Smart Playlists are nifty
I always start out wanting to catalog the hell out of things, and then gradually taper off. Dave, for instance, showed me yesterday that if you have all the actors entered into the movies in your Delicious Library then you can do a search for ‘Christian Bale’ and see what movies you own that he’s in (side note: only A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Batman Begins, American Psycho and Equilibrium? For shame!).
I’ve been trying to get back into the ‘Using nifty programs and such’ mode, which included reading Lifehacker again (I generally scroll through their GTD and productivity posts, but there are some gems). The most recent podcast linked to the Cranking Widgets Blog, which has a great piece on using smart playlists to fill your iPhone with new music each time you sync.
I had a basic version of this playlist; actually, I think I still do, though I haven’t used it in a while. It was ’50 songs that I’ve never listened to,’ to which I really need to add the ‘Skipped less than 3 times’ clause because I manually had to remove stuff I didn’t want to listen to. It also means I need to get back into the habit of using genres, at least for Comedy and Interview (additionally, I have to finish Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything).
Of course my iPod is 30 gigs, which is enough space for all my music, and by the time I get an iPhone they’ll hopefully have a larger capacity (and be cheaper, pretty please?), but smart playlists have always been one of those instances where I understand their power but have never bothered to harness it.
