hazel

I finally decided that I want to move most of my paperless workflow to Evernote. Its search feature make it more convenient than going through a bunch of folders in Dropbox, and I guess that the fact that the bonus space I had gained through Dropbox’s Space Race has expired gave me the final push I needed to move my stuff.

So, I made a thing.

I called it sendToEvernote. It’s a Python script that mails the files you want to send to Evernote to the personal address every Evernote user gets after signing up. You can find yours in the “Account Info” section of the app, and you should make sure you keep it secret, otherwise you’re likely to get random junk in your notebooks.

You’ll find sendToEvernote on GitHub. Download it.

I’ll spare you some details about the script (you can find everything in the README file), and just go through what you need to do to get up and running with Hazel.

Download the mailer Python module:
sudo easy_install mailer
sudo easy_install mailer
Edit your email settings at the top of the script
Make it executable:
chmod +x /path/to/sendToEvernote.py
chmod +x /path/to/sendToEvernote.py
PROTIP: drag the file into your terminal window instead of typing the path manually.
Add a “Run shell script” action (embedded script) to your Hazel rule, and enter the following:
/path/to/sendToEvernote.py "Notebook name" "$1"
/path/to/sendToEvernote.py "Notebook name" "$1"

That’s it.

I LOVE HAZEL.

Now that I made that clear, let’s get into the actual stuff.

As many of you will know, Hazel is a great Mac utility that lets you automatically do stuff to files. You can move files based on their name/size/extension/you name it, and do a bunch of cool stuff with them, without ever having to write a single line of code.

Today I needed to write a rule that would act based on the day of the week a file was created¹.

Turns out, Hazel can do that (not much of a surprise, huh?), but this time I didn’t find it particularly intuitive how to do it. You have to use the “Occurs after” function on the “Created date” (or any date, actually). In this example, this rules will only run on files that have been created after 00.00 on Mondays only, i.e. any file created on Mondays.

(Don’t be confused by the weird names on the “day of week” submenu, they’re just the Italian names for the days of the week.)

The cool thing is that you can select more than one day, so as always Hazel is very flexible.

I use a Sony ICD PX333 Voice Recorder to record classes, and I want to rename them based on the day of the week, since what we do depends on the day of the week ↩