- Why Quicksilver is *slowing* me down. - http://tinyurl.com/376zyo #
- Angry I loaded up Obama’s speech the second he finished. *Sigh.* That’s what YouTube is for, tomorrow, I guess. #
- @leolaporte I think we’ll all starting to see who she is. Watch the first few minutes of this video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=EhCikLeXb7c #
- Safari on the touch needs adblock. #
Monthly Archive for February, 2008
- I love Questionable Content (questionablecontent.net) this week. Best comic ever. #
- Near the top of my list of things I hate doing - writing letters to college admissions offices or financial aid offices. #
- It’s not like they’re not helpful. They’re super helpful. I just feel like I’m being a bother. #
- Time Machine is backing up 100 megs of stuff. What the heck did I do in the last hour? Nothing that big… #
- Harvard’s website hacked and leaked on bittorrent? I don’t even know how I feel about that. http://tinyurl.com/3b6a3q #
- Is it bad that I absolutely refuse to wear earbuds? I might look like a dork, but I’m a happy dork with good sound quality. #
- Barack Obama is your new bicycle. No, really. http://barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com/ #
- Clinton too!? http://hillaryclintonisyournewbicycle.com/ #
- John McCain - http://johnmccainisyournewbicycle.com/ Ron Paul - http://ronpaulisyournewbicycle.com/ #
- Just listened to Merlin’s talk about Time & Attention. http://tinyurl.com/3y9d9o #
- I’m thinking of switching from Camino to Safari… Ekk. #
- What’s your browser of choice on the Mac? #
One of my heroes, Merlin Mann, did a talk at Macworld called “Living with Data“. Although I was disappointed that it didn’t deal with my favorite second officer of the USS Enterprise, I enjoyed it. It’s long, but very entertaining. As I watched it last night, I found myself inspired.
I thought my personal productivity system was air-tight. I’ve been getting my tasks done - or so I’ve thought. But as I listened to Merlin’s talk, one point in particular resinated with me.
At 25:12 in, Merlin asks, “Who gets access now?” That is, who will I let interrupt me as I’m working? I looked around my desktop. Gmail notifier, Twitterrific, and Adium are constantly demanding my attention. I’m changing my use of these applications. I’ve decided to only use Adium when I’m actually open for conversation or have to post where I am, I’m axing Twitterrific in favor of the canonical twitter website, and I’ll check my email twice a day or so.
And then I got to thinking about Quicksilver. I love Quicksilver; it’s an application launcher on steroids. One of the plugins I use for Quicksilver is the Camino Bookmarks plugin. I can evoke Quicksilver using my keyboard shortcut (command + enter), type the first few letters of any website I’ve bookmarked, and press return to load that page. For example:
f - facebook
g - gmail
r - google reader
d - digg
p - pownce
Because those time-suck websites are so easily accessed, I go to them far too often. My new productivity experiment is to disable the Camino bookmarks feature of Quicksilver and see how much of my life I get back. Instead, I’ll check those sites in the morning, at night, and maybe when I have a free moment at school.
It’s amazing to realize that the tool you appreciate the most to save time is what’s actually causing you to habitually waste it.
- I have an idea! How about Microsoft Office 2008 obeys my Spaces preferences? What a great idea! Both Microsoft and Apple should hire me. #
- Even if they cut the prices to like, 90% off, who would buy an HD-DVD player? #
- Okay… the Webkit nightly builds are speedy. #
- Today’s TWiT was the absolute best TWiT… ever! I really enjoyed it. #
- If these Webkit improvements can be compiled into the ARM version of Safari… watch out. iPhones and iPod touches will fly through the web. #
- @cspenn Little bit of a buzz sound introduced 8 minutes into today’s show. #
- Just lost a crapton of data in Word. Ounch #
- @ronaldl79 I haven’t seen Obama play the race card. Has he? #
- My thoughts on cleaning the cruft from your iTunes Library - http://tinyurl.com/32mwq6 #
I’m the proud owner of a shiny new iPod Touch. It’s a considerable upgrade from my previous portable music player - a 6GB iPod mini with a broken headphone port. It served me well as a car iPod, though.
The iPod Touch is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a wonderful media player and an even better Internet and email device. But, when you’re looking at your iTunes library on its superb screen, you realize just how badly your ID3 tags and album art are.
I spent a large part of this holiday (happy President’s Day!) cleaning up the cruft from years of accumulating music. Luckily, there are some great pieces of software on the Mac and web services to do this.
- iEatBrainz (Freeware) - The Mac OS X client of MusicBrainz analyzes any tracks you feed it and compares its musical ‘fingerprint’ with a known database.
- Album Art Thingy (Shareware) - This inexpensive app looks up your currently playing track on Amazon.com and tries to find artwork. It does lyrics, too.
- Amazon.com (Service) - Whatever Album Art Thingy doesn’t get, you can get yourself by searching the MP3 store.
- Last.fm (Service) - This social network site helps see if you’ve done your ID3 tags right.
It’s really worth it to clean up the cruft from your iTunes library. You’ll not only delete music you don’t like anymore, but you’ll have a greater appreciation for the music you do like. The album art browsing in iTunes, Front Row, and an iPod is really great looking, too.
Good luck, and be sure to share your experience in the comments.
- You know who should be a Superdelegate? Me. That’s right, me. #
- Why can’t I make a smart playlist of music without album art? Apple! #
- Spend an entire day fixing ID3 tags and you’ll never "just import" something again. #
- The thing that kills me is that you can only listen to songs back in realtime, one at a time… let’s change that. #
- I’m going to Rick Roll you… except, this is Rick Astley’s awesome song, Sleeping, from 2001. It’s technotastic - http://tinyurl.com/248pqy #
- I hope there’s a good TWiT this week. #
- Brian Eno’s album, Apollo, is really nice. #
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