Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

I use my nano mainly to listen to podcasts. For various reasons that aren’t important here, I prefer to download them as files directly from their sites, rather than from the iTunes Store.

I use a smart playlist to transfer the latest ones to the iPod. I couldn’t figure out a way to have that playlist know that I’d already listened to enough of a particular podcast on the iPod that I no longer wanted it to sync to it.

Then I decided to use the ratings stars. When I’m on the go and I decide I’m done with a track and don’t want it on the iPod any more, I rate it with three stars. Next time I sync those three stars appear on the Mac, and the next sync takes the track off the iPod because of the rule in the screenshot above.

There’s probably a more elegant solution than this that I’m just not seeing. This works for now. Any suggestions?

I just installed this Service on the Mac and selected a lengthy article of text and used the service to create a new contact.

The new contact appeared in Address Book as No Name and the notes field was filled with the text. This could be a great way to take your reading material with you and access it (and edit it) using the iPod Touch.

That’s not its primary purpose of course. To quote the developers:

ContactCreator is a service that will take whatever text you have selected and make an contact in your AddressBook from it. If it’s only one word you have selected, it will automagically dump the word in the first name field of your new contact. If it’s two words, it will automagically dump the two words in the first and last name fields of your new contact. If it’s more than two, it will dump the whole lot in the Notes field of your new contact (which doesn’t have a name). It will also guess that word with an ‘@’ symbol in them are email addresses.

ContactCreator.service 1.2 software download - Mac OS X - VersionTracker

The “So What” is that up until very recently I was continually bugged every time I accessed the Open With menu because there were two entries each for QuickTime, Safari and TextEdit.

After a lot of Googling and Foruming I found that the fix was to open terminal and enter the command:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework
/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister
-kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

…All as one line of course. Please don’t try this and then blame me if something goes amiss. It just happened to have worked perfectly for me, so I wanted to pass it on.