Validate Your Life

Triple-Boot OS, Syncing Archived Mail.App, Emails, and Calendars from Different Platforms

I just wanted to share this bit of tech uploading/syncing bit of utter craziness partly for my own records, so I remember how I set this up, given that it’s so complex, and for anyone else attempted such a technological, mult-operating system juggling act.

First off, I’m working with Linux Mint, Winows 7 64-bit, and Mac OS 10.6.3.  I’m migrating away from the Mac OS (because it’s a waste of time, did very little constructive, and might be okay for self-therapy file/photo reviewing, but othe rthan that it’s pretty much rubbish imho).

I tinkered wtih refit, and an enormous amount How-To articles.  Lifehacker was tremendous help as were ones written by various other authors.  Eventually despite all of the “don’t install boot camp to triple boot!” messages I eventually did install boot camp via boot  camp assistant.  All of this was on imac8,1.

The hard drive partitioning was incredible complex and I forget some details but I definitely partitioned the 500gb internal hard drive into a:

• 189 Mac OS Partition
• 130 Linux Mint Partition
• 130 Windows 7 Partition

I may include the details of the file format used but jsut now that I did a partition before any refit, anyinstallations, an boot-camp stuff.

Then I did install Windows 7 successful (Hurray! Great OS. Fantastic OS in my opinion!) via boot camp.

Then I successfully installed Linux Mint, a very clean, minimalist, smooth operating system.  Nothing fantastic but, not much bad about it either.

My current boot sequence involves first Alt(Option)-Booting which provides the selection of Mac or Windows and then I get the linux boot screen and can again choose which of the 3 Operating Systems to boot from.  Obviously choosing the Windows/Mac from the boot-camp loader is unnecassry because whichever selection is made, it will point to the linux boot-loader.

So, jolly good.  I have triple boot (and I can refine that on another machine, and really eventually I am moving towards bulding my own screaming fast PC from scratch which would be obviously a great Windows7/LinuxMint dual-boot.

Calendar and Email Syncing

The next feat (and there is much less documentation on this) was to resolve this problem:

I had local ical calendars, a local archive of 2003-2005 Mail.App (clumsy format not easily uploaded to mail servers like gmail), various (about 6) email accounts, and I wanted All of that (all calendars past and present, all email past and present, ALL in the same convenient program).

To be perfectly honest I’m refining which program and tinkered with gcal/gmail webbrowser, Chandler (excellent open source), Windows Live, and I may check out Windows Outlook Express.  Ical was rubbish because in it I became obsessive-compulsive in 2008-2009, recording everything I did (from sleep, to eat, to activities I did).  I will post a few photos of those here.  It’s great for self-therapeutic reasons to have access to everything you did 24 hours a day for the past two years, but to say the least, it was too obsessive and time-consuming.  I had read David Allen’s GTD book, fell into the mindlessly lost pit of that productivity cult and before I knew it I was spending 3-5 hours a day making lists and organizing thigns.  Said GTD lists (and the GTD_Ultimate_Calendar concept I created with Physiology, Galvanizing, Sleep, and other categories where I stored everything I did) created the illusion of productivity, but I wasn’t get much done and worse, I was operating from the false belief that I was.  So I’m not too big of a fan of GTD anymore.  Some concepts of it are great (like don’t put things back in “inbox”, i.e. when you process something continue processing it, don’t revert it back into the “to-be-processed” file or else that file becomes wrought with psychological negative baggage.  Concepts like “amorphorous mass of stuff” and “psychological baggage with stuff that’s not organized” and “a computer-like workflow ” to a small degree at least are decent concepts, but too much GTD was very destructive and, ironically, unproductive!  So I’m glad that phases is over with in my life.  Needless to say, I had enormous amounts of calendar data to import!

