Moving Old Outlook and Outlook Express Email Over to Gmail

I’ve had an email address since 2003 I guess, but I’ve only got the past 4 years or so of my main billwadman.com address up on the google apps server where I host it (I use and highly recommend Google apps standard edition. Now I don’t have to worry about my mail at all when I switch computers). Not that the stuff before my Gmail jump in 2007 was literary gold, but you never know what was in there. Letters from old friends or my dead father, reminders of events that you’ve forgotten about, picture attachments you thought were lost to the sands of time. Old email can be like nostalgia central. Well I was thinking about all of this last night while recording Circuitous Conversations with Dan and it got me thinking that I should take stock in my email archive situation. I didn’t expect for it to take me most of the day, but it did and here’s what I’ve figured out.

Outlook Express
I looked thorough all my old folders of stuff I’ve pulled forward through pc to pc over the years. Back in the late 90′s through 2002 I was using Outlook Express which came installed with Windows. It wasn’t the most powerful piece of software, but it was a lot smaller and faster than the full version of Outlook and I didn’t need calendaring features so it was just fine for me. Those backups were really just a copy of the proprietary .dbx data files as OE kept them. And while they’re not hurting anyone just sitting there, who knows how long I’ll be able to get software that can even read them since they don’t make Outlook Express anymore. I had to figure out a way to get these up onto the gmail servers. In the end I booted up the Win7 virtual machine I’ve got on the hackintosh and installed the most recent version of Windows Live Mail. There is an import function that you point toward your old OE data files and it sucks it in. Step one done.

Now to get it to Gmail. First add your Gmail as an IMAP account in Windows Live Mail. I then created a new folder (shows up in gmail as a label) called ‘OutlookExpress Import’. You can then drag and drop your imported emails over into that folder on the Gmail IMAP and it’ll start copying them up. It’s very slow, like 1 per second in my experience. Something to do with the gmail servers having to parse the data a bit I think.

Outlook
From 2002 until recently I was using Outlook in it’s various versions. So I had a folder with a bunch of archive .pst files in it which was a bit of a pain because I know there are duplicates all over the place within them. So I installed Outlook on the virtual machine and one-by-one imported the .pst files into a nice fresh empty Outlook datafile. Making sure I selected “don’t import duplicates” of course. This took a while. So my about 2GB of my old Outlook archives are  now in Outlook and somewhat organized.

There are a number of little utilities out there which will upload your Outlook data straight to Gmail. In fact, Google themselves make one which will do the work for you. I tried using it a couple of years ago to questionable effect. It kept stalling so I decided to take a different route this time. I wanted to get the data out of Outlook and into a form that was more friendly to other systems. So I installed Mozilla Thunderbird, the email sister app to the Firefox browser. Using it’s import system, I pulled all the email over from Outlook.  Now that all the mail is in Thunderbird, it means I’m cross-platform (Win, Mac, Linux) , so I pulled all those files over to the Mac and imported them into Mail.app.  I’m not a huge fan of the Apple mail program, but I felt like it was a good safe place to make the move to Gmail.

I reckon I could have just added Gmail as an IMAP account to Outlook and done the same thing I did the first time, but I didn’t want to be in the Windows virtual machine any longer than necessary and there was a lot more mail in the Outlook dataset. I could do the same IMAP trick from Mail.app I guess, but I decided to give the latest Google uploader a shot.  Windows version here, and Mac version over here.  They’re similar in what they do, but somewhat platform specific as to what mail program data files they know how to deal with.  And I have to admit, the new version for the Mac is working pretty great so far.  I opened it up and it found all the mail in Mail.app and let me specify which of the folders I wanted to send, as well as hot to label the stuff on it’s way up.  It also seems to be quite a bit faster than the IMAP route.  It’s only about 20% done at the moment so I’ll update this later if I have any trouble, but so far so good.

Wrap Up
So if I had to start from the beginning again I think I’d do things a little bit differently. I probably would have imported the Outlook Express mail straight into Outlook, then pulled in all the archive .pst files. So everything was all in one place. Then spend some time culling the stuff that I know I don’t need from client projects 12 years ago, and perhaps consolidating the folder structure a little bit to tidy things up. Finally I would have either used the Windows version of the Google Uploader and just called it a day.

