In the Unix/BSD/Linux/Apple command line world, you are limited by your login as to what you can do. Unless you log in as root, in which case you can do anything. Logging in as root is considered dangerous because you can really mess things up - especially if you forget you're actually logged in as root. But sometimes you need the unlimited power of the root user.

'sudo' is something you preceed a command with if you want to execute just that one command as root, reducing the chance of you screwing up.

Prophylactic Simon Sez. Yup. Geeky.

Question: Lately, whenever I plug in my flaah drive, all my music files start loading to it automatically! A screen pops up when I plug it in that asks me if I want it to automatically perform a function with Media player, and I always click "Take No Action" but the little bastards start streaming over to the flash drive anyway.

Can someone help me make the madness STOP?

You might open up Media Player and go to the 'Tools' menu and select 'Options...' That will bring up the dialog of many choices. Select the 'Devices' tab and see if there is some device you can whack to keep Media Player from sync'ing.

That's just sort of a guess, I don't really use Windows for anything not work related. Hopefully someone more Media Player experienced can come up with a more definite idea.

Cool, a timeline of Linux distributions.

[link]

Okay, maybe not cool to everybody. Okay, maybe not cool to most people. Okay, maybe only cool to me.

I have 3 questions. At least about tech things.

1. Is there any way to get gmail to show only conversations tagged with a specific tag?

2. Is there any way to delete all songs from iTunes that it can't find (ie, that have an exclamation point next to them). I moved my iTunes folder and I have about 3000 of these now.

3. Does anyone use Google desktop? Is there any benefit to it?

The Gmail I can answer: on the left gutter, there's a section labeled 'Labels' (they're so tricky that way). It's a list of your tags. Just click on the chosen tag and you'll see them all in the message area.

3. Does anyone use Google desktop? Is there any benefit to it?

My husband uses Google desktop and likes it. Integrated searches - you can search your files, gmail, and the web all at once (supposedly also over multiple computers, though he hasn't used that) and get reults in that familiar google format, mainly. Also things like the widgets OS X gives you. He says it's a drain on CPU for teh initial indexing but not so much after that (thoug that varies a lot depending on what gadget/widget/thingies you add).

There was some controversy about the security of Google Desktop, but maybe that was just fear-mongering. Anyway, the indexing-of-files feature is similar to 'Spotlight' on the Mac - both help you find files very quickly.

Raq, I think if you tell iTunes to consolidate your music it will copy everything it can find into its own folders so that it can access them again.