ICAL GTD Ultimate calendar PHOTO

I instantly loved how “old school” Chandler looked.  And the fact that everything happened in panes and your workspace wouldn’t become populated with a clutter of stacked windows is unquestionably appealing.  I ran into some difficulties with IMAPing Chandler and it seems to revolve around POP without that much support.  I made an account on Chandler Hub as well.

Combining my five local ical calendars was a headache, but in a nutshell. I exported those 5 ical calendars in .ics format, and then imported/uploaded all of those 5 to one gmail calendar “galvanizing_gcal”.  I made certain to always denote with a _calendarsource indicator where the calendar originaed from or more importantly where it could be edited (you can’t edit subscribed gcal calendars in calendar apps as far as I know) to keep that clear and straight.  So I piped 5 ical .ics files into one gcal calendar. Great!  Then I created one Chandler calendar and Published that on Chandler hub. So far I’ve got a Chandler calendar on Chandler hub and a historical ical 5-icss-piped into one gcal calendar.

Sharing iCAl.  In the transition away from mac I may add something via iCAl occasionally and that will taper off so that I’ll eventually just add calendar events from a single Windows/Ubuntu-based application.  I needed a way to temporarily publish any new ical-added events I added to iCal.  This was a headache.  I had to publish them to Mobileme (which was simple, but undesirable and would have much rathe preferred dev publishing with a “private server” option).  icalExchange is a free publishing of webdav that got the ics data from ical (I could view my synced calendar on iCalExchange) but then it snafued getting the html-based icalExchange data (originating in iCal) to my calendar program of choice, so iCalExchange was useless.  The mobileme publishing of any ical events added (and then subscribing to that mobileme calendar suffices at least temporarily).  I may end up putting a lot of my photos in iPhoto—>MobileMe, but that’s sort of undesirable.  I’d like to be done with the headache of mobileme now that I use more efficient online backup systems (*cough* Dropbox).  But the outcome of the massive digitally archiving material possessions, people photos, and papers will be some highly organized bunch of albums and ideally online sharing via some yet-undecided method (MobileME, Picassa, Facebook, flickr, etc).

Right…I’ll cut to the chase of a very clever trick.  I couldn’t find ANY information on getting an old Mail.app archive of mail onto a gmail account!  I had 2-3 years of emails from during college seperated into about 10 folders (Work, Book, ColoradoCollege (the rubbish college I unfortunaetly attended, but I did graduate…quickly), Work, Recepits & Business, Family, Friends).  I wanted to 1)Get all those 2000-3000 messages on a gmail account and 2)maintain their folder archiving organization.

I had to use a lot of tricks:

• I created a seperate gmail account “myfullname.archive@gmail.com”.  This way it will be an empty fresh account so that I know it’s the online container for all those mail.app roughly 2.5k messages.
• Getting the Messages on Gmail: Now I could simply drag the “Local” Messages in Mail.app (archived from 6 years ago) in the message-list-view to the IMAPed myfullname.archive@gmail.com and the messages now pop up in the gmail archive inbox! Fantastic!  Finally, I can get out of Mail.app to view those old messages!
• Folder Maintenance: This was very tricky.  Chandler gets it’s email by installing “INBOX/Chandler Mail” and a few othes on gmail (this is hte part of using Chandler that’s headache-ish and a deterrant to using it for email.  Only the said chandler folders are synced with the Chandler application apparently…bollocks…still working on that, but the main goal was get everything (calendars, and email) “up in the cloud” so to speak (and in this case the cloud of gmail) and from it all online it would be easy and simple and intuitive to then just subscribe, import, dial all of that in to a single time-management application that does calendars, email, and possibly tasks.)  So…in noticing that INBOX/ scheme of Chandlers.  I noticed tha only the three INBOX/ folders of Chandler popped up in Mail.app (in a different email account, the main one).  So I custom-tailored the myfullname.archive@gmail.com account by deleting all the current pre-made labels and making the respective INBOX/Work, INBOX/Friends, INBOX/Book…etc folders tha I had on the local folders of the archived Mail.app mail!  Then those folders popped up in the IMAPed version of myfullname.archive@gmail.com and I could jsut drag all the messages (ranging from 50 to 924 in some folders) from the archived mail application to the IMAPed gmail myfullname.archive@gmail.com backup archive account!! Phew! Double Phew!  (Okay, the double phew was cheesy, but I had been trying to find a way to get those 2002-2004 year messages backedup online so now I can view EVERYTHING for the past 8 years or so in email from one email application.  Fantastic.
• Then obviously, I could forward (and leave a copy of the archive now-on-gmail emails to my main email account, validatelife@gmail.com).  Good.

