One problem I have run into is that of high-volume sites. Metafilter is the biggest culprit for me currently. If I don't check it often it easily fills with hundreds and hundreds of unread posts (841 as of right now). I was about to remove it from Reader altogether, but then I stumbled on a cool feature. I set my Metafilter feed to sort by "magic" and never looked back.

The magic here is Google's personalization algorithm, sorting posts based on your reading, sharing and "liking" history in Reader. Now when I come to the Metafilter feed I don't feel quite so overwhelmed. I can read a few entries knowing they are more likely going to interest me from the start without having to churn through all the posts strictly by chronology, looking for gems.

This has made me start to use the "Like" button a lot more often, hoping to educate the engine a bit. During the course of this, I've read a number of fascinating but disturbing posts about anything from human-skin lampshades made by Nazis to articles about dog fighting. These are not things I personally like, but the pieces themselves were very enlightening. In order to tell the algorithm that I would like to see more literature like this, I must click "Like". Every time I come across an example of this problem I pause, but ultimately click. I do want to see more of the same, after all.

However, the "Like" button does present an interesting UI problem. I know from experience that button labels should be as succinct as possible, so something along the lines of "More Like This" might be pushing the wordiness boundary a bit.

Anyway, I am very pleased with the results of the magic search, but I do wish my RSS reader didn't make me feel like a Nazi sympathizer quite so often.

First, they have introduced a new hero class for the Wrath of the Lich King extension to World of Warcraft: The Bard. Yes, you can now shred your axe in a most excellent way, doing massive "Rock" damage to your enemies.

Also, Blizzard is entering the console world once again with World of Warcraft: The Molten Core! The first 40-man raid zone, where many an adventurer cut their teeth, is now available for the Atari 2600! Ten unique raid bosses with 6 unique models! Move in any of 8 direction! Has sound!

I lol'd.

Shannon took a trip recently and when she got back I downloaded all the pictures she took onto a MacBook Pro I'm using. Last night she wanted to get those photos onto her own Mac, so we sat down next to each other and fired up the little Bluetooth File Transfer app that comes with OS X.

After selecting the files to send (about 100 images, between 1.5 and 2.5 MB apiece), the first thing I noticed was the terrible transfer rate. 75 KB/s at the top end, mostly in the 50 KB/s range. The next thing I noticed was that the transfer would fail every 5 pictures or so, causing us to start the process over again, manually picking up where the app failed.

After about 3 such failures, I remembered that OS X is built on UNIX and so we had a whole slew of robust applications at our disposal, namely SSH and SCP. So, I quickly made an account for myself on her machine and enabled remote login. A few quick keystrokes and the SCP transfer was started.

The transfer rate jumped into the range of 1.0 - 2.0 MB/s and all the files moved over seamlessly, all with very little initial setup. Even the OS X help files were useful, with a quick search for "SSH" bringing me straight to the document describing how to allow remote login.

So, score 1 for command line.

So, while I was pondering what a cool thing homebrewing is, I figured I might as well blog about it. A lot. On a site dedicated to such blogging. With JR, who is now also brewing.

And so WorldofWort.com was born. Hopefully, it will flourish.

So, after discovering this problem in iTunes I quickly found a solution. Some kind soul out there had written a nice little piece of Applescript to fix this problem by generating a new user playlist in iTunes and adding the m3u entries to it. And some even kinder soul had wrapped this Applescript up into a nice little .app which can be associated with all .m3u files and does all this magic, well, automagically.

But then MacWorld happened.

So, it seems that the iTunes 7.6 update has broken this functionality. The code now throws the error:

Can't get item 1 of {alias "Macintosh HD:Users:username:Desktop:playlist.m3u"}.

I am a total Applescript n00b so I cannot immediately find out what is wrong, so I'm posting this so that perhaps some Internet traveler will stumble upon it and, having the same problem as I, quickly find the proper solution. Everyone else posting about this issue apparently stopped blogging some time in 2006.

Here is the offending code:

on open m3uFileList
	tell application "iTunes"
		activate
		set newPlaylist to make new user playlist
		set name of newPlaylist to (current date) as string
		repeat with m3uFile in m3uFileList
			add m3uFile to newPlaylist
		end repeat
		play newPlaylist
	end tell
end open