That said, the alternative of pushing it all through Thunderbird to make it more platform agnostic is not a bad way to go considering then you could zip all those files up and keep them as a standardized backup.  Knowing that they’ll be readable for a long time to come since it is open source and uses a variation on the UNIX’y mbox mail file standard. It all depends on how anal you are about such things. But if I’ve learned anything in this process it’s that being a little crazy about organizing things now could save you a lot of time in the future, and perhaps determine if you can even read it at all.

Hot Mess Pre-production

Ok, here’s the situation. My parents went away on a week’s vacation and…  Ok, just kidding.  What’s really happened is that my friend Amy whom you all saw last week in one of my 365s has asked me once again to take pictures to promote her web series Hot Mess.  Last year we shot both individual and group shots in a pin-up style.  I was rather happy with the outcome and think they look pretty good as a series.

This year we’re going to do just a group shot, however she’s added more characters, so instead of the 4 from last year there are a total of 7 ‘messes’.  We’ll be shooting here are my place which does give some logistical problems (it’s not that big) but I think we’ll manage.  The concept Amy came with is to take all 7 girls in black dresses and wrap them together in caution tape.  In fact she’s even sent me a sketch of what she means:

Ok, so I know we’re stacking them together like that. How it’ll actually work when they’re all here, I guess we’ll find out tonight. I am concerned with how I’m going to make sure they don’t all block each other’s light and what I end up with is half the scene in shadow. So that’s a problem.

I’ve also got to figure out what we’re trying to say with the lighting. I mean, I could easily shoot them on white again and do a similar pin-up motif as last year. It would work and maybe we’ll end up trying it, but I don’t want to rehash the same thing.

So maybe we go the other way and shoot on gray or black and light it so it looks like they’re getting caught by a police searchlight. Maybe even shoot on the paper, but turn it into a composite so they’re in front of a big brick wall or gated up storefront or similar city scene. It’s not a bad idea, now I’ve just got to figure out the lighting plan. Here’s where I plan to start.

So, 9′ seamless with a softbox over both rear top corners to give an edge to as much as possible. This should make it more cinematic and allow them to pop out a bit from the background This should also help if I end up doing a composite. Nice contrasty absolute edges make everything easier.

For a mainlight, I’m thinking about using my ringlight which I rarely use. Most of the time I find it far too powerful for the distances that I work from, and don’t really like the tell-tale edge shadows it produces. However I used it to good effect on the Atari picture of Heather a few weeks ago so maybe it’ll work here. Plus the rear boxes may do a bit to negate those pesky shadows in the first place and I’m planning on backing up and shooting with a longer lens this time as well. As a second option, I could also just setup a bare strobe right above them camera which would probably work as well.  One additional advantage of the ring is that if the camera can see it, it’ll be lit. Which helps my fear of them blocking each other’s light if I have it coming from either side.

I’m going to spend an hour or so setting all this up in a bit. Will let you know how it shakes out in a bit.

New to Mac OS – Part 1 Things That Drive Me Nuts

As most of you who read my blog know, I just recently moved to Mac OS 10.6 as my primary OS. Part of this was just an experiment, part of it is interoperability with Mac OS formated disks from other people which I need to use, and part of it was the fun of getting my Hackintosh to work (I’ve had a unibody Macbook for years as well but that’s not up to what I need to do photographically). That said, I’m pretty happy overall. There are still a few things that drive me nuts. Thought you might get a kick out of my misery.

Things that drive me nuts about Mac OS:
- In Windows I loved that I could maximize my windows to use all the screen real estate and still jump between them because the taskbar is always down the bottom of the screen. I know there is a full screen mode on a lot of apps, but most of the time I just want to click a button and not be seeing all the other crap on the desktop. If you’ve got Photoshop and Dreamweaver and a browser open, you end up clicking on the wrong thing and switching applications when you didn’t mean to. Miss the edge of the window when you click to resize and POOF all your toolbars are gone and you’re in Finder somehow. The green window button makes things bigger, but seems pretty unpredictable as to what it’s going to do exactly.

