<metaname="description"content="this past week my dad and I helped my grandmother with a few Computer Things. my grandfather died at the end of last year and the process of getting “Computer Things” to a usable state for my grandmother was pretty rough."/>
<metaproperty="og:description"content="this past week my dad and I helped my grandmother with a few Computer Things. my grandfather died at the end of last year and the process of getting “Computer Things” to a usable state for my grandmother was pretty rough."/>
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<p>this past week my dad and I helped my grandmother with a few Computer Things. my grandfather died at the end of last year and the process of getting “Computer Things” to a usable state for my grandmother was pretty rough.</p>
<p>One of the things that was unexpectedly frustrating was transferring stuff (photos, contacts, whatever) from my granddad’s account to my grandmothers. as near as i can tell, a different family member had been helping my grandmother and closed several of my grandfather’s old accounts. including email accounts and /iCloud/ accounts.</p>
<p>normally, transferring contacts from one persons icloud to another’s is pretty straight forward (there’s an export button on icloud.com), but if you can’t succesfully auth to icloud it gets a lot trickier. there’s probably a few ways to do this, but the tack i ended up taking was:</p>
<ol>
<li>find a totally different source for the contacts (in this case, my grandfather’s outlook 2010 install)</li>
<li>export those contacts to vcards</li>
<li>import those vcards to icloud.com under the new account</li>
</ol>
<p>That is the bones of what happened, but the details kept screwing me over.</p>
<p>first, outlook 2010 contact exports by default come out in an outlook specific format (.msg) that cannot be imported into icloud. ok well fine, surely there’s a straight forward way to deal with that.</p>
<p>good news: you can directly export contacts from outlook to vcf
bad news: its fucking hidden behind a “send as business card” dialogue option that is fucking unintuitive. thanks 2010 microsoft.
worse news: it sends a very old .vcf format, 2.1. The minimum I could get working with icloud was 3.0</p>
<p>ok well surely you can convert the 2.1 version to 3.0? in fact, what is even the difference? here is some wikipedia examples:</p>
ADR;TYPE=WORK,PREF:;;100 Waters Edge;Baytown;LA;30314;United States of America
LABEL;TYPE=WORK,PREF:100 Waters Edge\nBaytown\, LA 30314\nUnited States of America
ADR;TYPE=HOME:;;42 Plantation St.;Baytown;LA;30314;United States of America
LABEL;TYPE=HOME:42 Plantation St.\nBaytown\, LA 30314\nUnited States of America
EMAIL:forrestgump@example.com
REV:2008-04-24T19:52:43Z
END:VCARD
</code></pre></div></div>
<p>the thing that caused most of the issues for the contact set I was working on was the ~TEL;~ lines. the type declarations, when present, needed to be altered. to fix this is pretty simple:</p>
sed -e 's/TEL;/TEL;TYPE=/g' -e 's/VERSION:2.1/VERSION:3.0/g' ../new-contacts/all-outlook-contacts.vcf > ../new-contacts/all-CLEANED.vcf
</code></pre></div></div>
<p>yes thats right, ‘ i am very 3 now ‘ is most of the work lmao. this worked, but I still couldn’t import the vcf files to icloud - it would think for a while, then error saying that at least one of the entries was unreadable. i skimmed through the file visually and found some lines that were interesting - on a few cards there was a LANGUAGE declaration:</p>
<p>wtf is that, that isn’t mentioned in the spec until vcards 4.0</p>
<p>my best guess is that this is just some Fancy Colour from outlook specifically, because nobody else was talking about this based on quick google searches. I just removed it from these 4 cards and went on to import them to icloud succesfully.</p>
<p>the lesson i learned during this process is:</p>
<ul>
<li>don’t close people’s accounts right away; make sure everything is prepared before accounts are closed.</li>
<li>by the time i die i should establish a fucking runbook to go over the necessary steps for people who aren’t technically inclined</li>
