Meme 2: iTunes

by

iTunes FoldersAnother meme that Kottke pointed out — iTunes usage methods.

How you organize your music can be as important to someone as what music they listen to. For me, with a personal CD collection currently somewhere around 1,200 discs, organization becomes extremely important. Luckly, iTunes has everything I need in order to keep track of what I have, find things easily, and discover music I hadn’t heard in a while (and at times, didn’t remember that I even had).

One of the godsends of iTunes is the “smart playlists” feature — I use smart playlists almost exclusively (they’re the purple-colored icons in the screenshot). Essentially, a smart playlist allows you to set certain criteria that determine what songs are in the playlist, which is then automatically updated by iTunes. For instance, I keep three smart playlists synced to my iPod at all times: “new additions”, “random unplayed”, and “random 1gb”.

  • Random 1Gb: the single most important playlist, for me. This randomly grabs one gigabyte’s worth of music that 1) I haven’t listened to in the past 2 months, 2) is rated three stars or above, and 3) isn’t in the “Christmas” genre. Whenever I listen to a song, it removes it from the playlist, and grabs another one. This syncs with my iPod, and as the iPod tracks what I listen to each day, the playlist is automatically updated at night when I get home from work, and in the morning just before I leave. The end result — roughly 20 hours of songs that I know I like, but haven’t heard in a few months.

  • Random Unplayed: this playlist grabs one gigabyte’s worth of music that I’ve never listened to. This comes in handy when I’m importing a lot of music (like now, as I re-import all 1200 CDs to AAC rather than .mp3) — as long as there’s something in this playlist, then I know that there’s songs that I haven’t listened to yet (either just to listen, or to check to ensure that the rip was completed successfully).

  • New Additions: this is, quite simply, any songs that have been added to my library within the last two weeks. Great for being able to explore a new album right after buying it.

Other smart playlists that come in handy: “recently played” (anything I’ve listened to in the past two weeks, handy for tracking down something I know I heard recently), “top 25 played” (a pesudo-best-of list), “top rated” (any songs rated four or five stars), and the various by-year playlists (listening by era can be quite interesting sometimes).

The only two “normal” playlists I have at the moment are one for Poems for Laila (from when I was making CDs for Prairie last weekend), and one for Sony’s excellent Soundtrack for a Century collection. Other than those two, it’s all smart playlists for me.

Meme 1: The Dock

by

My dock

There’s a meme propagating around the OS X corner of the ‘net right now, started by this O’Reilly article, propagated by Jason Kottke, and since picked up by many others, looking at how different people keep their dock arranged. Bottom, left, or right? Hidden or visible? Magnifying or not? And so on.

So, not being one to let a silly pointless meme pass by, I give you my current dock! I’m sure you’re all thrilled. It’s actually fairly boring at the moment, but that’s partly because I don’t use the dock as a launcher at all, instead preferring to use it only to show currently running applications. As I’ve had this machine for all of five days now, and there were a few restarts as I got things installed and configured, my list of running applications hasn’t grown terribly much yet.

I’ve gotten into the habit of keeping my dock on the right hand side of the screen. I’m right handed, so it’s a very natural movement for me to swing over that way to switch from app to app when I’m mousing around (which is actually a little odd, as on my Windows box at work, I keep the taskbar anchored to the left hand side of the screen — one of them is backwards). Keeping it on the bottom never really worked for me, as it takes up screen real estate that I’d rather have useable for windows — I’m far more likely to want as much vertical space as possible for reading pages than horizontal space.

Here’s what I’ve got running right now, top to bottom: The Mac OS X finder, Pathfinder (a finder replacement), Mail (email), iPulse (system monitoring), iTunes (music), iChat AV (.mac/AIM IMing), System Preferences (not usually open, but I’m still tweaking things), GraphicConverter (excellent graphic manipulation program), Safari (web browsing), NetNewsWire (news aggregator), QuickTime Player (had to watch the Return of the King trailer a couple times last night), and iCal (calendar/secheduling).