I may include photos of the polished application (likely with me throwing a drunken party of jubilation and victory xD) with everything synced up and all archives included so all messages and all my massive amount of calendar data is accessible (it already is on gmail, but I greatly dislike using that for productive because it’s so sluggish, but I do use gmail in browser alot, albeit reluctantly to ensure some things send/recieve at times, so the email-calendar app I use must have that assurance (that I’m syncing and getting all the email accounts and calendar accounts).  Great.

The main goal (and a huge whopping achievement it will succeed) will be jsut getting all calendars and All old emails (even the archived local peculiar copies) up on a gmail account, up in cloud so easily accessible to pull/subscribe/push, etc to a cal-email app.

Recent Update

This article was originally called “Bleh….About 4 hours finally succeeding in getting cross-OS/application platform syncing cal/mail data Chanlder is mehand maybe winlive.” And indeed, the ambiguity of the title reflected my uncertainty in knowing which programs to use, which ones were best!  Well, Now I have MUCH more clarity on that having downloaded, installed, and tested out over half a dozen email/calendar apps and/or configurations.  I tried:

• Eudora — Old School, but clunky.  No Go.
• Netscape — The Quintessential, Epitome of Old School Email.  Fit like a glove, great.  May keep this for simplistic reviewing of emails or if I want a change from main email viewer.  Netscape email was the email program I used back in the 90s when email was actually fun, back when I got emails from girlfriends or friends, instead of mass viral insanity.  So in addition to being free no cost, Netscape is clean, minimalist and spot on with the old-school-ness
• iCal — Rubbish.
• Gcalendar — Great for syncing but Cannot stand the adverts and cluttered in-browser calendar mode.
• Thunderbird — Likely the best email and cal (with Lightning Extension) situation.
• Chandler — I loved the ability to review all events, but it had some clunky python (programming) .exe that goggled up CPU work and it froze occasionally.  It’s a great program, but ultimately a sloppily-designed open source buggy app. No Go.
• Windows Live — I liked the simplicity of this at first, but then after falling in love (again) with netscape, I realized it’s too hypey and slightly bloated.
• Opera Mail — I read about this, tried the opera browser adn couldn’t find the mail app.  No problem, I don’t really care.  Netscape and Thunderbird work perfectly fine.
• iScribe — Some open source old junky app. No Go.
• Pegasus — Old, lame.  No Go.

