I use a Mac at work and was recently introduced to Skitch in a training class. This application is really handy if you need to share images or screen shots with others. Skitch allows you to easily take a screen shot of what you’re doing and then annotate it to state what is important in the image. You can also easily do simple drawings and then share them. Once you have an image that you like you can just drag it to your email program, or if you sign up for an account with Skitch you can have the image uploaded there and accessible from their website.
Finally able to use my iPod Touch without Windows or Mac
I’ve finally made it. I can now use my iPod Touch just with Linux. Apple adding over the air updates really helped, but I still couldn’t sync my music. I also found that pulling large videos off via Dropbox didn’t work as the app would time out. I had been trying to get gtkpod to work, but kept running into a problem with the database checksum on the music database. Recently I found Phone Drive and this has solved my problem. This app lets me copy images and videos out of my camera roll into the app and then the app will bring up a web server and an ftp server on the device. I can then browse the files from my web browser and download the files to my desktop. I can also put files up this way. Phone Drive also has a built in music player that will play any directory as a playlist and supports users adding their own playlists. So I wrote a little script (below) that will generate a playlist for all music and one for each artist on my computer and then I can upload those and all of my music via ftp. I did have a little trouble with some ftp programs that want to open multiple connections. In the end I used ncftp as it doesn’t try to open multiple connections and it has the ability to upload directories recursively. I did find one oddity that I needed to turn off the auto conversion of ascii files otherwise playlist files got their line endings changed and Phone Drive wouldn’t recognize them.
So my current list of apps that I regularly use is this:
- Calendar syncing with Google, either via Active Sync or via caldav (this allows the colors to sync)
- Contacts syncing with Google as an Exchange account
- GMail app for mail from Google as I prefer the way Google does conversations
- Appigo Todo syncing with Toodledo
- PlainText for notes
- Dropbox for keeping family pictures and moving images between my device and my computer
- MiniKeePass on my device and KeePassX syncing through Dropbox
- Podcaster for audio and video podcasts
- ReadItLater for offline access to web pages
#!/bin/sh
debug() { ! "${log_debug-false}" || log "DEBUG: $*" >&2; }
log() { printf '%s\n' "$*"; }
warn() { log "WARNING: $*" >&2; }
error() { log "ERROR: $*" >&2; }
fatal() { error "$*"; exit 1; }
mydir=$(cd "$(dirname "$0")" && pwd -L) || fatal "Unable to determine script directory"
cd "${mydir}/mp3"
# generate artist playlists
find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -print0 | while read -d $'\0' dir
do
short_dir="${dir#./}"
if [ "${short_dir}" != "." ]; then
playlist="${mydir}/itouch-playlists/aaa_${short_dir}.m3u"
log "Processing ${short_dir}"
printf "" > "${playlist}"
find "${short_dir}" -type f -name '*.mp3' -printf "/music/%p\n" >> "${playlist}"
mv "${playlist}" "${dir}"
fi
done
# generate all music playlist
log "Generating all music playlist"
find . -type f -name '*.mp3' \
-fprintf "${mydir}/mp3/aaa_all_music-new.m3u" "/music/%P\n"
Appigo Todo now supports Dropbox
On my iPod Touch I’m using Appigo’s Todo application. I had been syncing the data to Toodledo so that I had a backup in case something happened to my itouch. Now Appigo’s Todo app supports Dropbox. The advantage here is that the place that I’m syncing to, dropbox, supports all of the features of the Todo app. This is important for recovery. Toodledo doesn’t support hierarchical todo items. However when syncing with dropbox it’s in Appigo’s own format so all features are supported. And it turns out the native format is an sqlite database, so I can pull all of the items out of it in case Appigo goes away!
2/20/2012 update. I’ve gone back to Toodledo.com for syncing as the Dropbox sync for the todo app was just too slow. The Toodledo sync is faster, but it’s not a smart as it keeps trying to sync when I’m offline and then popping up an error dialog. I’ve contacted Appigo about this, but haven’t seen a fix yet.
Passwords for iTouch and iPhone
Until recently I’ve been using MyKeePass to store passwords on my iTouch. This allows me to use KeePassX on my desktop. What I’d really like though is Dropbox integration. Well recently on Hak5 they said that there was a free app for IOS that understood KeePass password databases and MyKeePass isn’t free. So I went looking and found MiniKeePass and discovered that it’s open-source and free. On top of that it integrates nicely with Dropbox! You still need to manually sync the database, but it’s really easy if you keep it in Dropbox. When you make changes on your desktop, you just open the Dropbox application on your iTouch and open the database and it imports right into MiniKeePass, then delete the old database from MiniKeePass. When you make changes on your iTouch, you can export it to Dropbox and overwrite the one there so that your desktop sees the changes.