- Hide vs Minimize. Two ways to get rid of a window. You can minimize it to the dock but to get it back you’ve got to click it’s little icon down on the right side of the dock (and you wouldn’t notice it if you hide your dock). Clicking on the related application icon in the dock doesn’t bring the minimized window back up, you have to explicitly do it. The other option is to hide the app (command + H) which makes is disappear and clicking the app icon DOES bring the window back. Oh and minimized stuff shows up in Expose, hidden apps do not. So you have to know that you’ve hidden the window, otherwise they’re in the ether. Weird stuff.

- In Photoshop CS5 on windows, you can be in full screen mode and still have your image windows as tabs. I have yet to figure out how to do that on the Mac. So jumping between images is a matter of using the Windows menu.

- Icons don’t reflow to fill available space if you resize a Finder window. I know this is an old Mac thing and I understand how this could be useful if you like to layout your icons in a certain way to help remember spatially what is what. But it’s annoying when you just want to see more in the window.

- Resizing from on the bottom left corner. Why not let me resize from any side of the window I want. Annoying. This one has been around forever and is apparently changing in Lion. Long overdue.

- In Finder you can’t cut and paste files to move them.  You’ve got to copy them and then delete the originals. Oh and the copying versus moving sometimes gets me mixed up on when it does which and what keyboard modifier key I need to use.

- The whole keeping applications open even when no windows exist is a hard thing to get used to too.  I guess when you’ve got 12GB of RAM you can let Text Edit stay in memory, but it’s still annoying that I just opened up a .txt file to copy a chuck of text and then I’ve got to go manually quit out of the application instead of just closing the window.  That’s a paradigm shift I guess.

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That’s all I can think of at the moment, I’m sure there are more.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of things I really love about it, and new ways I’ve found of speeding up my workflow.  I’ll get into those a in the next post, but in the meantime, if anyone’s got answers to the above problems, feel free to leave a comment. I’d love a solution or two.

Photo Computer Buyer’s Guide Part 3 – The Hackintosh Option

Let’s say you’ve read Part 1 and Part 2 of my Photo Computer Buyer’s Guide with all the attention of Ken Jennings in Double Jeopardy, but you feel like your needs have slipped through the cracks.  The laptops and iMac are all well and good, but you really want the expandability of a Mac Pro with a really great screen but you don’t want to spend $5000 to get it. Well if you really want to run Mac OS X you’re not afraid to get your hands dirty there’s always a Hackintosh.

We need to back up one second. In the old days (read, from the mid 1990′s til 2006) Apple computers ran on PowerPC processors.  This is a different platform than the Intel x86 machines that Windows has ran on since it’s inception. Apple used to make a big stink out of this fact and laud the PowerPC-based processors as being faster than relavant x86 ones. This was dubious at the time, but by the mid 2000′s, Intel had taken their architecture to levels of performance that IBM (the maker of most of Apple’s fastest chips) just couldn’t and Apple had a problem on their hands. So in 2006 Steve Jobs announced that they had been planning for this contingency for years and that they had OS X running on x86 processors too. In fact after making the announcement he mentioned that all the demos he had been running to show off Apple software the earlier in the talk had been running on a Pentium 4 computer and not a PowerMac as you would have thought.  It was an “Oooo” moment and for more than one reason.

Soon there were people thinking now that Macs were  just  fancy Intel boxes, why not try to run Mac OS on any Intel Box.  Well there were a number of reasons this was a problem. Mac’s were built around a very specific set of hardware and the drivers required to get it working on anything but those setups didn’t really exist. Also Mac’s don’t use a standard BIOS that most Windows computers used to start up. Instead they used what is called an EFI (extensible firmware interface, but you don’t need to know that) which is basically a fancier, more modern BIOS-like system.  This made it possible for them to limit the number of machines that Mac OS would boot on.  No Apple hardware, no can do.  The thing is, computer nerds are amazing.  And so in no time there were people hacking the system to work on specific sets of hardware, but you couldn’t use software update a lot of the time and things were more buggy.  Definitely not the kind of system you want to rely on. This is where we were 2-3 years ago.

Now we’re in a whole new world. Hackers have gotten around just about every problem with solutions which are elegant and fairly easy.  So if you’re an enthusiast who has built their own computer from parts before, or a tinkerer what wants to try (it’s really not hard. No soldering or anything, just plugging stuff in) you too can build a custom computer which runs Mac OS X. A Hackintosh. I’ve been running one for over a month as my main desktop production machine and have had nary a crash.

