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.

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.

Using a Microsoft keyboard with a MacBook is possible but has one major drawback: The “Option” and “Command”-keys are exchanged and called “Windows” and “Alt”-keys.

Fortunately swapping the keys so that the “Command” and “Option”-keys are in the same location like on an Apple keyboard is very simple:

1. Open your “System Preferences”
2. Select “Keyboard & Mouse”
3. Select the “Keyboard”-tab
4. Click on “Modifier Keys…”

In the resulting dialog map the Option Key to “Command” and vice versa. This is a screenshot made with Tiger, the dialog in Leopard looks a little bit different:

Voila – that’s it. Now the Microsoft keyboard should behave just like an Apple keyboard.

Now, for one additional problem (if you are still using Tiger or before):

I am using my MacBook Pro in my office, so I’m frequently connecting and disconnecting my keyboard. Since my external keyboard is an ergonomic keyboard with Microsoft keys I would have to change those settings each and every time I connect or disconnect the keyboard. This is only the case if you’re still using Tiger or before, because in Leopard you can set the keys for each keyboard type as shown in this screenshot: Keyboard settings in Leopard

One solution is an AppleScript, which I found on the following website:

Change keyboard modifier keys automatically on OSX with Applescript

Now I have a Quicksilver Trigger to execute this Applescript, which makes the swapping of the “Command” and “Option”-keys quick and painless!