Let’s say you want to create a smart playlist in iTunes that will contain the 25 highest-rated Beatles or Bob Dylan songs that you haven’t heard in a while. That would be pretty cool, right? It’s not that simple, but it can be done. I’ll show you how.

The main roadblock you’re facing is that iTunes only gives you two ways of restricting / selecting songs. You can build a smart playlist based on songs that meet all of your criteria or one based on songs that meet any of your criteria. This any / all option really puts you in a corner. First I’ll explain why, and then I’ll show you how to fix it.

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Awesome LifeHacker DOS trick: Give a folder its very own drive letter.

My mom just sent me the following text message:

Attempts to contact my mom via her cell phone have failed. Unfortunately even if I could get her on the phone, the only advice I could give her — after over a decade of working in the computer industry — is to maybe try to shake the liquid out and blow-dry it.

When the revolution comes and the computers try to squash humanity out of existence, hopefully some of us will remember their Achilles’ heel: ill-placed cups of coffee.

A friend of mine sent me a link to an iTunes song he thought I’d like. Of course I was unable to open it because it came delivered as an attachment. (Cue scary music.) Microsoft thinks that I can’t possibly be trusted to not open some flesh-eating virus, so by default Outlook blocks everything. It’s usually one of the first things I “fix” when I get a new computer. Here’s how to do it …

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Zeldman does a spectacular job explaining why I hate when people use Word as their email editor.

A couple of weeks ago I picked up a great linen shirt at Old Navy. It’s so great, in fact, that today I thought I’d go to the website and grab a couple more of them. Alas, I cannot. Their website is broken. This is a multi-million dollar company and they’re currently not able to sell anything online because of a database error. Bummer for them.

I bought a CD today. It was a little bit strange. I can’t remember the last time I bought an actual compact disc. I’m sure this isn’t the first one I’ve bought since I moved to LA seven years ago, but I know that since I got my iPod the number of CDs I’ve purchased is in the single digits. That is somewhat incredible.

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From the Department of Inexplicable Corporate Decisions: Pocket PC integration discontinued with Microsoft Money 2007.

Looking for a way to clear some of your computer’s clutter? Getting rid of empty directories is a good start. I was looking for a file and realized that my machine was spending a long time searching through folders that I knew had nothing in them. A quick Google search returned a handy DOS trick to zap them all. It took me about one minute to delete just over two thousand empty folders. There’s nothing like a little command-line scripting to get something done.

We’re running a Belkin Wireless G router in my office. I had to rummage in my garage for a few old wireless USB dongles, but it’s much nicer than having to string CAT-5 all over the place. (I hate cables.) Some of us were suffering deadly latency and frequently-dropped connections, which was annoying as hell. I flashed the firmware and tweaked every setting on the thing, but the problem persisted.

Then I had lunch with a friend this week and he suggested that I switch the router from Channel 11, which I had thought was the best, to Channel 6, which is actually the strongest. Blam-o! Now we all have a much stronger signal and no drops. Brilliant.

All three of the televisions in my house are connected to either a TiVo box or a DirecTV box. Both of these systems give me the option of displaying a “guide” in a grid right on the screen. If I want to see what else I can watch, I click to the guide and browse until I find something I like. That way I can search all I want without changing channels and stopping whatever is currently being shown from being recorded. I love this feature.

My girlfriend fiancée hates it. When she is watching TV she never uses the guide. She just punches the code for E! or VH1 and goes right to the channel. This bothers me both because she sometimes stops recording something by changing channels and also because it just feels inefficient. Why not just use the guide?

I can’t really get upset about it, though, because her method is the same one I use to read my blogs. I just can’t seem to get into feeds. RSS is certainly cool and I dig the ability to subscribe to the feeds of the sites I like. But I never do. I have a bookmark folder in FireFox called “Blogs” and that’s where I save the links of my favorite online reads. About once a day I scroll to the (incredibly cool) “Open All in Tabs” link in that bookmark folder and pop open all my blogs at once. This is definitely less efficient than using an RSS reader — or the system included with Firefox — and only checking the blogs which have been updated recently. Why in the world do I do it this way?

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A week or so ago I found a link to the Griffin Mirrored Chrome Finish iPod case on Dan’s site. Anything that beautiful must be mine. I ordered one immediately and it arrived last night. The previous case I had — Agent18’s video-shield — was awesome, to be sure. After a year and a quarter, though, it had seen better days. It’s a testament to Agent18’s quality that my iPod doesn’t have a scratch on it. But my new chrome one is just rockin’ cool. Sweet.

The schedule for the University of Florida 2007 football season has been published. You can find it at the University Athletic Association website. They even give you the ability to import the schedule directly into Outlook!

It took me a few minutes to find it, of course. There is just a lot of stuff cluttering the site … Y’know … all about how we won the National Championship in basketball last year, and then the BCS Championship in football this year, and then the National Championship in basketball again this year.

The feature I’d most like to see added to iTunes “smart playlist” building is the ability to exclude songs based on metadata. I like to listen to music that I haven’t heard in a long time and / or that I haven’t heard very often. The only problem is that when I choose to select songs based on the criteria “Least Often Played”, iTunes annoyingly adds its own sub-sort based on Artist. That means that my 50-track “smart” playlist will include, for example, 25 songs by Bruce Springsteen. That doesn’t give me much randomness and it drives me crazy.

What I should be able to do is create a “Recently Played” playlist (or use the existing one) and add a limiting factor to a separate playlist like this:

Artist is not in the playlist “Recently Played”.

That is what I’d really like.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine asked me to build a WordPress plugin to display a Gunning-Fog analysis on his blog. The math part was pretty easy stuff. I was having a borch of a time getting the plugin to count syllables, so I hunted through Google and found someone else had written a pretty good function to do that. I squished it all together and it seems to be working pretty good.

You can download the plugin here and see it in action here.