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 [...]

I estimate that in any given day I must use clipboard copy and paste operations a few dozen times—and if I’m working with multiple documents, such as when transcribing information from a spreadsheet to a Word document, that figure becomes more like a few hundred times a day. But in all of those times, I [...]

You know the feeling: you are involved in some intractable problem that has all kinds of weird angles and you just can’t get your head around it—perhaps you feel like you are inspecting an elephant, one square inch at a time, or maybe you simply feel like you are herding cats. There are plenty of [...]

This evening I opened my email and found a most welcome message: Fujitsu has released their patched version of the ScanSnap software for Snow Leopard. [UPDATE: I spoke too soon—they only delivered half of the goods. See below.] [UPDATE 2: Hurray! It's fixed! The birds are chirping and the sun is shining and life is [...]

I can’t help it. As soon as I hear of a new version of anything, whether it’s an application or the entire operating system, I have to install it. Now prudence would lead one to take careful steps and wait until all of the wrinkles are ironed out before starting. I was almost not prudent [...]

Thanks to its face-recognition tool, iPhoto ’09 can now put names to the faces in your photographs, letting you quickly sift through your library based on content rather than how photos are arranged. But putting this feature to work requires some effort on your part. A few months back I received my copy of iLife [...]

Whether you are a cube dweller sharing an electronic document with your next door neighbor or a homeowner attempting to catalogue your digital life, you will soon encounter resistance in the form of document incompatibility. What good is a byte-for-byte perfect duplicate of the original if you cannot open it in an application? My own [...]

Anyone who is serious about committing their piles of paper and other media to digital format asks this question from time to time. And it doesn’t seem to matter how large hard drives have grown over the years—the media files seem to grow to keep pace quite nicely. I would like to share with you [...]

Work flow is inherent in the kind of work that we do when scanning, indexing, searching, filing, tagging, and backing up all of our documents, photos, music, and video. Once you are committed to digital media, you will find that you often need to cobble together different programs in order to do away with some of the tedious manual labor.