s1 is not a character device

512 bytes per physical sector

/dev/disk2s1: 1013416 sectors in 126677 FAT32 clusters (4096 bytes/cluster)

bps=512 spc=8 res=32 nft=2 mid=0xf0 spt=32 hds=54 hid=0 bsec=1015434 bspf=990 rdcl=2 infs=1 bkbs=6