Background

Users can extend the func­tion­al­i­ty of Mail.app for OS X by installing software packages called "Mail Bundles". I use three such bundes of joy on a daily basis:

• The Clip-o-Tron 3000 for OmniFocus
• Mail Act-On
• GPG Tools

Each of these is essential to my workflow, and not having one of them severely imapcts my pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

The Problem

One of them is broken, and none of them will admit it. The problem began after applying the OS X 10.9.3 update.

At irregular intervals, Mail.app will stop servicing the Outbox. That is, messages to be sent will be placed into the Outbox folder, and then remain there. I have my suspicions, but I'm not …continue.

This article is a specific im­ple­men­ta­tion of the concepts discussed in Hazel for Expense Receipts.

This rule is specif­i­cal­ly so I can report the cost of an airline ticket. My employer pays for the tickets directly, but we're still required to add them as a non-re­im­bursable item on the ap­pro­pri­ate report. All other items in the itinerary get their own receipt from the vendor (hotel or car rental company, et cetera).

My employer has had more than one travel agent, but all of their documents have a very similar format. I suspect that all agents booking for American Express Travel (Concur) will have formats that are similar enough to adapt …continue.

This article is a specific im­ple­men­ta­tion of the concepts discussed in Hazel for Expense Receipts.

This rule sorts an emailed receipt from Hertz Rent-A-Car into a folder named for the year and month of the last day of the rental.

These are the details:

We just check that the document is from Hertz, and then try to pick out the correct date.

We have to look for a date (in the pattern below) that follows the word "Date", a colon, and some amount of other text. The first occurrance in the file is used, because this is the date that the receipt was generated (which is always the last day …continue.

Hazel is a wonderful tool for au­to­mat­i­cal­ly sorting files. In fact, I've written a family of rules that sort differnt types of receipts into folders for expense report backup. These rules are assigned to my Downloads folder, which is used as a "sorting folder".

Most of the expense document sorting rules have the same general recipe:

• Identify the type of document (usually PDF)
• Pick at least one unique text string
• Somehow match the a date in the document contents that is used to determine into which month's folder it will be sorted.
• If the file name is not already unique, rename it such that it …continue.

There aren't always Mac versions of binary dis­tri­b­u­tions of OSS, so sometimes the package needs to be built with Xcode. This isn't a big deal other than that I try to maintain a repeatable in­stal­la­tion discipline, and I like to be able to undo operations that are performed on my systems. The best way to accomplish this is with packages.

I needed to build HDF5 for a project. The Python bits are trivially installed with pip, but they depend on native libraries... so I set out to learn how to package the non-python de­pen­den­cies.

Brew and macports just don't interest me right now. All told, there are probably less than …continue.