That’s about it.  What I’ve got now is FeedDemon for all my news. Sick!  Thunderbird is set up with this Massively Awesome rad, sick, incredible, pretty much exactly what I’ve wanted — simplicity for adding new events, complexity for reviewing all my past events in list form, it’s free, it’s open source, it constantly has cutting edge add-ons and extensions thanks to thousands of programmers working around the clock (and I may add some kind of add-on if I branch into that kind of programming) easily installed from the add-on manager.  It’s stream-lined, not-bloated.  And Most AMAZINGly of all.  The add-on Provider for Google Calendar AMAZINGLY conveniently as All heck, enables me to Modify Google Calendars FROM (get this….drum roll….from….) Thunderbird!!  And I can modify google calendars from any browser and because I subscribed to that calendar in Thunderbird, it will update thunderbird (And thunderbird will update gcal!)  Finally, the any-where-accessible calendars are playing nicely together, live syncing and updating.  Best of all, thunderbird has a “View All Events” option so I can constnatly review my thousands of calendar historical events for self-therapy if I want (see Ultimate GTD Calendar lunacy and headache described below).  Furthermore, I have one calendar really and it syncs with gcal’s servers, thunderbird and everything, so it’s perpetually backed up and perpetually accessible from anywhere in the world!  This sounds like a no brainer (oh..gcal big deal), but really, look into trying to setup a way to modify calendars that you’ve subscribed to (like gcal) it practically does not exist and the two-way modification (changing calendar A on Thunderbird or changing Calendar A on gcal, where Calendar A is a gcalendar that Thunderbird subscribed to, is UNHEARD of in the calendar syncing world and would not be possible without the small, dinky, simple no-name, Provider for Google Calendar Addon!  Big Kudos and Grats and Gratitude, for that matter, to that add-on!

Plus, there’s some nifty as heck addons like FoxClocks.  I’m a Philleas Fogg time zone freak! so I love updates of world time and in a neat, tidy, compact display at the bottom of Thunderbird, I’ve got local, UK, sydney time updates (of course I have international times on my desktop gadgets, gcalendar, and taskbar…but hey, time is one’s most valuable commodity!  Hey that’s true!  What happens when people die?  They have run out of their time commodity!  What exists in the universe?  Space & Time!)

(I still have one that syncs with gcal and thunderbird if I add an event from ical,but I am pretty sure I will delete that within less than a week because I can add events from gcal web browser (bleh, but a convenience) or thunderbird (yipee!!) and it syncs with gcal’s server, thunderbird, anything I have subscribed to me gcal_galv or gcal_tent(ative) (I may abandon the tentative calendar for just one calendar simplicity, but hey, 1 or 2 calendars is much less of a headache than the 5+ I had been juggling!).

That said, I still like the old school simplicity of Netscape.  I ordered netscape mail to download the whole 1427 messages from the myname.archive@gmail.com account I created (see below).  So I can review that era of my life in the highly minimalist stream-lined netscape email program whenever I wish (or alternatively from thunderbird as well).  I like the idea of using Netscape (an old school and comfortable fit email app) for doing self-therapy and reviewing old emails (from like 6+ years ago) and thunderbird for new emails.  But they’re all IMAPed and linked up for offline viewing (key folders are) so there’s no headache if I ever reinstall system software.

Wow, what a mountain of installs and tweakings, from partitioning the hard drives, to install the three OSes, to figuring out the best app for cal/email/tasks to ensuring it’s all synced and automatically backed up and so that I have only 1 or 2 calendars/emails! (I still have over a dozen emails so am whittling that down.)  And tasks I’m currently using Remeber the Milk and/or Thunderbird Lightning’s Task.  If I could sync up Thundie’s tasks with a server (not unlike the gcal-Thunderbird calendar syncing two-way modification is so sweet and refined) I’d use just Thundie for tasks, but hey I had used a smorgasbord of GTD hellish apps (I won’t even get into the dozens of those) and text files.  I like just doing things and collecting the small handful of things that I don’t do at the moment.  Good times!

I just looked at some email settings and tthere’s this continual bandwith limit error.  Other people on forums seem to have had similar problem.  Seems to be the result of gmail restrictions.  It seems like the (now in my opinion, seedy) gmail only limits something like 100 email something (sends, but I haven’t sent 100 emails and am still getting this bandwith error?) possibly per day.  Bollocks.  The quest for good email app and simple email accounts goes on!  I may just use gmail for archive.  It’s caused me tons of headaches and I have wanted to move away from it for a long time.  Indeed, my 40-folder sub-folder nested hierarchy is indicative of not liking the account and festering it with overly-complex sub-structures.  So maybe I’ll just have my co.uk account in thunderbird and load all historical accounts in Netscape, or pop3 the old accounts and only keep one current account IMAP.  Will, see have to resolve bandwith limit error (by new/non-gmail account or adjusting settings, likely the former). This may solidify me switching fully to my live.co.uk account, one that I like much more anyways!  Jolly good.  The emails send, they just get all sixes and sevens in the client and you get bombarded with alert boxes upon sending.  I do like the synced alarms (with snooze in Thunderbird.  I think thunderbird is most likely to be calendar app of choice.  The email app am still tinkering with.

