More iTunes stuff:

One of the problems with this is keeping your music collection interesting. You’ll want to hear newer songs more often than older ones, yet at the same time you’ll want to make sure that the old music doesn’t get lost. You want to hear your favourite songs slightly more often than everything else, but you don’t want to keep listening to the same old tracks over and over again. As such you need to make sure your playlists have a good degree of variety as well as and a high churn rate.

The way to achieve this is by utilising smart playlists, however it can be quite difficult getting the right balance.

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I do some of what this guy recommends, but I generally don't have playlists based on other playlists.

Huh. I just leave my iPod on shuffle all the time.

I do that some of the time. But I have a shitload of songs and I generally want to hear my favorite and/or newly added songs more often than randomly selected songs.

Crap. I had a solution for one of Theo's problems, but then I rememberd that iTunes is scriptable only on a Mac.

but you don’t want to keep listening to the same old tracks over and over again.

Sure you do.

Huh. I just leave my iPod on shuffle all the time.

Me too.

Sure you do.

Also me.

Though I've become a little obsessed with my unheard songs smart playlist and whittling that number down. But there is a reason why some of those songs remain unheard.

That dude has too much free time to mess around with iTunes.

I may have a little too much free time myself, but I never listen to the whole thing on shuffle. I have all my music on there, and I don't like every track. Sometimes there are moods. Sometimes I want to listen to podcasts, sometimes it's music I adore, sometimes it's music about breakups...that sort of stuff. I've never been in the mood for "anything, honest."

My problem with shuffle is that I tend to listen to my iPod when i am on the move and want to listen to something upbeat. Probably about 60% of my music is not upbeat, so there's a lot of skipping. I do have a couple of playlists of more upbeat songs but I had to do them manually (and rarely think to update them), because I find the genres assigned are unreliable and all of one of my albums has uploaded with the bpm info included.

Though I've become a little obsessed with my unheard songs smart playlist and whittling that number down.

Recently I made a smart playlist of all my four-or-more star songs that I had yet to play this year. I think there was about 800. It was fun whittling that number down to zero over the course of a week....

eta: I've never messed with the BPM stuff. Seemed like way too much work, even for me. I did download a program that enabled you to calculate the BPM of a song by tapping out the beats on the spacebar, but I've never used it. It would be cool to be able to do smart playlists based on BPM, though....

If you buy something high-tech, shouldn't you be given the source-code, so you're not subject to the whims of the vendor? The UK thinks so, at least when it comes to figher planes.

The UK has warned America that it will cancel its £12bn order for the Joint Strike Fighter if the US does not hand over full access to the computer software code that controls the jets.

Lord Drayson, minister for defence procurement, told the The Daily Telegraph that the planes were useless without control of the software as they could effectively be "switched off" by the Americans without warning.

"We do expect this technology transfer to take place. But if it does not take place we will not be able to purchase these aircraft," said Lord Drayson.

The problem stems from strict US guidelines on the transfer of technology to other countries. Under current rules any British requests for the use of US technology can take 20 days to go through, obviously limiting the usefulness of a jet strike force.

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