Let me say a couple things here: One, I wouldn’t do this for my Mom.  There may be unforeseen complications in the future and you can’t bring it to the Genius Bar to get fixed. That said, there is a rabid community of people online who go out of their way to make this stuff work. If you follow their advice, you’re in good shape. System software updates 10.6.5 > 10.6.6 for example, just wait a day before you install them so people smarter than you can figure out any problems and workarounds.  And Two: It may not be technically legal. The EULA (End user licensing agreement) that comes with OS X Snow Leopard says it’s only useable on an Apple Computer.  I think that’s crazy. If I’m buying the software (which I have) I should be able to do what I want with it in the privacy of my own home. For what it’s worth, Apple hasn’t ever sued any individuals for doing this.  They did shut down a company who was building them and selling them online. For personal use, I wouldn’t worry about it.

So where do you start? Well you need to buy the parts and build the computer. The building the computer part is fun, and Ars Technica just posted a long form guide about what’s involved. It even walks you through each step.

http://arstechnica.com/ask-ars/2011/04/how-to-build-your-own-computer-ask-ars-diy-series-part-i.ars

But which parts to buy to make your machine as Hackintosh friendly as possible? There are a number of sites all over the net talking about Hackinoshes but the one I’ve stuck with is http://www.tonymacx86.com/ Great blog with news, great forums for tips and tricks and information. Best of all, the people on this site have specific sets of components that they’ve tested to work great as a Mac which they call CustoMac Builds.  Mostly it’s about getting the Motherboard, Processor, and Graphics Card right. For a number of reasons, certain Gigabyte brand motherboards seem to be the way to go. The hard drives, case, power supply, dvd drive, fans, keyboard, mouse, etc don’t really matter as much.  Either way, we’re talking serious machines which rival and beat the 4 core Mac Pro’s for around $1300.   In fact they even specced out a CustoMac Pro last fall for $1224. I’d imagine those parts are even cheaper now. This leaves you plenty of money left over to buy a nice NEC monitor like their latest 27″ beauty.

Once you’ve got the computer built and booting, the process basically involves 4 steps. First you boot with an iBoot CD you’ve burned from a TonyMac download.  You then replace that CD with the Mac OS install disc and install MacOS. Then reboot using the iBoot cd again, but instead of going into the installer, you boot into Mac OS from your hard drive. Then you use the system update you download from Apple to bring your computer up to 10.6.7 or whatever is current and before you reboot you run the Multibeast utility to install all the drivers you need to boot without iBoot and run Mac OS on your hardware.  Sounds complex, I know, but it’s really not that bad.  And once you’ve gotten the hang of it, it’s second nature. Seriously, there are specific walkthroughs for specific builds, but here’s the generic one.

http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/2010/04/iboot-multibeast-install-mac-os-x-on.html

Usually the gear that’s most compatible is one step behind the cutting edge. If you want to use the latest $800 video cards, you might have problems. Or if you want to build a system based on the latest Intel Sandy Bridge processors, you might want to wait until they get the kinks out.  For instance am running an Intel Core i7-920 processor, overclocked to 3.2GHz on an Asus P6T motherboard with 12GB of RAM installed.  I didn’t build this machine to be a Hackintosh, it’s one I had built over two years ago for around $1400 which still benchmarks as fast as a $3400 current Mac Pro. That said, it runs Mac OS just fine, and those are facts that I’m just fine with. So follow their guides to the most compatible setups and you should be good.

Personally I find running a Hackintosh as my main box very satisfying.  There’s something smirk-worthy about making something do something it’s not meant to. And doing it well to boot.  I’m going to write another post about how my workflow and backup system has changed with my switch to Mac OS, as well as a bunch of neat keyboard commands and timesavers I’ve been taught or figured out.  It’s like going 0-60 in 3 weeks. Exciting.

Photo Computer Buyer’s Guide Part 2 – Buying a Mac

This is the follow-up to my post a couple days ago, the aptly named ‘Part 1′. In it I talked about the 4 most important parts that make up a photo computer and what you’ve really got to worry about. Today I’m going to get into specific machines.  Now some people will rip me for only talking about Macs, but that’s largely to do with the fact that there are a million different Windows machines out there and at least the Apple line is a manageable post topic. Most of what I’m going to say would apply to a PC too, just figure out which model is most similar and you’ll get a good idea.  Let’s jump right in with the laptops.