Exciting, huh? ;)

Longhorn gets Scoblelized

by

Robert Scoble has started a Longhorn blog. Information might be light until the upcoming PDC, but it could be a good source of info on Microsoft’s next OS. I may be a Mac user, but it’s good to keep an eye on the other side of the fence. ;)

A couple thoughts, purely on the presentation. The UI looks bearable, and seems to match some of the leaked Longhorn shots we’ve seen so far. The headers for each of the sections in the sidebar look a couple pixels too high to me, though, like they’re crowding the divider lines. Who knows how much of that is just a web rendering issue (or even a browser issue), though. Comment support, but no Trackback, which is a shame (or maybe Trackback is there, but Robert doesn’t have it turned on — I see a ‘Trackback’ counter under the ‘Statistics’ section of the sidebar).

Code-wise, it’s less of a mess than I’ve come to expect from Microsoft, but it could use some improvement. While the main content is structured with CSS, the overall page is still heavily table-based. Images are missing title tags, and there’s still some ALL CAPS tags used (according to specs, HTML tags should be lower case). Still, it’s at least readable code, which is better than I was guessing I’d see when I pulled up the source, and it doesn’t seem to have any IE-specific nastiness. Maybe there are a few people in Microsoft who are starting to get a clue. ;)

Five million in ten days

by

Wow. It looks like I owe the Dean campaign something of an apology. In my Dean/Clark post last Friday, I said this:

…his campaign’s current “5 million in 10 days” fundraising drive struck me as fairly ludicrous when I saw it (even with the fundraising skills they’ve demonstrated, that’s a lot of money in very little time, and if they don’t make their goal, then no matter how much money they do raise, it will be perceived as a “failure” because for the first time, Dean couldn’t meet or break a fundraising goal…they seem to be setting themselves up for bad press)…

While the bat graphic hasn’t been updated since sometime last night, it appears that they pulled it off. Joe Trippi posted a big thank you note last night, with the final count:

Our original goal for this quarter was \$7.6 million — to match what you accomplished last quarter. When we saw that we would surpass that goal we raised the bar to matching the record set by President Clinton. 10 days ago we had raised \$9.7 million and we set the goal of raising \$5 million dollars in just 10 days. You did that. Tonight we sit at \$14.8 million — \$5.1 million over 10 days.

That’s just incredible. Congratulations to the Dean campaign, and to everyone who chipped in to fill those bats. Good work.

Saving embedded Quicktime movies on OS X

by

Thanks to this comment on Mac OS X Hints, I found an incredibly easy way to save Quicktime movies that have been embedded into a page (like, say, the recently released trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King).

Well, easy if you’re comfortable with using the Mac OS X terminal, at least.

Simply create a shell script (I named mine getmov) with the following commands:

#!/bin/sh
ditto -rsrcFork /tmp/501/Temporary Items/QT* ~/Movies/$1.mov</code>

Then drop that shell script into your /usr/bin directory, rehash, and you’re set. Now anytime you’re at a page that has an embedded Quicktime movie that you’d like to save, just leave the window open, and call that shell script, setting the destination filename at the same time. For instance, to save the trailer for RotK, I simply typed getmov returnoftheking, and suddenly ‘returnoftheking.mov’ was sitting in my Movies directory.

Collective nouns

by

I just ran across the phrase “a smug of Mac users“. Collective nouns can be a lot of fun to play with. A gaggle of geese. A murder of crows. And so on. Every so often I’ll play with creating other collective nouns, with the goal of being equally descriptive and clever if I can manage it…

A giggle of girls. A scrape of skaters. A mope of goths.

I’m sure I’ve come up with others, but those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head right now. Anyone have any more suggestions?

Trying to get caught up

by

So far, I’ve found two (and only two) downsides to the new computer.

Firstly, I need to get used to having a single monitor again. I’ve been using a dual-monitor setup for the past few years with my old Mac, using two 17\” CRT monitors. Once was an old Apple monitor that used the old proprietary Apple monitor connector, and the other was a standard VGA monitor attacheched to a VGA port on a second video card.

I can’t do this on the new machine, though. While its video card has two ports, and will drive two monitors quite comfortably, one port is the new ADC port for Apple’s LCD screens, and the other is a DVI port for non-Apple LCD screens. The machine came with a DVI to VGA adaptor, so I can run one of my 17\” monitors, but that’s it. I’ll get used to it, it’s just feeling a bit cramped right now, and I keep losing windows.

Guess what just rocketed to the top of my wish list? ;)

Secondly, after spending the weekend getting things set up and configured on the new machine — and doing a fair amount of playing and marvelling at the new goodies — I’m way behind in reading all of my usual websites. Uff-da.

