For the large number of people that use iTunes as a media library, I’m baffled to hear how few people actually use the rating feature. To help people see the benefit, I thought I’d write a little on how I’ve implemented smart playlists, many of which are based on ratings. It’s important to note that you don’t necessarily have to rate your entire library. I’ll first discuss my rating structure:
- 5 stars: my favorite songs at the given moment - these are usually ones that I could listen to over and over again
- 4 stars: great songs
- 3 stars: good songs
- 2 stars: mediocre songs - ones that I want to hear infrequently
- 1 star: songs that I don’t have any interest in listening to again, or tracks that I wouldn’t want placed into a music mix, like a stand-up comedian or skit from Dr. Dre’s The Chronic.
- 0 stars: not rated - doesn’t mean I don’t want to listen to it, but I just haven’t listened to it at all or enough to rate it
When I first started rating my music, my rating spectrum was much more symmetrical. I quickly realized that I needed more variation for the music that I liked, and I’ve been using this modified rating structure since. After the break, I’ll discuss some smart playlists I’ve created. Read more…
Posted on January 30th, 2008 by brian
Filed under: Music | No Comments »
Last summer, I setup my HP DeskJet 930C printer to my linux server running Fedora 7. I used the included CUPS server to share the printer with the rest of my network, including a Windows XP box, and two Macs running Leopard. It was working great until a few months ago when printing just stopped working from all of the network hosts. From the Windows machine, the queue window now had “access denied, failed to connect” within the title bar. Who knows what caused all of this, maybe a scheduled yum update or radiation from a meteor shower. Not knowing why it suddenly broke, I started tweaking settings in CUPS and Samba, but nothing worked. I used yum to upgrade to Fedora 8, but CUPS alone still didn’t work.
I did some searching and found this guide which describes hplip, a tool developed by HP for linux and their printers. The tool seemed to be installed but gave me an error that the GUI was missing. I had to run the following as root to install the necessities:
yum install hplip-gui PyQt
Then, as root, I ran hp-setup. This will take you through setting up the printer. Mine was already listed, so I actually ran hp-toolbox and deleted the existing one. Then I ran hp-setup again and recreated it with the desired settings. After that the printer was accessible from the Macs!
To get it accessible in Windows, I just had to install Bonjour for Windows (from Apple). Then the Bonjour Printer Wizard found the printer. The first time through I tried the latest HP driver for Windows that I had installed, but that didn’t work. Doubtful that it would make a difference, I tried the Generic Postscript driver and it actually worked! So now my network printer is working again.
I have a feeling that Fedora 8 has better Bonjour support (if Fedora 7 had any), so that could also be part of the solution. Hopefully this experience helps someone else!
Posted on January 24th, 2008 by brian
Filed under: Tech | No Comments »
For the large number of people that use iTunes as a media library, I’m baffled to hear how few people actually use the rating feature. To help people see the benefit, I thought I’d write a little on how I’ve implemented smart playlists, many of which are based on ratings. It’s important to note that you don’t necessarily have to rate your entire library. I’ll first discuss my rating structure:
