Leaf Raker

I don’t want to go into the discussion about the annoyances around the new “Social Music Network” Ping that was introduced by Apple with iTunes 10.

After installing iTunes 10 many users have, maybe not with full intend, switched Ping on. Since I have received a number of questions on how to opt out of Ping, or completely disable Ping, I thought I’ll take some screen-shots for this little step-by-step how-to guide.

There you go:

1.) In iTunes, select “View My Account …” in the “Store” menu:

2.) Your account information is now displayed in the main iTunes window. In the “Ping” section select “Turn Off”:

3.) In the confirmation dialog select “Turn Off”:

4.) Your account information should now display that Ping has been disabled and is turned off:

That should be all you need to do to turn off Ping.

Hope this was helpful!

OK, this one baffled me: One of the quicksilver functionalities I use the most is the opening of URLs.

I recently switched back from Safari to Firefox 3, something I do from time to time just to keep life interesting.

Even though I enabled the Firefox plugin in Quicksilver it didn’t index the Firefox bookmarks, because Firefox 3 stores the bookmarks in a format that Quicksilver can’t read. Fortunately the solution is simple:

First go to the “about:config”-page in your browser bar:

In the resulting page enter “bookmarks.autoExportHTML” to find the entry for “browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML”.

Now all you need to do is set the value for this preference to “true”.

From now on Firefox will, every time Firefox quits, write the bookmarks in html format in your preferences folder. Quicksilver will index this file (as long as the Firefox plugin in Quicksilver is enabled). You’re done!

I have to admit: When I first heard about the Genius function in iTunes 8 I thought “…when would I ever use that?”.

Today I listen to music at work, and 90% of the time I use the “Genius” to select the songs for me. There is just one problem – after a while it feels as if iTunes selects the same songs over and over again, even when seeded with different songs. So I tried to find a way to create a Genius playlist with songs that I’m not listening to all the time. Here is my solution:

Create a Smart Playlist to contain only the Genius songs that I have listened to a limited amount of time. This is how the conditions for this smart playlist could look like:

The number of play counts would obviously depend on your own iTunes library. For my library, with a playlist count of eight the smart playlist will contain approx. 75% of the songs in my Genius list, and only the once I have listened to less than eight times. Another approach would be to filter by “Last Played”, so the list has only songs that you haven’t listened to in a month or so.

Now all I need to do is listen to this Smart Playlist instead of the Genius (maybe on shuffle or through iTunes DJ). There you have it – seed Genius with a song of choice and only listen to the songs you haven’t listened to in a while.

Scott Bourne just released his newest project, a blog about storage and backup solutions.

As always – Scott’s stuff is well worth a read, so check it out here:

http://mydl.me/

I’ve seriously outgrown the capabilities of iPhoto since starting to take pictures not only of family vacation, but also trying to sell some pictures as Stock photos. I have taken about 5000 pictures within the last five month and can really feel how the organization of those pictures is slipping out of my hands.

After downloading the trial version of Lightroom I’m sure that this software would really help me with my postprocessing workflow before it falls into complete chaos. Too bad I can’t afford a full license right now, but maybe and with some luck I will win a licence over at the PhotoNetCast podcast?