So, things have been a little slow for the past few days, but I’m working on getting back up to speed. Small prices to pay, really.

Hey Parrotheads!

by

(Yes — this means you, Casey.)

Jimmy Buffet has released two of his upcoming live albums exclusively on Apple’s iTunes Music Store nearly a month before the CDs will hit store shelves. “We are happy to announce that Jimmy Buffett will be releasing ‘Live in Auburn, WA’ and ‘Live in Las Vegas,'” notes Buffet’s record company. “Both releases will be available exclusively at Apple’s iTunes Music Store beginning September 30th. The live CD’s will also be available October 28th at your favorite record store, or here online at mailboatrecords.com.”

(via MacMinute)

Underworld

by

Saw Underworld yesterday. While I won’t go quite as far as to call it a Big. Steaming. Noxious. Pile. of. shite., I will say that I found it very disappointing and frustrating. There was a lot of promise and potential in the film, which unfortunately was entirely wasted. I’d almost prefer that a film be flat-out bad, but when you can see the seeds of a worthwhile effort in the midst of the crap, it makes it just that much harder to deal with.

First off, the good points (and yes, there are some).

The film is extremely pretty. Lots of worthwhile eye candy — cast, sets, costumes — just about everywhere, there’s something worth looking at.

The writers have concocted a new mythology for the creation of both vampires and werewolves, and included an explanation for the enmity between the two species, that I really liked. I’d have to see the movie again (rent, though, not in the theater) to get it down completely, but it involved a disease that one person had an immunity to which was passed to his children. Those two children were bitten by animals — one by a bat, one by a wolf — and the mutation that allowed their father to survive the disease mixed with the animal’s blood to create the beasties. After years of the werewolves acting as the vampire’s daylight guardians, a conflict between the two set off the years of warring between the clans. It’s a definite step away from the traditional storylines, and I liked the new ideas.

Unfortunately…

The writing, the overall story, and the direction were horrid. So much could have been done with the story to make it coherent, and it never happened. Alliances are formed that don’t make any sense, motiviation is never given for much of what happens, and too much of the plot dissolves into an incoherent mess.

The actors are something of an on-again, off-again mix. Kate Beckinsale does decently with what she has, she just wasn’t really given that much to do — her character is essentially either brooding or fighting during the entire movie. Bill Nighy as Viktor, the recently-resurrected elder of the vampire clan did fine by me up until the end, when a suddenly bleated out, “But I loved my daughter!” line completely destroyed all credibility for the character in my eyes. Sure, it was bad writing, but he played the line so badly that it just made it that much worse. Shane Brolly as Kraven, leader of the vampire clan until Viktor’s appearance was fairly ridiculous, to tell the truth. In fact, the only actor — and character — that I really though much of was Lucien, leader of the werewolves, played by Michael Sheen. Not only did he get the only character in the film given any decent amount of personal backstory and motivation, but he was the only actor to really seem like he fit his part.

Special effects wise, the movie was decent for the most part, with a few sudden moments where it got so astoundingly bad that it surprised me (Celine’s sword-slash-and-floating-jump across the pool of water at the end [which can also be seen in the trailer — it’s the sequence that looks like it could be straight out of a video game] stands out in my mind). The soundtrack, both musically and just as effects, drove me nuts. Apparently the sound designers felt that the best way to make sure that something was interesting and intense was to make it loud, and then they decided that everything in the movie counted as interesting and intense.

So that’s Underworld — some definite promise and potential that was completely pissed away during its two hours on screen. A shame, really — in my minds eye, I can see the same elements creating a film that would have been well worth watching, but it just didn’t happen here.

Excluding OS X?

by

So I’m in the midst of getting my new machine all configured the way I like it, installing software, drivers, etc. I use a Microsoft Office Keyboard (that’s discontinued), so I hit Microsoft’s keyboard pages to download the software. As I was working my way through the download process (verify system requirements, choose your product, choose your OS, choose your language, and download), I was presented with these choices when choosing my operating system:

Mac OS 10.1 - 10.2.x (excluding OS X)

Anybody want to take a stab at explaining to me just what operating system Microsoft thinks I’m running on my Mac that has a version number equal to or greater than 10.0, and yet excludes OS X?