Export/Import Grindstone XML to Google/iCal/ICS

I recently started using Grindstone to track my daily workload, and I've been using a number of calendars on Google to not only share classifications of appointments, but to track historical data (Android call logs, etc). I kind of expected that Grindstone would have iCal/ICS export capability, but sadly it does not appear so. You can, however, export to XML. So I thought I'd write up a Perl script to convert the XML data into an ICS file ready for import into Google Calendars. Feel free to download it and use to to convert your Grindstone XML files into iCal data.

Here's the Perl script: grindstone2ics.txt (Save as .pl, not .txt)

If you are on Windows with ActivePerl installed, here's a batch file that you can drag-and-drop your XML file onto. Place it in the same folder as "grindstone2ics.pl": grindstone2ics.bat

Let me know if this helped you!

Simple Script to Mount Disk Image Partitions Looped on Linux

Every so often I have to recover a drive to a disk image on Linux, and before I transfer the data back to a physical drive, I like to mount the disk image check on it's status. Mounting a partition from a disk image is slightly more complicated than mounting just an image of a partition, so I thought I'd post a shortcut to doing so. This information was derived from the how-to posted here (http://madduck.net/blog/2006.10.20:loop-mounting-partitions-from-a-disk-image/). You will need to alter three variables: DISKIMAGE, DISKPARTITION, and the mount path at the end of command.

DISKIMAGE=/media/usbdisk/mydiskimage.img ; DISKPARTITON=2 ; mount -o loop,offset=$((`fdisk -lu $DISKIMAGE 2> /dev/null | grep -P "$DISKPARTITON\s+\**\s+[0-9]+\s+[0-9]+\s+[0-9]+\s+[0-9]+" | sed 's/\*//g' | awk '{print $2}'` * `fdisk -lu $DISKIMAGE 2> /dev/null | grep "^Units" | awk -F"= " '{print $3}' | awk '{print $1}'`)) $DISKIMAGE /media/recovereddisk/

Hope this helps someone else save some time!