Macbook Pro
The latest “Sandy Bridge” revision to the MacBook Pro from a couple months ago makes them an almost desktop replacement for me.  Finally we have laptops with processors which are as faster or even faster than a desktop.  In fact the new 15″ beat a recent 8 core Mac Pro in Photoshop benchmarks. And with the new crazy fast Thunderbolt connection on there with drives being released soon, the little internal hard drive isn’t so bad either.  Get a nice 120GB SSD as a boot drive and keep your images files on a nice big external drive or RAID array.  The internal screens are decent enough for most use, though I personally wouldn’t base final decisions on one. Hell you could even get yourself a nice NEC screen (they just released a new 30″ with DisplayPort).

So you say, “Perfect Bill, what’s the problem?  Connect an external disk and monitor and I’ve got a workstation that can also be mobile when I need it.  Plus, I get a nice additional screen on the laptop for palettes and such.”  This is all true and it’s a great idea. My problem with it is two fold.  First, it’ll cost a lot, but then most of these options aren’t cheap. Mostly the problem is RAM, the laptops have only two memory slots on them. From Apple, this limits you to 8GB of RAM.  Which is a lot for a laptop a few years ago, but not quite enough for me as my primary machine. You may remember that I’ve got 12GB on my current desktop and was thinking of upgrading. This depends a lot on how you process your images though. If you’re a Lightroom or Aperture guy and do only minimal edits in Photoshop, then you’re probably fine with 8GB. In which case this might be a great solution for you if you need portability.

In the past month or so, OWC has released a 16GB kit for this new machines. That’s two 8GB so-dimm modules. That’s pretty amazing.  16GB gets you in the territory where I would use this as my only computer. The problem is that those 16GB cost $1600, or about the cost of the laptop itself.  Highest capacity memory modules are always at a crazy premium.  It was only a couple years ago that 4GB dimms cost hundreds of dollars each. Now an 8GB upgrade kit with two of them costs $100. So maybe it’s a matter of time, but that’s a pill that’s a little too hard for me to swallow.

“How about the Air?” you ask. With a max of 4GB of RAM, a slow old Core 2 processor and a 128GB SSD, I’d say the Air is currently not an option for a serious photo machine.  Would I get an 11″ to take with me on shoots and shuttle through doing selects in Lightroom?  Sure, but that’s not worth $1200 to me right now.  That said, the Air has a much better screen than the low-end Macbook.

Speaking of the MacBook, we’re talking about people who are looking for a photo editing computer here, so I’m going to skip over the low-end macbook because I’ve found the screens to be greatly inferior to the Macbook Pros and they come with a 2 year old processor and half the RAM. If you’re going to spend $1000, spend $1200 and get the low-end 13″ Pro.

Ultimately for me, I don’t need to edit on the road very often and I like a big screen. So the laptop as a workstation doesn’t float my boat considering the price premium. You however may love the idea of bringing your system with you wherever you go.

iMac
The current iMacs are pretty great as well, and though they  are a generation behind the Macbook Pro from a CPU point of view, I think it’s a matter of weeks before they’re upgraded.  So if you’re thinking of buying one right now (April 2011) wait.

Of course, the cool part about the iMac is that you get a nice big screen almost for free. In fact the 27″ is a pretty good panel. Not as good as a pro external monitor because of it’s glossy glare-exploding nature and lack of internal LUTs (see Part 1 of this series for an explanation), but if you’re on a budget, you could do far worse. Plus you’ve got a display port on the back, so you could always upgrade to an additional pro monitor later.

As far as RAM goes, the iMac uses the same so-dimms as the laptops do, however instead of 2 slots, it’s got 4 (the new ones that is, older ones had only 2 slots as well).  These 4 slots can each take a 4GB dimm which gives you 16GB of RAM at a very reasonable price. The kits are about $200 from aftermarket dealers.  Don’t buy your RAM from Apple, they charge three times as much for the same 16GB.  Those giant 8GB OWC dimm will work in here too apparently, which gives you a maximum of 32GB which is amazing and more than you’ll ever use.  That said, the memory would cost you $3200, so that $200 you were going to spend for the 16GB looks like the realistic max.

