1. Create a Notes label in your new Gmail
2. Connect the old and new Gmail to a mail client that allows multiple accounts and transferring messages between them
3. Transfer all messages in the old Gmail’s Notes folder to the new Gmail’s Notes folder (Gmail labels are manifested as folders in Evolution)
4. Turn off Notes sync with the old Google account on the iPad
5. Turn on Notes sync with the new Google account

The longer tale

The iPad Notes application has the ability to sync your notes to Google, Yahoo and other accounts, along with iCloud. While dealing with the ramifications of changing to a new primary Google account, I needed to get all my notes moved over. During this process, I learned some interesting things about Notes and Gmail in particular.

Line-wise diffs only

When you sync your iPad notes with a Google account, notes appear as email messages with a newly created label applied called “Notes”. While the view on the iPad is a continuous document, modifications to notes actually show up as new messages in the same conversation under the Notes label. This provides the perk of a primitive diff view for your notes since the changes are shown in a different color.

Update: After some additional testing, I cannot discern the pattern of how these notes are updated as messages in Gmail. I have several that definitely show diffs and threaded conversations as evidenced by the image above (purple text was the first form; black was the most recent update). But this next test shows no such markup or evidence of what were definitely multiple messages:

Test synced note showing no signs of diffs or multiple messages despite the disparate update times...

Nice-to-have optional features aside, seeing as these notes are nothing more than emails with an intuitive label, transferring them to a new Google account got pretty simple. First though, I was unhappily reminded that Gmail does not allow you to forward more than one message at a time. To get around this, I set up both Gmail accounts within the desktop Evolution client. Then it was simply a matter of going to the old Notes folder, selecting all, Copy to Folder, navigate to the new account’s Notes folder, done. Be aware that you should first create a Notes label in the new Gmail account since it won’t exist before you sync notes from an iPad with the account. (And while we are on that topic, be aware that you have to quit and restart Evolution for it to pick up new folders.)

As is unfortunately common with Windows improvements… there’s a registry modification to solve it. All credit goes to OnlineTechTips: this article got me fixed up quickly.

Basically you just download a zip file, extract the contents, and rename the file whose title indicates the behavior you’d like in place. After this you just double click to run the file. This is a very convenient way to provide a fix, much easier than following descriptions of where in the registry tree to find what entries and what values to set them as. One of them even adds the option to open in a new Excel window to the right click context menu.

Now go to System -> Preferences -> Bluetooth Manager. This should bring up a handy utility:

For the mouse:

• Right click on entry
• Select Pair, passcode by default is “0000″
• Once paired, right click again and select Connect to Input Service

And keyboard:

• Right click on entry
• Select Pair, didn’t ask for a passcode
• Once paired, right click again and select Connect to Input Service

After these easy steps both devices started working flawlessly. As it should be.

[Update, 2011-02-24] Reader Jason Coombs kindly made the necessary changes to get this working on Windows 7! Now I might be shamed into getting it working for Mac OS X as well His changes are here. I’ve updated my script linked below as well. I’ll add some nicer instructions for Windows users soon .[/Update]

I love checking the National Geographic Photo of the Day page to see what wonderful slice of nature or mankind some intrepid soul has captured and shared. Often a wallpaper-sized image download is provided. I wanted to automate the process of checking the page for a wallpaper link, downloading the file, putting it somewhere appropriate, and setting it as my background. The result is this script, which does all that and even:

• Verifies you have at least 25% free disk space before continuing
• Renames the image to the title shown on the page
• Creates a dir to hold these images if it doesn’t exist

Windows users

Download that script and double click assuming Python is installed.

Linux users

Download it, set it to be executable (chmod u+x nat-geo_background-setter.py), put it somewhere like /opt. You could add an alias to run it whenever you fancy:

If you want it to run every day on Linux you could add a crontab entry:

Enjoy a bit of nature on your desktop!

I came across this post, and then this post after it still wasn’t working. Here’s what ended up being the right process.

First you need to install getlibs, which as reader Adam thankfully pointed out, is not in the Ubuntu repos. This is the main post about it, but unfortunately the download link that worked for me before is down now. This post has information on it getlibs general use if you are interested.

Next download the Ubuntu 9.04 deb from this page. Then in your favorite terminal navigate to the folder you downloaded the deb to. Next up:

If you try to run amazonmp3 now you will get an error: “Error: Dependency is not satisfiable: libboost-filesystem1.34.1″. Let’s fix that:

Almost done.

