Rainforest Pyramid, originally uploaded by ahknight.

One of a set of photos I recently uploaded to Flickr from my trip to Galveston (I’m using Flickr because I don’t want to pay the bandwidth costs of hosting them myself, of course).

A while ago I read a tip somewhere about how to make a few smart playlists work with each other to make a mix of music for a smaller iPod. After thinking for a short time I realized I could make a perfect little ever-changing radio station out of iTunes with a similar methodology. Start by considering what makes a good radio station (I know, it’s been a while…):

• Your favorite music.
• A balance of new and old music.
• A moderate variety. You want to hear some songs repeatedly, but not at close intervals.
• New old music. Don’t just play the same old songs, cycle them in and out.
• Old new music. If a newer song is really good, keep it in rotation as an old song.

iTunes has a way to handle all of this. The core here is that you’re going to have to rate all of your music for this to work. Unrated music will not make it into rotation. It doesn’t have to be accurate right now. You can go find a favorite artist and mark all the tracks as fives or find all your audio books and mark them twos or something. Just get some ratings in. As your ratings change, so will the station.

Some folks just aren’t getting the idea behind the Mac mini. A shame, that, because this product is going to take over and help make switchers out of a good chunk of PC users, despite what some may think. So far it seems that the largest complaint about the Mac mini is the lack of a keyboard, mouse, and monitor.

You know, those things it was intentionally designed around not including.

So since he’s the only person that I can find that’s posted a semi-coherent rant about this view (though I’ve seen it elsewhere in bits and spurts) I’ll sift through Bill’s issues with the Mac mini and see what clarity can be brought to this.

No, this isn’t about using Disk Utility to partition it and break it, this is about partitioning it and keeping the iPod’s functionality intact. Useful for those with 40GB of iPod and 25GB of music…

It goes without saying this is not something Apple intended a music player for, so if you break your toy you’re on your own. Apple’s iPod Firmware Updater program can usually restore the iPod back to its former self but reader beware: you may kill your little friend in the process. You have been warned, and since this is merely an educational guide I will take absolutely no responsibility if this fails to work for you even if you follow the directions perfectly.

So we’re in about the third year of Mac OS X now and there’s one thing I’ve not done in this entire time: actually looked at that “other” standard palette: the color palette. I’ve used it to pick colors for various things and gone through the tabs to use the different methods, but I’ve not actually looked at the panel (like I did the font panel) since it came out. Big mistake. Huge. This thing is awesome.

One more thing to do with an iPod: enhance your clock radio.

I got my iPod for music during times I’m away from my computer and for storage for times I’m running out, but there’s always new uses. I picked up an iTrip at the Apple Store in town recently and it works great in the car, but it also makes my clock radio worth using again; I stopped listening to the radio because of commercials, but since I own about 300 hours of my own music I decided to use it.

• I first synched the clock radio to that of the iPod (which is set by the computer, which is set by an NTP server) and then I set the radio to the iTrip frequency.

I tried to use the outline CSS property so as to not disturb layouts, but my copies of Mozilla and Chimera did not support it, so I’ll leave that out for now and keep using border for borders.