I'm a Christian, a physicist, a worshipper, a gamer, a husband and a father.
An article in Science this week called Space for nature asks the question: How much of the earth are we willing to share?
I challenge you to read the whole article without thinking of Thanos. Maybe his evil master-plan wasn’t such a bad idea after all…
Star Wars in Shakespearean Verse
Someone Re-Wrote The First Three “Star Wars” Films In Shakespearean Verse (via BuzzFeed)
Yesterday I wrote about my quest to find good ways of reading the articles and other content I need for my research, and talked about the two tools Flipboard and Pocket that can make this a bit easier.
The next thing I’m looking for is a way to discover the papers and articles that I should be reading but just don’t know about. At the moment I do this manually by subscribing to journals and news services that I then flip through with Flipboard to find something interesting.
One of the things I find hardest about being a scientist is keeping up-to-date with all the latest research. A number of times I’ve worked on some problem for days, weeks and even months before finding out that someone else has already solved the problem!
I’ve started looking to internet tools to help me keep up to date. My favourite two at the moment are Flipboard and Pocket.
Ugh. What fun I have had. For those of you that want to know how to do this without reading the hoops I jumped through, here’s a summary:
Sounds simple, right? No.
This all started because I’m helping a friend set up their new computer, including transferring all the Outlook data. The old computer is old and running Windows XP and Office 2000 Professional very slowly! The new computer is running Windows 7 Home Premium and Office 2010 Home and Student, which does not include Outlook. To get Outlook involves paying another £80 or so.
So first off, I went into Outlook on the old computer and looked for the export settings, found these OK and started with the calendar and contacts, export to CSV, looks simple. A lovely little Microsoft box pops up saying that this feature “Import and Export Module” is not installed, and could you possible put in the disc for Office 2000 Professional that you had 10 years ago? Unsurprisingly, this disc was not forthcoming. This is why I always tell people to select full installations – disk space is so cheap these days. This is also why I tell people to keep all the discs somewhere safe…
So, short of finding a copy of Office 2000 Professional in a friend’s dusty attic or on the dustier side of the Internet (of course, Microsoft don’t support it any more), the only export option available is to PST. Now, as far as I know, PST is a proprietary format, only used by Outlook. Not great for importing. But at least it’s a backup.
I then went onto the new computer and opened Windows Live Mail. I looked for the import function – after working out how to show the menu bar and find the File menu, the only options are to import from Outlook Express, Windows Mail or Windows Live Mail. Boo…. So I downloaded a trial version of Outlook 2010 and imported the PST file – all fine, everything is in there, I just needed to get it out!
Again I started with the calendars, as they should be easier than emails. I found a Save As function and exported the whole calendar to an iCalendar file. Simples. Then I went to Windows Live Mail and tried to import the file. No such luck. After scraping the Internet for a while, the only way seems to be to set up a Windows Live account, import the calendar file online, and sync the computer with the online version. I tried to do this, but the online import kept crashing after a certain amount of events. I got around this in the end by exporting the calendar from Outlook as ten different iCalendar files, all for a certain time period, and importing them one at a time… Not nice.
Then the contacts. There doesn’t seem to be a Save As or Export option for contacts in Outlook. I did find a Share by Email option, so did that and saved the attachments as vCard files. So far so good. However, the only way I could find to import them into Windows Live Mail was to double-click each contact individually! Aaargh!!
Anyway, everything’s in there now except the emails. And this is the tricky bit. With a nice ISP that lets you use IMAP, there wouldn’t even be a problem, all the emails would be on the server ready to download. Stupidly, BT don’t think this is a good idea. So in Outlook, my friend has ten years of emails downloaded over POP – *sigh*.
I won’t list all the things I tried, because it would take too long. Transferring them via my own GMail account would have worked, but I estimate it would have taken over 40 hours. I found the answer on a number of forums (thanks Mark) but it’s not possible on Windows 7. So I took the PST file home to my MacBook, which has Windows XP and Office 2007 Enterprise. So my poor Mac is sadly running Microsoft software and imports the PST file to Outlook fine. The trick now is that Outlook Express on XP and Windows Mail on Vista can communicate with Outlook. So I opened Outlook Express and managed to import all the Outlook data, which it saves as DBX files in a mailbox store. By going to Tools > Options > Maintenance > Store location you can find the store or move it somewhere more memorable. I then opened Windows Live Mail on my MacBook too, and found the import from Outlook Express option on the hidden File menu. Hooray, the emails are there in Windows Live Mail! At this point it seems like a miracle!
All that is left is to move the store (Tools > Options > Advanced > Maintenance > Store location) to my friends computer and get the folders in. Hopefully that should be the easy part…
My advice, as ever: Get a Mac.
It’s amazing how your identity gets spread thinly across the whole Internet! I’ve just be collating all the web sites that I belong to and all the chat clients that I’m connected to, and it can be a bit overwhelming to keep everything up to date. Does anyone know of some web service to notify all your different sites when you change your address, for example?
Is it possible to have a coherent web identity? In fact, I would probably like three or four different web identities – a public one, a work one and one for friends and family. I guess this is just the nature of the Internet. It is by definition decentralised, and there is no reason for each of your web services to know about the others, let alone communicate and consolidate together. It does seem, however, that interoperability is one of the current pushes in Internet services.
If you’re interested in how to connect with me online, check out the contact page.
I hope you appreciate the variety of technology and the juxtaposition of new and old, cheap and expensive in my entertainment cabinet!
For gaming I have a SNES from the 80s and an Xbox 360. For watching and recording TV I have a VCR on top of a PC running experimental new social television software (I got rid of the DVD player to save space as the Xbox plays DVDs). And this brand new software is running on a 10-year-old cast-off HP PC…
ooh, lookit, new posting interface! that shows how long since i used livejournal…
i’ve got a website! it’s very exciting. i bought a domain and everything. check out www.matteaston.net!
the only problem is i don’t have anything to put on it…