If all is well it should look like this:

After this point I was able to download the album from Amazon without a hitch! Note that you don’t have to start it from the command line, that was just as a test. You can also launch it from Applications -> Internet in the Gnome menu, or just launch it from the link on Amazon when buying a song.

But thankfully I decided to try a bit more Googling and came across this lifesaver post. First of all, I’d like to say I think his solution is pretty damned sweet. He takes the 32-bit AIR deb package, pulls out certain pieces, changes the architecture specified, then repackages it. Then you can just install it like it’s a 64-bit package and no one need be the wiser.

I’ve confirmed this process works without a hitch on Ubuntu 10.10 running 2.6.35-24-generic kernel. Afterwards I installed Pandora One and TweetDeck, which ran without issue.

That’s why this forum post made me one happy penguin. The steps are simple, and they work. I’ve mashed them all into this one script to make it more convenient:

So all you need to do is download that here, run it as “./flash-fixer.sh”, and start smiling.

Once Flash is working, if you need a sample video to test out the goodies I recommend this one.

In a recent effort to pull data into an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis, I needed more flexibility than a static report URL could provide. The back end could accept parameterized values (e.g. the desired date range) in the report URLs. I just needed to be able to set these values (initially or through user input) from within the spreadsheet, then request the needed data. Seems generally simple and useful enough, so I’ll share what I did.

Sample Report

Ignoring most of the particularities of the reporting back end, say the report in question consists of an SQL query:

The URL to access it is http://initech.com/reports/total_profits. Using the query above, this would return data from the beginning of 2000 to the end of 2010. To pass in values for the start and end date parameters you would use the URL http://initech.com/reports/total_profits?begin_month=2000-03-01&end_month=2000-06-31. This would limit the data returned to the second quarter of 2000.

Use in Excel

So what if you want to use dynamic parameters like these when pulling data into Excel? Let’s assume you have a spreadsheet already pulling data from the static report URL and displaying results. If you run into trouble, check out my earlier article on the subject. Once that’s working, right-click the resultant data table in Excel, select Edit Query, and add the parameter names and values in the format ["FieldName"]:

FieldName in this case can be whatever you want to call the variable for the user’s convenience. This format is recognized by Excel and you’ll be prompted to enter a value. You can enter it yourself of course, or you can select a cell from which to pull the value. You can also specify whether to use the cell for future data refreshes and whether to refresh automatically. These features are key for our intended use. You can set a parameter value in a single cell and have it effect any number of web queries, across various sheets!

Note: This last feature only partially works in Mac Office 2008. A cell’s value can be selected as a parameter value but after updating it you have to manually refresh all related web queries. In Windows Office 2007, updating the specified cell updates all queries that have this property set, which is great for easing administrative load caused by having to update reports!

Date format annoyance

Your backend reporting system might likely expect dates in proper ISO format (YYYY-MM-DD). Excel, in its infinite wisdom, allows “Date” typed fields to be one of a myriad of formats, not one of which is proper ISO. So you need to make your date fields Text type and enter the dates as ISO format yourself.

This article has additional information on the above approach as well as more screenshots of the various steps.

Osmos is a wonderfully fun and good-looking game. I was so impressed by the demo (a game that starts off with Newton in Latin deserves my attention) that I purchased the full game. I might add this is only $10 and allows you access to DRM-free versions on Windows, Mac, and Linux, as well as a download of an ambient album used in the game! Quite a deal for a game that can provide many hours of enjoyment. It’s like a simpler version of the first stage of Spore, with more interesting novel elements and music reminiscent of Blade Runner. Full size screenshot here.

Go check it out, it’s a lot of fun. And if you are on Linux and want to see more great games for a great platform, consider buying the game!

Enter Readability:

Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you’re reading.

Huzzah! Simply go to the Readability site and try out the different options for how you want rendered pages to look. You can change things like font size and style, as well as margin. You can even make the colors inverted if you prefer a dark background. Then drag the indicated button to your bookmark toolbar and click it whenever you are on a page you want to be more readable. After discovering Readability, I’ve been using it every day.

I was interested to see that the new version of Safari released today (version 5) added a feature called Safari Reader. This serves the same purpose as Readability, just built into the browser’s address bar. It doesn’t appear that Safari Reader allows you to set more advanced options like the appearance of the font, but it does have the added benefit of remembering your zoom level.