Sleep well, sweet dog cow

As previously mentioned, my old mac died. While I had toyed with the idea of continuing to push it down the road as the central computer where stuff gets done, the number of road blocks beyond the slowly shrinking stack of ATA hard drives has only grown. Some are philosophical: the array of computing resources has grown to encompass the mac, a laptop, with windows gaming machine, the linux home server, the girlies old laptop, the girlies new macbook, the TV computer (really just a dvd player that usually boots windows but sometimes BSODs). There's no reason to try to use all that stuff constantly... it becomes a time suck. Then, the availability of powerpc software and the degrading apparent speed of html5, HD video, and vast piles of photos was becoming painful. Combing resources onto a faster machine is the order of the day.

So, we appear to be ambling in the general direction of productivity. I ordered a few terabyte drives and 4 gigs of ram for the windows box, and installed ubuntu in a dual boot configuration. Windows for all those games, linux for actually doing work.

The two major hurdles to transition, which were ultimately preventing a sooner move, was the email archive and the photo library.

Moving the photo library ended up being simple, enough, just copy the directory, and the IPTC keywords embedded by Shoebox were browsable by most of the photo management tools I tried. I ended up sticking with Shotwell, as Darktable made adding keywords a chore and it lacks a coherent full screen browsing experience. (You can't go to a Darktable collection, open a photo in full screen, and sequentially move through the photos, using the delete key to remove unwanted images. ) So, you can hope to see more photos in future posts. And future posts, now that I've gotten this mess cleaned up.

Email was somewhat tricky. I really wanted to be able to import Mail.app email into Thunderbird. Sadly, there is no T-bird filter for that, and Mail.app stores messages in individual .emlx files. I found a few, rather old scripts (ruby and perl) for converting .emlx to .mbox format, but neither of them worked to my satisfaction. The perl script would have required a lot of hand holding to deal with the many mailboxes to import from the mac, and the ruby script was written based on a depricated library, and needed more re factoring than my slightly greater than 0 ruby skills could muster.

The mac was able to keep itself together long enough to just export the mailboxes to mbox and then ultimately copy them to the server where the data would be safe.

That all took a bit to figure out. I wanted darktable to work well... it's so blindingly fast that one feels dismay when using anything else. It's not as fun to wait for a split second between photos closing and loading.

 We appear to be rolling again.