Backing up cloud data
This year I replaced my Palm Treo with an iPod Touch. To make sure that I could access all of my data on my iPod as well as on my Linux desktop (and anywhere else for that matter) I moved all of my data to the cloud. This is great for accessibility, however I still want backups in case something happens to the cloud provider. Remember that all data needs to be backed up or you run the risk of losing it.
The 3 cloud providers that I am currently using and want backups for are Google Contacts, Google Calendar and Toodledo. My backups are done from my Linux desktop, so I’m using unix tools to do the work. I’m sure people can find replacements under Windows as well.
I wrote a script for each job (based upon various solutions that I found on the net). The data for each cloud service is backed up into a directory named by the date and I choose to keep 30 days worth of backups, so that I can go back and pull information that I may have accidentally changed or deleted.
First up is Google Calendar.
#!/bin/bash -e
root=${HOME}/backup/pim/calendar
date_dir=`date +%Y%m%d`
base=${root}/${date_dir}
mkdir -p ${base}
find ${root} -maxdepth 1 -type d -mtime +30 -exec rm -rf \{\} \;
CURL="curl -s -S"
${CURL} -o ${base}/cal.xml "PRIVATE_URL_FROM_GOOGLE"
Here I setup some variables to determine the name of the directory based upon date. I then delete anything older than 30 days. The real key here is the last line. This tells curl to download the calendar and save it locally as “cal.xml”. The PRIVATE_URL_FROM_GOOGLE is found by going to calendar settings for the calendar in Google. At the bottom is the private address with 3 links for XML, ICAL, and HTML. I choose to download the XML version, but you can pick any that you want to work with. Since this script has your private calendar URL, you should protect it from others as they can change your calendar with this URL.
Backing up Google Contacts is a little harder because you have to login to get the contacts. I found a script to do this searching Google. I found a script written in python that dumps the contacts in Google’s XML format. I don’t know the best way to load back from this format, but I’m sure I could figure it out if needed.
#!/usr/bin/env python
import gdata.contacts.service
gd_client = gdata.contacts.service.ContactsService()
gd_client.ClientLogin('user@gmail.com', 'password')
query = gdata.contacts.service.ContactsQuery()
query.max_results = 1000 # change for max contacts returned
feed = gd_client.GetContactsFeed(query.ToUri())
print feed
Then I wrote a wrapper script like the one for Google Calendar that puts the data where I want it.
#!/bin/bash -e
root=${HOME}/backup/pim/contacts
date_dir=`date +%Y%m%d`
base=${root}/${date_dir}
mkdir -p ${base}
find ${root} -maxdepth 1 -type d -mtime +30 -exec rm -rf \{\} \;
export base
${HOME}/bin/export-gcontact.py > ${base}/contacts.xml
I’m sure I could have done this in python too, but I wanted to keep all of my scripts as much the same as possible.
The last cloud service I needed a backup of was Toodledo. This one uses curl like the one for Google Calendar. Except that it does the login too. This script has curl post to the login page, save the cookies, then visit the XML export page. Since the cookie is saved, we don’t get prompted for a login again. I tried to do this trick on the Google Contacts page as well, but it doesn’t work because Google embeds a random hash in the login page as a hidden form field that needs to be passed on for the login to work. Anyway here’s my Toodledo backup script:
#!/bin/bash -e
root=${HOME}/backup/pim/tododate_dir=`date +%Y%m%d`base=${root}/${date_dir}mkdir -p ${base}
cd ${base}
curl \
--output /dev/null \
--form 'email=YOUR_EMAIL' \
--form 'pass=YOUR_PASSWORD' \
--form 'remember=1' \
--cookie-jar ${root}/cookies.txt \
http://www.toodledo.com/signin.php \
--output toodledo.xml \
http://www.toodledo.com/xml.php
Note that this script has your username and password in it, so you’ll want to set the permissions on the script to keep others out.
To backup my email from gmail, I’ve found offlineimap to be a great application and easy to setup.
Passwords on the iPod Touch
On my Palm I used Keyring to keep track of my passwords. This has a nice interface in jpilot to access it on my desktop. When it came to my iPod Touch I needed to find something else to use. I did some searching and found that there was an open source password program called KeePass that had applications for many platforms (including Windows, Linux, Mac and IOS). It turns out that there is an old version of the database (1.x) and a new version (2.x). There isn’t an application for the new format on Linux yet, so I choose to use the old database format and the desktop application KeePassX. There are two applications for IOS listed on the KeePass website: MyKeePass and iKeepass. I chose MyKeePass because it supports both the old and new formats and seems to have been updated more recently.