The Goal Achievement Checklist for this OS Project

• √Triple Boot OS — I can boot in Windows 7, Linux Mint 9, or Mac OS 10.6 (which I haven’t and likely will not boot in Mac much anymore).  Notes: May repartition drives, providing different distribution so that Windows has 250GB, Linux 150GB, Mac OS 100GB.
  • √Installed awesome apps.
  • √UK Theme on Windows 7 is sick.
  • √Selective and simplified Install set of applications.  I loathe anything bloated from OSes, to individual apps. So I made a folder “windows7_installers_worked” to keep all the installers for applications that I know I use, and they work (Thunderbird, Firefox, Download Manager, Synergy, Feeddemon, etc).  And the addons that work and I use in any of those respective apps.  After that’s polished and tested (I still use the apps) I can pop all those installers on a flash-drive or burn them onto a DVD and I’ve got my “instant full install DVD/Flash-Drive” after I reinstall the OS software.  I basically test, tinker, try out apps and things that I may/may not like, find what I do like, keep that installer, so if/when I reinstall OS fresh I don’t have to experiment and can jump straight to installing only what I need and use, efficiency and simplicity defined!
• √Calendars
  • √Two-Way Modification – Done.  Thanks to gcal, thunderbird, and the clincher Provider for Google Calendar add-on.
  • √Syncing/BU on Server — Done. The calendars are from gcal, modified in thunderbird.
  • √All old calendars uploaded and removed from local drives.  The Historical GTD 5-calendar “recording every event” craziness is backed up and I can subscribe to it instead of freakishly in a state of panic and worry about it being on a local drive (plus those 5-old-calendars I don’t touch anymore and utilize solely for self-therapy and historical review).  All I need to do is ensure those are individually on gcal, and then delete the local versions.  Sweet!  I much greatly prefer having the main version of something online and then I can setup backups to local areas, but that way, the “local backup” is itself already a backup of a backup (good for security and minizing anxiety of data!).
  • √Good, simple, clutter-free calendar app.  Done. Thunderbird Lightning suffices.
  • √View All events (historical events from past two years) in list form.  Done.  Only other place I saw this was buggy Chandler, so Thunderbird accomplishes this.
• Email
  • Simplicity of only 1 or 2 accounts.  Getting there.  Not quite yet whittled this down.
  • √All email on servers, IMAPed.  All email from all the funky local POP3 formats I have uploaded on various gmail accounts.  This was a headache and a massive relief and “missing piece of the puzzle” to have those 2003-2006 emails all on server.
  • Only thing left is to maybe designate a work-email, everything else email, and archive email.  But it’s all backed-up and off local hard drives, so that’s excellent success.
  • √+Simple, intuivie, non-bulky email app for online and offline viewing.  Thunderbird and Netscape accomplish this.
• √Tasks — Handled with Remeber the Milk at the moment, and/or Thunderbird.  After GTD hell, I’m not as interested in an imprisoning multitude of task-lists, so the fact that this isn’t so solidified isn’t as much of a problem and reflects my disinterest in many task management files.

