I’m certain that there are all kinds of filesystems in the Linux world that support file creation dates, but the plain fact of the matter is if you perform a vanilla Ubuntu installation, your files will remain ageless. Why should I care? In a word, Photographs. I keep everything I own on network attached storage [...]

Do you want to automatically publish iTunes playlists to a non-iTunes music library? This free application will convert iTunes playlists to m3u files, transform paths to match your external master library, and then copy the playlists over the network. It will even ping a Squeezebox server to force a playlist refresh.

Most of the time I don’t really bother with the timestamp information that my camera embeds in each digital photo. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I checked to see if the clock was right. Scanned photographs are an entirely different brew. They typically represent events from the distant past, and scanner software [...]

If you live in a slightly older home, such as mine, you occasionally might want to know which circuit breaker or fuse controls a particular outlet. Besides making it more convenient to disable the power for repairs, some of us have to deal with easily overloaded circuits that weren’t meant for all of the modern [...]

Show me a musician and I’ll show you someone who has at least a three foot stack of sheet music squirreled away somewhere. My situation is worse—both my wife and I are musicians, to one degree or another. Throw in the fact that she is a music teacher and you can imagine just how many [...]

One of my pet peeves in software is the black-box application that calmly sucks in all of your files and does everything for you, until the day you want to swich apps. This is the iTunes model, followed by many other products. I am of the opinion that rather than allowing an application to shuffle [...]