Having had my little Sony MP3 player for a week now it’s just reminded me of the many failings of listening to tunes on any digital platform. Not even mentioning the lack of any tactile feedback from these devices, why does the software make it so hard to do what you want, which is just listen to the tunes you love?

Having bounced around from Winamp to Musicmatch and back, then onto XMMS and finally to a nasty hack I cobbled together myself, I still (to quote those noisy irishmen) haven’t found what I’m looking for…

Fine grained control of which tracks you like and which ones you don’t. A rating of one to five just doesn’t cut it anymore. (Well not for me…)

A random playback mode uses the preference data intelligently, plus details of when you played things to give a truly useful random play mode. (No more Scooter or thrash metal as you’re about to turn in…)

Totally transparent downloading of album and single art and lyrics, don’t keep asking me, just do it!

If you know of any tools out there that fit the bill then let me know…

Just got myself one of these. 2Gb, dinky little colour lcd, USB charging. 30 hours on a full charge and about the size of a pack of gum. I would use my mobile phone as an mp3 player but I don’t want the headphone cable acting as a waveguide for the radio signal and piping it straight in my lugholes…

The only downside is that it’s not a true drag and drop usb device. You’re forced to use Sonys bastard SonicStage software. If I’d realised that at the time I probably would have gone for the equivalent Phillips model. There is a way round it, but I’m not that brave…

I guess the lesson for the day is mea culpa. But that’s what you get when you’re a sucker for Sony style. Damnit they get me every time.

As I mentioned a few days ago I aggregated all my digital photos into one place recently. One part of the task involved connecting a bunch of hard drives one at a time and scanning them for the files I wanted. While this wasn’t a problem for the old Windows disks I had lying around, I was stumped for an answer to the Linux disks for a while.

A long time ago I used a tool called Explore2fs that let me get at linux disks from windows, but that was then, and it was fairly primitive, so I went in search of something more up to date…

Which was when I discovered Ext2 IFS (catchy name) which is an altogether slicker bit of software. It works in the background giving you access to linux partitions through any bit of windows software. They just look like standard windows disks (C: D: E: etc…) Clever stuff, and just what I needed.

On the odd occasion I do want to see carefully targeted messages from some of the companies that I deal with, yet at the same time don’t want to be bothered for evermore or run the risk of having my address passed around to other companies, I take advantage of disposable email…

Spamgourmet.com is my provider of choice for this service (There are plenty of others just a search away, but I can only vouch for the one I’ve been using for years.) The home page isn’t exactly web2.0 but it does the job…

Once you’ve created an account that points at your main mail address, you’re free to use any email address of the form:-

<unique-identifier.x.username>@spamgourmet.com

Where x is the maximum number of emails you want to receive from that unique address.

You can hand these out to anyone safe in the knowledge that once the sender hits the allotted number of allowed messages at the individual address, Spamgourmet will eat any further ones without troubling you. Handy, huh?

As you might be able to tell I’m quite taken with the Google suite of online apps. Gradually since starting to use Gmail I’ve noticed that I’m using my inbox more like a to-do list than just a repository for my incoming email. Combined with a couple of other free online apps you can turn it into a useful personal organiser.

In order to make this work though, you need to be disciplined in keeping your inbox empty… (I was put onto this way of thinking by way of two posts, the first from ZenHabits, and the second from Tim Ferris who writes a lot of sense…) Inboxes full of mail make me shudder, you know who you are…

In addition to acting on incoming mail promptly, I use the Google calendar to mail me about things I really need to do (as well as sending me texts to let me know and appointment is imminent).

The final weapon in the arsenal is Hasslebot. This is great for irregular reminders. If you want to be reminded to call someone every few weeks, but you don’t want it to appear too regimented you can get Hasslebot to mail you roughly every 14 days. And the key word there is roughly. Because of that you’ll seem spontaneous, just don’t let them know your secret…

The neat thing about getting these reminders thru your inbox is once you get into the mind set of having an empty inbox it provides a real incentive to act on the reminders you receive in order to have the warm fuzzy feeling you get from knowing where your towel is…

Give it a go for a week, see if it works for you and let me know how you get on.