Archive for December, 2004

Make a Best of 2004 iTunes Smart Playlist

Friday, December 31st, 2004

With all the top 10 lists around, it only seems appropriate that iTunes should make a personal one for you.
How to Make a ‘Best of the Year’ Smart Playlist

In iTunes, choose File, New Smart Playlist…
Under Match the following condition choose “Last Played” “is in the range” “1/1/04″ to “12/31/04″
Limit to 10 songs, or whatever your [...]

Priorities

Thursday, December 30th, 2004

I realize numbers can become very abstract. Large numbers are thrown around on the news for things like government budgets and corporate fraud, but it’s true meaning is never quite understood. They all just get thrown in the mental category of “big” and then we go back to making pop tarts.
Numbers of the [...]

Ripesense = Purchasing Fruit for Morons

Wednesday, December 29th, 2004

I’ve seen Ripesense on a number of blogs as an example of a cool technology application, but it just seems like a complete waste to me. Do you really need technology to save you from the monumental effort of squeezing a pear to see if it’s ripe? Does everything we buy have to [...]

Newsfire, David Watanabe and the Advantages of Public Beta Development

Tuesday, December 28th, 2004

I’ve been using NewsFire for quite a while, despite my reservations for existing RSS reader implementations. NewsFire, an RSS reader for Mac OS X, wins me over by being simple enough in it’s goals to be useful. It’s a perfect example of how a tool targeted at a specific activity can be much [...]

Turn Your Heat Up To 77º F

Wednesday, December 15th, 2004

I grew up in a house that was almost always colder than I was comfortable with in the name of keeping the heating bill down. I’m certainly a fan of energy conservation, but now you have a legitimate reasons to keep your home and workplace well heated.
A Cornell study on performance and temperature “found [...]

Obvious Diversion Album of the Year: Heroes to Zeros by The Beta Band

Tuesday, December 14th, 2004

Music reviews on blogs are pretty useless. Unless you run a site dedicated to seeking out new tunes (a la Largehearted Boy), your music reviews are rightfully ignored by those who don’t already know the band mentioned in the subject line and met with supportive “rah-rah” style comments by those who do. So, [...]

Typo or iPod Mini Upgrade Confirmed?

Tuesday, December 14th, 2004

I scanned the following table from the January 2005 edition of MacWorld, page 16. They printed a small table of all the available iPod editions, but the iPod mini is listed at 5GB rather than the current 4GB.

Is this just a typo or did MacWorld confirm what we all suspect is coming in January?

My Dear Mr. President Letter

Friday, December 10th, 2004

It looks like my letter was selected for the front page of the McSweeney’s feature Dear Mr. President Letters. I wrote it months ago, but just now discovered it was used. There’s a ton of them up there, many quite good. Here’s mine:

Dear Mr. President,
How is it that you cannot find work [...]

The Toyota PM is Real

Wednesday, December 8th, 2004

There’s probably only one in the world, but the Toyota PM is actually real or real enough for what looks like an auto show. When I posted about Toyota’s concept sketches, I honestly didn’t expect them to make a physical prototype. I’m sure it’s just for show, but I can dream. I’m [...]

Make Mail.app Always Send Windows Friendly Attatchments

Wednesday, December 8th, 2004

Mail.app sends attached files in a way that is not entirely friendly to Windows users and, as a result, Windows users often see an extra file that they can do nothing with. This leads to confusion and seeding confusion via email doesn’t make you look good and doesn’t make your Mac look good. [...]