The achilles heel of the iMac is storage, though it’s less of a problem than it used to be. There is normally one internal hard drive in an iMac.  In this last revision, Apple added the option of having an SSD & a hard drive at the same time which is pretty cool. That said, they charge you $900 for the trouble. That’s a lot of money for what you get. You could then use a Firewire 800 drive as an ok level backup to bolster your overall capacity.

The better idea would be to wait for the next revision of the iMac itself which will, I’m sure, contain the new Thunderbold port. The nice 27″ screen, 16Gb of RAM, an internal SSD for boot and applications, and then an external array of disks for storage would be an amazing bank for your buck.  Could could put the whole thing together for less than $3000 and it would scream. There is a setup that would get my seal of approval.

Mac Pro
The granddaddy of the Mac line is the big pro desktop. Used to be the PowerMac back in the day and is now the Mac Pro since the Intel switch a few years ago.  These are very nice machines that hold their value far better than they should based on the tech in them.  Seriously, go look on ebay for 2-3 year old machines and you’ll find some for 70% what they went for new.

They’re big and with that size you get capacity.  Up to 12 cores, 32GB of RAM (64GB if you go aftermarket), 4 internal slots for hard drives which with today’s 3TB drives could give you 12TB of internal storage.  This thing is a beast, and you pay for that capability. These things start at $2500 at the very low-end and quickly get to $3500 or far more with just a few clicks of the upgrade mouse. If you are going to buy a Mac Pro, don’t buy extra hard drives or RAM from Apple.  This machine is build to be upgraded, the hard drive caddies are right there to pull out when you open the side of the thing up.

The main thing you’ve got to worry about when buying a Mac Pro is the CPU. And it comes down to how many cores you need.  For video guys or 3D rendering, the 12 core beasts are great. For photo stuff, they’re overkill in my opinion.  4 or 6 cores is plenty. You can disagree and that’s fine, it’s your money but it’s my blog.  Trust me, get a nice fast single processor machine and load it with RAM.

Downsides are still there with the Mac Pro line. Price being the main one.  Go spend $3500 on the box and then another $1800 on a nice monitor and you’re up around $5000 for a system which to me is crazy for what you get.  You see, part of the reason Mac Pros are so expensive is that they use server chips, Intel’s so-called Xeon line of processors. Basically they’re the same as the i7 that is in the high-end iMac except they can be used in systems with multiple CPU.  But if you’re only buying a Mac Pro with a single CPU like I suggested above, then that capability of the Xeon is moot. That’s all Apple sells however, so you’re basically spending extra money on a part you don’t need.

Ideally there would be a plain old Mac desktop in the Apple line.  A smaller Mac Pro chassis with a single processor and room for 2-3 internal drives.  Basically a headless iMac without the screen and with more space for drives. They don’t have this however, so you’re stuck choosing between ‘less than you want’ and ‘more than you need’. If money is no object then go trick out a nice $5000 Mac Pro.  I myself can’t justify it for what you get.

Best Bets
So Bill, what does this all boil down to?  Well, basically one of two options if you’re not planning spending more than $3000

If you want a desktop and you’re on a budget, and really want to buy genuine Apple hardware, my suggestion is to wait a few weeks until the new iMac comes out.  As I said above, buy the top of the line 27″ with an SSD internal drive, upgrade the RAM to 16GB from OWC or similar aftermarket company, and get an external drive enclosure to plug in via Thunderbold. This setup would cost you less than three grand and would absolutely SCREAM. Seriously, if I were in the market right now, I might go that route.

If you absolutely need to go with a laptop.  Get the fast version of the 15″ MBP. When you get it, upgrade the RAM to 8GB and replace the internal drive with a nice fast SSD like the OCZ Vertex 2 which are about $200 for 120GB. Should be enough capacity for your internal drive. You’ll probably need to carry around a little external on long trips.  Just be sure to get the anti-glass high-res screen option when you order.  It’s really pretty nice, has lots of real estate (1600×1050), and is a bit easier on the eyes than the glossy model.

There is one other option to consider however and that involves getting your hands dirty a bit.  The rewards however, can be amazing.  So in part 3 I’ll discuss Hackintosh a bit.