Alot of knitting pattern designers are computer folks. . . don't know if they're programmers or not.

You can get a free copy of MacX DVD Ripper Pro as a promotion with How to Geek.

The software rips a DVD or a Video-TS folder directly to iPhone, iPad, iPod, Apple TV with nothing more than a few mouse clicks—or if you want to rip a DVD to MOV, MP4, or AVI, you can do that easily too, which should be sufficient for most devices.

Maybe those people just don't want to take the trouble.

Which is totally cool. But how can you not get it's valuable to other people? It's not rocket surgery.

did you know you can rate entire albums, and the rating then carries over to all the songs in the album?

There are maybe two albums I rate all the songs all the same.

Boy, I am getting raked over the coals in this meeting. Shit.

Most of the car stuff is just stuff that wears out- boots, brakes, leaky things, things that go snap, tires, alignment. It all just adds up. A newer car is not in the offing anytime soon. If I *truly* had to get another car, it'd end up having to be something that cost about as much as this repair. And probably thus a clunker. This one has many more miles in it, barely 104K.

I'm kind of obsessive about rating the songs in iTunes, and I have Smartlists feeding into others in order to make sure that I listen to everything except the single-stars within a couple months of playtime.

That includes a special smartlist that picks up on all the non-starred songs that I've played more than once and keeps popping them up every other day until I get around to rating them.

Um... like I said, a bit obsessive.

It never occurred to me to rate a song in iTunes! Why would I?

Because then you can use the Smartlists to automagically give you playlists where your favorite songs pop up more often?

Why would I?

So you only listen to five star songs?

I don't rate my songs because I'm always just making my own playlists which I burn to play in the car.

Even when I could play the iPod in the car, I preferred my own playlists, though then they could be open ended and as long as I wanted. But I prefer to have a finite playlist. Eighty minutes is good.

I do use the Genre field a lot to make Smartlists though. And you can make up your own categories there, so if ita wanted to have Spoken Word, Fiery Declamations or something she could.

Because then you can use the Smartlists to automagically give you playlists where your favorite songs pop up more often?

This.

Also, I have about 17,000 songs in iTunes. With so many songs, it's easy to have a song I like a lot that I just forget about. I use smart playlists to bring up songs I've given, say, four or five stars to but have only played a few times.

That includes a special smartlist that picks up on all the non-starred songs that I've played more than once and keeps popping them up every other day until I get around to rating them.

Right now I'm going through everything that's tickyboxed, because I don't want to only listen to new stuff--I like the variety of favourites popping up randomly. But I'm making sure to rate everything that comes across the wire. Which will take approximately forever. But I've already found so many great songs I'd forgotten I had for one reason or another.

It never occurred to me to rate a song in iTunes! Why would I?

Most of my playlists are smartlists based on ratings and some other criterion. So I have playlists by decade and rating, for instance--everything 1980-1989 three stars or over. So it's on me to make sure those stars are accurate. I'll also listen to, for instance, "Good Prince" or "Good Reggae" or whatever.