At some point, you travel down a path far enough that it stops being a trip and starts to become “a journey”.

I’d like to update that famous Lao-Tzu “A Journey of a Thousand Miles” saying for the modern age of air travel to read: “A Journey of 23,244 Miles Begins With a Single Mouse Click.”

Now you might be saying to yourself “23,244 miles seems like a very large number — and also a suspiciously specific figure for Justin to pick.” 1

23,244 miles is almost the full distance around the Earth at the Equator.

It is also, as close as I can figure it, the exact distance of a round-trip flight from New York City through Frankfurt, Singapore, Bangkok that will return me to Luang Prabang, Laos in two weeks time.

Where The Journey Begins

Seven months ago, my wife and I arrived in Luang Prabang while on our honeymoon. We walked into a community library one afternoon and met kids who wanted to practice their English with us. We met Carol Kresge who ran the library. We talked with Justin Spelman, who was pitching in and helping around the Library while starting up his own science education organization.

It was only a few hours of our time, but something about that library and those people stuck to us. Some places are like that — leaving a residue on your thoughts as you continue your travels.

We kept in touch with Carol and Justin from the moment we left. We read more about each of their groups, wondering if we could help them out in any way.

And now I’m returning to Laos to do just that.
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  1. If you like to use metric distances when you talk to yourself, feel free to substitute “37,407 kilometers” [↩]

A Public Beta of a New AppleScript, including new features like HTML Email Support, Better Attachment Handling, MailTags Support, and Easier to Configure Features (Tag Entry On/Off, Default Tags/Notebooks).

UPDATED — April 2, 2012

A new version of the Apple Mail to Evernote script has been released which works around the bits of AppleScript that Apple broke in 10.7+!

I’ve left the older beta versions posted below for people who want to look at the MailTags code in them (I’ve removed this functionality from the new script)

 

Links to The OLD Scripts:

Click Here for The English Language Version

Click Here for The Japanese Language Version

Don’t forget to check out the other stuff in the Veritrope.com Code Library — it’s filled with other helpful AppleScripts, including many more for Evernote!

Delicious to Evernote AppleScript Lets You Keep Tags and Dates Intact While Importing!

As has been widely reported today, Yahoo is discontinuing the Delicious social bookmarking service. (UPDATE: Delicious now says that service will continue while they look for someone to buy them.)

I’ll leave the in-depth postmortem to others — but I will point out that there are any number of good options to replace Delicious (the most obvious being Pinboard).

Mac users can also import their links into many popular note-taking apps via AppleScript, and I wanted to mention that I’m hosting one such script project here:

Delicious to Evernote AppleScript (Keeping Tags and Dates)

It’s still an early version, but it does offer the added benefit of allowing you to keep your tags and date information. Give it a try — and feel free to pitch in with any improvements if you think of any (especially if you know a little AppleScript!)

Don’t use Evernote? It’s free and easy to try — but AppleScript also makes it easy to adapt the code to whatever app you’re using! And if you do, don’t forget to share it with your fellow Mac users here in our Code Library!

A Japanese translation of instructions for the “Evernote Folder Action” script!

Updated on February 28, 2013

Synkuro-san — the publisher of b2log and a friend of Veritrope.com — has generously provided this Japanese translation of instructions for the “Evernote Folder Action” script. We hope that this makes it even easier for Japanese Evernote users to enjoy this project!

-Justin

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A VPN service can help you avoid having your data stolen or your internet traffic blocked. Here’s how I use VyprVPN while traveling to reduce the risk of both!
A VPN service can help you avoid having your data stolen or your internet traffic blocked. Here’s how I use VyprVPN while traveling to reduce the risk of both!

No Internet For You!

The recent proliferation of internet snooping tools like Firesheep — which allows a semi-knowledgable hacker to hijack any number of your personal accounts — highlights an under-examined need for many travelers: A secure connection to the internet.

After all, most people are just worried about how they are going to connect to the internet as they travel — not even considering how safe that connection is. A person on the same network as you can actually see the information you’re sending and receiving — or sometimes even read the files on your hard drive.

Sound alarmist? Take a moment to look your computer’s network file browser the next time you hop online in a hotel, on a plane, or at a free WiFi hotspot and you’ll probably see a number of other computers visible. Some of them even probably have their file sharing turned on, exposing all sorts of personal data, photos, etc. to theft or vandalism.

Not good.

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