Leaf Raker

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?

Jesse Grosjean of Hog Bay Software just released an update to his excellent personal productivity tool TaskPaper, bringing it up to version 2.0.
Some of the improvements over the previous version are better searching, some improvements to the user interface and the introduction of themes.

As mentioned in an earlier posts, I like TaskPaper a lot because it uses just enough functionality to the editing of plain text files to make it a powerful tool without restricting the user. This is important to me, since I don’t want a productivity tool to tell me how to organize my life.

TaskPaper costs $29.95 and is available from Hob Bay Software.

I like most of the new features in Leopard (yes, I even like the translucent menu bar!), but there are as always small annoyances.

One of those annoyances is that the printer application stays open and in the dock after printing.

Fortunately there is an easy solution:
Next time you print something just right-click and select “Auto Quit” from the menu:

Voila - now the printer application will quit after the job is done.