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.

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).

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.

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 (probably) is.
• Move the file into ~/Work/Expenses.
• Sort the file into a subfolder, creating it if necessary, with the pattern YYYY-MM.

Other Articles

• Hazel Rule for Hertz Receipts
• Hazel Rule for Hurley Travel Receipts

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.