Jolly Good!  This was very successful.

s2010_17_06._08:10:56 I’m using Netscape for email.  Calendars in Thunderbird (likely), but definitely netscape.  I have cutting edge most of everything else (the latest firefox addons, triple-booting etc).  One thing I’ve learned in life is somethings you keep, even though they’re old, because they work.  I’ve dried 5 different wallets and still have the exact same one (not the same style, but the exact same wallet) I had when  Iwas 10!  Netscape works, there’s few bandwith errors (even if that’s a gmail problem), it’s simply and emails can get complex so I can’t have a complex email program (yin/yang right? right.) .  It’s free, it’s simple, and it was the first email app I really used back in the 90s haha! Good times.

Reviewing Booting Terminology

After being marooned and imprisoned in Mac-Land (where Apple locks it’s cult-worshipping users out of interacting with a lot of the hardware, which really bites, because that’s the best part of computer!) I had to reacquaint myself with some jargon used in Windows and Linux booting for multiple-OS savviness.  Obviously I could’ve gone much more in-depth.   There’s full books written on just EFI let alone the transition from from the different partition

MBR – Master Boot Record (replaced by GPT).  The first sector, Sector 0 (a mere 512-byte sector), of the boot hard disk volume.
GPT –  GUID Partion Table; the layout of the partitioning table on the physical disk.  replaced by EFI.  Microsof’ts definition of GPT

GPT provides a more flexible mechanism for partitioning disks than the older Master Boot Record (MBR) partitioning scheme that has been common to PCs.

EFI — Extensible firware interface.
BIOS – Basic input output system.  The BIOS loads and starts an operating system.
and just because it sounds piratey (and is a genuinely useful concept in booting jargon)
Bootstrapping.  Aside from it’s references in the delightful Baron Munchausen, and “as a metaphor, meaning to better oneself by one’s own unaided efforts, was in use in 1922″, bootstrapping refers to in computing basically a very simple program “jump-starting” a much more sophisticated and complex program, like an OS (*cough* thus, when getting a triple-boot to work, boostrapping is significant).

Reflecting on Multi-Operating Systems

Regarding Mac OS and Windows, I’m interested in operating systems in general so delaying eliminating Mac OS from my work may be a slight incentive to tinker with mac, but that’s not really an interest at all.  I felt I wasted a lot of time on mac and compared to the fully-amped aviation-like Windows 7, Mac OS seems like tinker toy with few features, relatively few collaboraters, and just the result of cult product.  But that’s a little too opinionated.  Features alone, Windows 7 is soo sooo sooo much more professional and smooth and efficient and quality from the right-clicking features to the efficiently-designed Windows 7 .  I’m impressed with how Win7 hasloads of features but still maintaining an incredibly streamlined and non-bloated effect.  I’m a huge fan of Win7 and given my massive interest and experience with computers over 20+ years it’s preposterous how long I’ve delayed fully trying out ANY distro of Windows (and Linux for that matter)!  I’ve been trapped in Mac; I’ve craved Windows (and a bit of Linux!).  Regarding actions on each operating system, I’ll just say this:

• On Windows 7 I’m writing this blog entry (highly technical, professional, about a 40-20,000 foot planning perspective)
• On Linux I wrote a very impassioned facebook not that may become a blog entry on my love atheism (unquestionably a 50,000 foot planning/discussion perspective)
• On Macs…I basically eat food and don’t do much, but I was scanning in a few photos from elementary school (the tail end of an enormous 1000s upon 1000s of photo archiving almsot all papers and material things from past memories onto the computer, which I then can access from any OS).

So maybe because Linux is “open source” I think of things that are “free and non-business” like atheism.  Maybe I feel very productive and professional with windows so that’s why these very techie blogs emerge in that OS, and Mac is just the OS I’ve used for over 95% of my computing experience in the past (*cough and tha twill be merely past because all efficiency has increased using Windows 7) maybe I just dink around. lol.  I am finishing up some old archiving projects on Mac OS but that’s only because of drivers for the scanner and digital camera.  Jolly good.  Will be massively relieved when the last few scans and digital photographs have been taken and all hard-copies are practically gone (many burned! xD) is over and everything is digital and I’ll have the rewards of my efforts!