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I’ve decided to abandon my plain text note-taking system in favor of Evernote. nvALT and Byword, Elements and PlainText, these are all great applications and I’ve gotten a lot of use out of them over the years, but there was one use case that they weren’t addressing for me: sometimes it’s helpful to have images, or some other kind of non-textual data, accompany a note. The plain text editors just don’t do that (by design and rightfully so). I’ve used Evernote off and on to clip interesting things from the Internet and I think it would be easier for me if everything was in one place instead of scattered across multiple applications.

After deciding to take the plunge I whipped up an AppleScript to import all of my existing text notes into Evernote:  

I saved it as an application, selected all the text files and dropped them onto it. A few minutes later they were all in Evernote, with the note’s creation date set to the original file’s creation date.    It’s also trivially easy to turn the script into an OS X Service, so if you find yourself wanting to import random files from the Finder into Evernote you can. To do that: 

1. Open Automator and create a new Service. 
2. Set the Service receives selected dropdowns to files or folders in Finder.app.
3. Find the Run AppleScript action in the left hand pane and drag it over to the right.
4. Copy the repeat block above and paste it into the on run block in Automator.
5. Change the file_list variable to input.
6. Save it with a sensible name like Import File to Evernote.
7. There is no step 7.

You could also use an application called ThisService, which takes an AppleScript and turns it into a Service, but I’ve personally never used it and it hasn’t been updated since 2008. I don’t see why it wouldn’t still work though.

I’ve got a few posts about some other useful things I’m doing with Evernote in the pipeline and will share them in the near future. So stay tuned. 

There are a bunch of licenses people use for their web content these days. The most prolific is probably Creative Commons and its many variants. But the one constant in all licenses is pervasive legalese. So with that in mind I present to you the Don’t Steal My Shit License:

• You can read my shit
• You can quote my shit
• But don’t be a dick and steal my shit

Simple, permissive, to the point. If this license appeals to you I encourage you to use it on your own works. But keep in mind that I am not a lawyer (nor do I even play one on TV) and this license will probably not stand up in court if someone does steal your shit.

Re: my last link, I feel like I should explain, briefly, why I have no use for sites like Engadget or the Verge (hereafter referred to as General Purpose Tech Blogs, or GPTBs) instead of just saying they suck.

For better or worse, I’m only interested in a small area of the tech world. GPTBs, as my pithy initialism suggests, all cover broad categories of tech topics, most of which I consider completely irrelevant to my life. For example, I couldn’t care less about reviews for the Hot Android Phone of the Week or speculation about what Apple may or may not be doing six months from now. I understand that they do this to bring in a wide audience (and hence more advertising dollars), but for me the signal to noise ratio is just too low. Their home pages are completely overwhelming and, quite frankly, it’s a waste of my time to look through all of the headlines and try to find the one or two articles I would actually want to read. Ditto for any RSS feeds that they publish. 

I know there are lots and lots of people out there who actually care about overall trends in the tech world or whatever the new hotness is, but I’m not one of them. And I don’t think these kinds of sites should go away either. They have their uses and occasionally put out articles that interest me. I just assume if that happens, it’ll probably pop up in one (or many) of the other news sources I follow. And that’s worked out pretty well for me so far.

Back in September Brett Kelly wrote a neat little Python/Applescript tool called Evernote Dated Photo:

When you add an image to Evernote using this app, it will set the “created” date on the note to be the same day the photo was taken.

As originally written, it could only handle adding one photo at a time to your default notebook. Brett put the project up on github, so I forked it and added multiple file/folder support as well as the ability to select which notebook to add the photos to. I learned a bit about AppleScript from working on this and I’m flattered that Brett thought my changes were good enough to merge into the project.

I also made a very low production value screencast to demo how it works:

Check out Brett’s Evernote Essentials book too.