Export Microsoft Outlook contacts and calendar into Evolution

Using Evolution 2.26.1, if you go to the program's help and search for "outlook", you'll get instructions to export your contacts & calendar from outlook as CSV (DOS). In Outlook 2003, doing that for contacts doesn't work (when you import, you get thousands of bogus contact data); doing that for calendar doesn't work either (nothing gets imported).
Also using Outport for exporting calendar didn't work for me; evolution didn't recognize the ics file as valid.

The solution I found was to install Outlook 2007 (if you don't have it, grab the free Trial from Microsoft), and:
- Export contacts as CSV as before

- Export calendar by using Save As, as explained here. This way, not only did it work well, but also avoided problems with recurring events, which don't get exported correctly by exporting to CSV.

You can import these into Google Calendar (nice to have SMS notifications!) and Google Mail contacts. The only problem seems to be that characters like "ñ" get scrambled.

My favourite Joomla extensions

Article version control: http://www.fatica.net/downloads/simple-content-versioning.html . Never again overwrite contents accidentally!

Editor: JCE. www.joomlacontenteditor.net  - http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/88/details

Photos: Embed your picasa web albums as a slideshow in your articles: http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66969

To upload your albums, the easiest way is by using the Picasa desktop software.

AutoHotkey Replacement for Linux / How to Activate Applications with Hot Keys

I love AutoHotkey for Windows because you can set up a key like Ctrl+Alt+F to activate the Firefox window if it's running.

From this thread, I discovered wmctrl and keylaunch:

sudo apt-get install keylaunch wmctrl

Then create a file ~/keylaunchrc. For example:

# Format:
# key=...KeyName:Command
#
# ... No modifier
# *.. Shift
# .*. Ctrl
# ..* Alt
key=.**f:wmctrl -a Mozilla Firefox   # Activate a window that contains 'Mozilla Firefox' in its title when you press Ctrl+Alt+F


Finally, you need to run keylaunch to get the hot keys working.

Also, check out launchy: It's very handy for launching an application by typing the name.


Matt

How to run a VMWare/VMplayer machine in VirtualBox

At least as of VirtualBox 2.2.2 for Linux, you don't need to convert the VMWare hard disk. You can just create a new machine in VirtualBox, and as a disk select the virtual hard disk file in you VMWare machine. Done! (You'll just need to install the VirtualBox machine additions in the new machine to enjoy the same level of integration)

And remember, as the Help of VirtualBox proclaims...

Warning
Do not run other hypervisors (open-source or commercial virtualization products) together with VirtualBox! While several hypervisors can normally be installed in parallel, do not attempt to run several virtual machines from competing hypervisors at the same time. VirtualBox cannot track what another hypervisor is currently attempting to do on the same host, and especially if several products attempt to use hardware virtualization features such as VT-x, this can crash the entire host.