International Mac Podcast

Disney always tells you to “Wish upon a star” to make your dreams come true. While I Love Stars from The Potion Factory won’t make dreams come true, It definitely solved a problem that I had.

I Love Stars is a Menubar app that displays clearly your rating of the current iTunes song. By simply clicking on a star you can change the rating of a song. If you hate to have unrated songs in your library (like yours truly) you can have it flash and play a sound when an unrated song is played.

A great feature of I Love Stars is the fact that it is so discrete. When you aren’t playing a song it hides and you can also make it disappear when unrateable things (podcasts, streams etc.) are playing. To operate it you can either click on the stars or use keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl-Cmd-star rating).

I Love Stars is a great little app that does one thing but does it well. You can get it for free today from The Potion Factory

Apparently it’s now a unspoken rule that all of our recurring segments have to use alliteration, unfortunately I drew the short straw and got stuck with the letter ‘K’. Very little apple-related starts with K, but then I realized that I can publish my own posts on this blog now, so I just thought of the most random thing I possibly could that starts with K. Turns out that’s Kumquats. The problem is that I have very little to say about kumquats. So the rest of this post will be very short, only lengthened by the fact that it’s entirely in binary:

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I’ve been looking for a tool to take out the trash and do my repetitive filling jobs for a while now and I think that I’ve found my favorite. Meet Hazel, my personal housekeeper.

Hazel is a background app that does so much. Hazel is a preference pane that you access through system preferences. When you open the Hazel preference pane you are greeted by 3 tabs; Folders, Trash and Info. I’m going to run through what each one does.

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There are do dates, and there are due dates. There are no doo dates, but the former two will suffice. There is a distinct difference, though, between the two.

You are most likely more familiar with due dates; they’re normally dates a task must be done by. However, they don’t strictly have to be. False due dates can help you, say, when you have a big project that you only have one due date for. If you separate the project and add a different due date for each section, it becomes much easier to avoid the dreaded last-minute scramble. (more…)

First of all, full disclosure. I made this up. Thus, it might hurt you more than it helps you. However, this is true for most GTD concepts, so that’s all the warning you get.

I call this Mindests, and here’s the elevator pitch: Mindsets is (are) one particular activity, such as writing, that is distinct from others, such as reading. They can be nested, putting blogging and emailing under writing, or not. They are useful when you are blazing along, have written three blog posts already and can’t continue on or you’ll have none for later, but don’t want to stop the creative juices flowing. Just continue on in your Writing mindset. (more…)

No, no, don’t get too excited, I haven’t suddenly turned on everybody’s favorite fruit-inspired electronics company, this isn’t ANOTHER blog post ragging on the new iPod on the block, quite the opposite really, I mean, look how small it is,  it’s so helpless, that thing can’t possibly stand up for itself. Over-personification aside (That was a really big word!)

Maybe a better title for this would have been “Keaton On: Other people on: the new iPod shuffle” or “Keaton’s response to everybody else’s response to the iPod Shuffle”, but frankly, any headline that implies anything anti-apple is the “Free Beer” of our generation (It makes people read things that they normally wouldn’t). (more…)

I haven’t talked to you guys about some of the ideas behind GTD in a while, so I think it’s time we rectify that. Last time we talked about Essentials, which was so long ago you wouldn’t remember this unless I brought it up, I promised I’d tell you about Areas of Responsibility. Truth is, there isn’t much to say and I said it all in my Things post. So today, I’ll be talking about Contexts. Next post I’ll get into another thing I’ve added to my personal GTD strategy which isn’t in David Allen’s, and that’s Mindsets.

Contexts are usually expressed as tags. That should tell you that they can apply to any task, project, or Area of Responsibility. Tasks in projects or areas will inherit their contexts, but projects and areas don’t inherit contexts from the tasks they contain. Tasks, projects, and areas can have any number of contexts, or none. (more…)