White’s of Henry Lane

My iPod is an aging 2nd gen 20G model I bought dirt-cheap from an aquaintance who is a first-adopter if there ever was one. I’ve been using this thing non-stop in the years I’ve owned it, and a result my library had grown a lot of cruft. Thanks to AllOfMP3, my iTunes library recently surpassed my iPod’s capacity. I started noticing that when I synched, I wouldn’t get all the tracks in albums, or odd stuff would start creeping on like operas or bits of Christmas music, both of which I keep off my iPod.

Last night I got sick of this state of affairs. I made playlists for each genre of music I wanted on my iPod, and then hand picked exactly what albums I wanted on there. I deliberately selected albums that hadn’t seen heavy rotation for whatever reason, and omitted stuff I had become sick of. All told, I moved about 2.5G of music on to my iPod.

This hardly qualifies as a hack, but wow: I never would have thought such a simple, common sense process could increase my enjoyment of my iPod so much. I’ve been using the incredible Pod Player to listen to these hidden gems all day. I’ve even caught myself stopping to give a closer listen to tracks, or replaying tracks. Usually by about now I’ve killed Pod Player and am listening to Creation Steppin’ or Ragga Jungle with Media Player Classic. Instead, I have a whole new love for my iPod, and my library.

Brendon at the Slacker Manager has very kindly linked up my GMail Journal post. (As has Lifehacker. Its exciting when your writing grows legs.)

Apparently Exchange doesn’t play nice with appending “+whatever” to your username. If you’re on an Exchange server, you could borrow a method I’ve used at a few of my employers to simplify auto-sorting mail. We prepend the subjects of messages with the docket number of the project to which the mail refers. So if you want to tell me about new documents for a project with the docket AAA 001, your mail would have the subject “[AAA001] New documentation on server”. I would have a rule that automagically sorts that to my AAA001 folder, and depending on the urgency of the project either removes the unread flag, or notifies me your message arrived.

You could set up your journal in Outlook by replacing that docket number with your journal categories. You could even use a tool like AutoHotKeys to create shortcuts that are expanded for you if you got sick of typing the journal entry categories.

I don’t know enough about advanced Outlook to come up with anything more sophisticated than this, but sometimes there’s beauty in simplicity.

Incidentally, if your company hasn’t picked up on something like the docket number tags, and you communicate primarily by email, do everyone a favour and get this system in place.

Back when I still had a Mac, I played around a bit with the Humane Text service. This is a program that converts selections formatted in Markdown to HTML.

(Markdown, if you can’t be bothered to follow the link above, is a human-readable markup inspired by how people “markup” text in plaintext emails.)

I found this particularly useful when I was coding sites, and we’d got to the interminable dump-text-into-templates phase.

I hadn’t found any equivalent for Windows until I was pointed to this post at this is sippey.

Inspired, I hacked together a batch file which I documented in the comments thread. I’ll share this whole process with you here, though.

Install Cygwin, making sure you get perl. Then create a batch file with the following text:

@echo off

C:\cygwin\bin\getclip.exe | C:\cygwin\bin\perl.exe C:\cygwin\home{usr}\bin\Markdown.pl | C:\cygwin\bin\perl.exe C:\cygwin\home{usr}\bin\Smartypants.pl | C:\cygwin\bin\putclip.exe

That second bit is one long line. Edit paths as necessary.

Now, copy a section of markup source, and run this batch file. The contents of your clipboard will be converted into HTML!

Next step: use AutoHotKey to convert a selection in-place, much like the behaviour of the Humane Text service.