MyKeePass can store multiple databases and those databases can be loaded from a public website, or from it’s own web server. You can tell the application you want to import a database file and it starts up a mini web server that just has an upload page and tells you the URL to visit. If your computer is on the same network you can visit this URL and then upload the database and it’s on your device. This is pretty nice. It would even better if MyKeePass could read the database file from Dropbox, but that functionality doesn’t exist yet. You can have MyKeePass reference a public URL and that could be a public file in Dropbox, but that seems a little to open for me. I’d prefer it to be a private folder on Dropbox that I store my database in.
I found an XSLT to convert the output of the keyring XML exporter to the 2.x format of KeePass, but not to the 1.x format. So I hacked on the 2.x XSLT some and created my version for 1.x. This is a fork of the original that I hope will get pulled into the main.
Offline web pages on iPod Touch
One of the things that I really liked about my Palm was using Plucker to view web pages when I’m not connected to the Internet. I’ve found a few apps for the iPod Touch that do this and here are the ones I’ve tried and what I think about them.
I read all of my news using Google Reader and so I wanted an app that would sync with it and keep the articles offline so that I could read them later. I tried Byline and MobileRSS. Both are good RSS readers, however I’ve found that I prefer MobileRSS. The syncing of all messages and ability to scan through all messages easily is great. Also MobileRSS allows one to send web pages to multiple other services, twitter, email, safari, Instapaper, Read It Later, etc. I’m currently using the free version and it works nicely. I’ll probably upgrade to the pro version to get rid of the ads eventually.
For generic web pages I started out using iWebSaver favelet. This favelet takes a given web page and sends it through the iWebSaver favelet site and produces a data page that can be stored on your IOS device. This data page is then opened in Safari when you want to view it. The advantage to this is that you have the whole page as is downloaded onto your device. The problem is that it takes a long time to load and doesn’t remember where you are in the page.
Next I tried Instapaper. This has worked very well for most pages. I’ve been very happy with the scaled down version of web pages. However I found that my Bible study had a problem with rendering. I couldn’t see the days. I’m guessing this is some CSS magic that gets stripped out by Instapaper as extra visuals.
I then gave Read It Later a try. At first I thought that it wasn’t going to help because the stripped down page looked the same as Instapaper and my Bible study still didn’t work. However then I noticed a button at the bottom of the page with a ‘T’ on it. It turns out that this toggles the page from the stripped down text version to the full page. With a little reading through the options I found that if I disable auto picking of the “right” format to download I can have Read It Later always download both the text and full versions of the page. Then when I’m offline I can toggle between the two. This allows me to view most pages in text and then pages like my Bible study as the full page.
Palm Contacts to Google
I have already been using Google to store some of my contacts for syncing using Zindus. So it seemed pretty natural to use Google to store all of my contacts. Using Google means that my information is available on any platform. Google provides a nice sync interface for the iPod touch that works well in an offline mode, so I was happy with it.
Originally I started writing an application in python to convert my Palm contacts to Google. As I got close to having this done I discovered that the Birthday and Anniversary fields couldn’t get populated via the python API from Google (it may work now, but didn’t work then). So I started looking for other options.
It turns out that Google allows you to export your contacts in a CSV format and can import in that CSV format as well. So I entered a few contacts with all of the fields that I wanted and then did an export to see what I got. The CSV file was pretty standard, but had lots of extra columns. So I tried trimming it down and discovered that I actually need to have most of the columns, even if they’re blank, otherwise Google wouldn’t recognize some of the other non-blank columns. This seems kind of odd, but my guess is that Google is looking for some set of column names to determine if it’s a CSV file from Outlook or one from Google.
So now I needed to get my contacts into the Google CSV format. I started by exporting from jpilot and then trying to reorganize the data. This got old real fast. So I wrote another application in C++ using the pilot link library that would output my CSV files. I’ve put this application up on github so that anyone else can use it as well.
After running this application I had a nice CSV file that I was able to import into Google and all of my contacts were now available to my iTouch. I did end up hacking the IM conversion as I didn’t have many contacts with IM information in my Palm. Otherwise the conversion went pretty well.
Convert Palm Calendar to Google
I chose to use Google for my calendar. I already use Google for some of my mail and I sync contacts with Thunderbird using Zindus. Using Google means that my information is available on any platform. Google provides a nice sync interface for the iPod touch.
