tips

There is a secret to creating killer Smart Playlists in iTunes. You have to know what not to play. The best way to do that is with an “ignore list”. And I’m going to show you how to make one.

For several years now iTunes has given you the ability to use playlists themselves as parameters when building smart playlists. That means you can make a smart playlist that does (or does not) include another playlist. Why is this important? It’s important because — if you’re like me — you love to hear almost all of the music in your library, but there is a tremendous amount of stuff that you do not want to hear out of the blue.

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Here’s a little trick to help you keep your books from getting lost forever. If you’re like me, you get a ton of snail-mail spam, what we used to call “junk mail”. Lots and lots of companies — especially those concerned with getting your money to save the whales, the environment, the lives of endangered pets, etc. — put a few sheets of return address labels, with your name and address on them, in their pleas. (I think the theory is that you’ll feel guilty for using the labels without sending them a donation.) Instead of throwing them immediately into the trash, grab those return address labels and stick them on the inside covers of your books. It might not help you keep them on your shelves, but at least your friend will remember that it was stolen from your library.

Jim just showed me a bitchin’ cool Mac trick:

If you press Shift, the Apple (”command”) key, and the 4 key at the same time, it will change your mouse cursor into a targeting device. Then hit the space bar and your cursor will turn into a camera icon. Use the mouse to move the camera over any window and left-click. Bam! That will create a screen capture as a .png file on your desktop.

Lifehacker posted an article today about VidToMP3.com, a site which will convert any online video to mp3 format for you for free. How cool is that? Now there’s finally a way to get the soundtracks to Planet Unicorn and Show Me Your Genitals on your iPod. Radical.

A few weeks ago I saw an image on Chris Pearson’s Pearsonified that I just loved. He had taken a photo of something — I can’t remember what it was — and made it look like an old-fashioned Polaroid. “What a great idea!” I thought. Surely I can figure out how to do that in Photoshop. And I did. So now I’ll share.

How to Create a Polaroid Using Photoshop in 10 Simple Steps

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If you’re sitting there with a new computer and scratching your head trying to figure out how to get all your music from your iPod and iTunes library on your old computer, scratch no longer! This is how you do it.

Update: And if you want to get your playlists on your new computer, you have to do this.

And you should also read this tip on Keeping iTunes Organized!

File this under “Things I Can’t Remember How I Learned but Have Often Been Handy to Know”:

Bananas like the weather
At the tropical equator
So never ever put one
In the refrigerator.

Scriptygoddess is another site dedicated to showing / teaching tips and tricks about MovableType. There are some really good ones there. Check ‘em out!

[The girlie matters] has a cool collection of MovableType tips and tricks.

Sadly, she is another blogger that for some reason doesn’t ping weblogs.com when she updates. I wish *everyone* with a blog would ping … it would make using blogTracker so much simpler …