Bonus!

It was with great relief that I unpacked my repaired laptop yesterday afternoon. Two weeks without its high power computational abilities was about a week and a half too long. But it was back, I was happy and I was also going to get OS 10.5 loaded on it as well (since the hard drive problem before prevented me from upgrading).

Imagine my delight when I got it fired up and noticed that my previously 100 gig hard drive had magically been upgraded to a much more spacious 185 gig post format drive.

The nicest thing about this unexpected upgrade is that I am finally going to be able to wrangle my ridiculous and sprawling music collection. There's been no easy way to roll through my multiple mp3 libraries and get rid of the duplicates, of which there are many.

So I'm importing all of the songs into iTunes, allow the application to copy the files to the iTunes folder. Once all of the disparate and overlapping folders have been consolidated into one mega folder, I'll use the Show Duplicates function and cull the extras from the list. I expect that'll take a little work as I haven't figured out an automated way to do it yet (got a solution? share it!).

But it will result in a final consolidation of four or five distinct but well overlapped libraries funneling down into one and I expect a space savings near a hundred gigs. Which means I'll be able to start on my next consolidation project of pulling all my photos into one mega-library. That'll be lots of fun, I'm sure.

I wish the repair hadn't taken so long but Apple more than made up for it with the hard drive upgrade. And boy does this MacBook Pro scream (in a good way now!).

The Best and Most Useful Mac Application I've Ever Used

This'll come as no surprise to the power Mac-heads out there. But I am finding more and better ways to use Quicksilver than ever before.

Sure, its a perfectly kickass application launcher but it does so much more that I've been able to clean out my dock to the barest of bare minimums.

Today I learned how to use the "Append to..." command to easily and quickly add tasks to my many and varied tasklists without even opening the documents. 43 Folders has a good rundown on how this is done and it took a little working but I've got it down now and it kicks ass.

I'm now able to quickly and easily add tasks by invoking Quicksilver, starting with a perid then type by task, tab to the next window and start typing Append to and the next window pops up, tab to that and start typing the text file you want to append to, hit execute and get back to whatever you were doing without any delay.

But, truth be told, I just learned about this neat feature on Zen Habits. Now I'm going to start implementing the other tips to make my workflow even slicker and more seamless.

If you like working efficiently and intuitively (and you're on a Mac) then definitely check out Quicksilver, it'll transform your computing. And I've barely even begun to get into all of what Quicksilver is capable of doing for me.

Some Interesting Stuff I've Read or Seen Recently

Otherwise known as the link dump.

Morford's latest: Outrage Fatique hits home, its too easy (and plays directly in their gameplan) to just tune out the scandals, hypocrisy and stupidity of our government leaders.

The zeroHouse is very green, off-the-grid and cool looking too. No electrical hook ups, no sewage hookups. I want one.

Next up is a video of Time-lapse photography at Vikings-Packers game. Pretty cool to watch a day in the life of Lambeau Field.

And here we can learn how to
Build a Hackintosh Mac for Under $800 which doesn't include the hours of work to get this Frankenputer working.

Here are some cool Ipod skins to Steampunk-ify it.
Gelaskins: Steampunk because everyone knows if its cool it becomes cooler when it gets Steampunk'd.