One annoying thing about the Google calendar integration with the iPod Touch is the lack of the ability to choose the color of the calendar. You need to choose to sync one calendar, then if the calendar color isn’t what you want, tell google to not sync the calendar, wait 10 minutes, then tell it to sync again. Repeat until you get the color you want.
I started writing a python program to do the calendar conversion as jppy gave me acces to the Palm database and Google has a python version of their API. However I found the python API to be lagging behind the Java API in features supported, such as birthday and anniversary information. So I decided to use Java to interact with Google. In initial testing this worked well, however I needed a way to access my Palm database from Java.
Instead of direct access I choose to write a C++ program that read the Palm database using the pilot link library and then output using Google protocol buffers. This kept me from having to rewrite the code to parse the palm database and give me a format that I could read in most any language. The C++ program is available on github as palm-export. The Java program for importing into Google calendar is also on github as calendar-import.
As of this writing I can import all calendar information except recurrence exceptions. This is when you have a repeating event and have chosen to cancel some of the events in the series. Google supports this concept and I have even gotten it to work for some events. However since I haven’t gotten it to work for all and I can’t tell when it’s not working, I came up with a workaround. Instead of creating the exception I create a new single event for the exception with “EXCEPTION:” prepended to the event name. This way I can recognize when one is canceled and I can just cancel the single event in Google, which works fine.
After the import I found a few of my appointments off by an hour. I suspect some timezones on recurring events didn’t get in correctly, so you’ll want to check appointments that are created with timezones in your Palm.
A couple of things to note. The iTouch doesn’t support all repeat types nor all alarm durations that the Palm does, however Google does. What this means is that these will show up as “Custom” in the iTouch and cannot be entered directly. So when you want to use an alarm or repeat type that the iTouch doesn’t support you’ll need to use the Google web interface to the calendar and then wait for the data to sync, which is pretty fast.
Recently (2/17/2011) I’ve noted that Google sometimes has trouble loading all of my calendars so they will disappear from the iTouch and then come back later. I’m hoping this is just a temporary situation and will be corrected in the future.
Replacing my Palm
I have been using a Palm as my PDA for a number of years. With the decline of the Palm platform I have been looking for a replacement PDA. The smartphones aren’t an answer for me as I really don’t want to pay for a data plan. I was looking at the Archos 43, however I haven’t been able to get my hands on one to see how well it works. In particular if the resistive touchscreen is reasonable. Furthermore Best Buy removed the Archos 43 from their website after listing it for 2 months. So I broke down and bought and iPod Touch.
I run Linux at home, so a major concern is how to sync data. In this post and following posts I will describe the tools that I’ve chosen to use and why; as well as how I imported my old data. Hopefully this will help others that are considering making such a change or looking to convert from one PDA to another or just want to know what tools others are using.
I also wanted to make sure that all of my information is available offline as well like my Palm. So I have mapped each of my Palm apps to the apps on my iTouch and then either web applications or a desktop application to view the data on my Linux computer.
- Todo: Appigo todo backed in Toodledo to have an online backup. This is also a handy way to edit a bunch of todo items. Note that the free account doesn’t support the hierarchies of the Appigo application, but at least the data is there. To import data here I just manually entered the todo items.
- Memo: Appigo notebook backed in Toodledo. I tried Evernote, but it was overkill for my needs and I wasn’t able to easily import my information from my Palm. To import data I just copied and pasted from jPilot into Toodledo. 3/20 update: I’ve switched to PlainText for my memos app. It’s really nice because it stores each memo as a text file in Dropbox and then it can be easily edited on my desktop.
- pFuel: Gas Cubby is a nice application for keeping track of gas mileage and maintenance reminders. It also integrates very well with Appigo’s todo application so that maintenance reminders can be turned into todo items. Importing data here was just a matter of exporting from pFuel through the palm memos application and then massaging the CSV file to match what Gas Cubby wants for their input format.
- plucker (offline web pages): See this post for details.
- MyBible: Laridian has made MyBible for the Palm and PocketBible for the iPod Touch (and other IOS devices). I was able to transfer all of my Bibles easily. This worked out very well.
- Keyring: MyKeePass – more information on this in a future post
- Titrax: HoursTracker is a nice application for keeping track of time on projects.
- Dropbox: I didn’t have this on my Palm, but it’s pretty handy for keeping photos as the photo album application won’t let me create albums.
- Podcasts: Podcaster. I tried iTunes, but you can’t subscribe to a podcast on the device. Podcaster allows me to do this and has a nice refresh feature to grab all of my latest podcasts.
- Calendar: Google Calendar – more details in a later post
- Contacts: Google Contacts – more details in a later post