I keep my iTunes library sorted by Artist alphabetically, but when you click the Artist heading, the Album column gets sorted alphabetically as well. I recently discovered a trick to sort Albums by Year within each Artist group, while keeping the overall Artist order alphabetical.

Simply click the Album column heading twice. The heading will rotate from “Album” to “Album by Artist” and then “Album by Year.” This will sort the iTunes Library by Artist, then by Year. The following is a summary of the different combinations:

1. 
   Sort by Artist alphabetically, then Album alphabetically.
    
2. 
   Sort by Album alphabetically.
    
3. 
   Sort by Album Artist alphabetically (or Artist if Album Artist is blank), then by Album alphabetically.
    
4. 
   Sort by Album Artist alphabetically (or Artist if Album Artist is blank), then by Album chronologically.
    

For compilation albums things get a little confusing. The Album Artist is not always the same as Artist, so it is important to remember that for the last two options, these will be listed according to Album Artist. Also, if the Album Artist is blank, but the album is marked as a compilation, these songs will be found at the end of the library.

It is nice to have Albums listed chronologically within each Artist!

Let’s say you have a folder full of images that you want to sequence together as frames in an animated GIF. You can find special programs online to do this, but with some of the new features of Adobe Photoshop CS5, it’s quite fast and simple.

1. Gather the images you want to animate into one folder.
2. Open a new document matching the dimensions of your source images.
3. Select all of the source images and drag them together into Photoshop. Release them over the general workspace. The first image should show up with a superimposed “X.” New to Photoshop CS5, the images will stack one at a time as layers in your current document when you hit “Enter.” (In previous versions, dragging the files into the workspace would simply open each one up as separate files)
4. Keep hitting “Enter” until all of the images are loaded as individual layers. Rearrange the layers into the correct order, if necessary.
5. Open the Animation palette (Window > Animation).
6. In the Animation palette menu (found top right corner of the palette), click Make Frames From Layers. You can also click Reverse Frames if needed. This will take each layer in your document and set it as an individual frame in the animation.
7. Now we will change the duration of each frame. In the same menu, click Select All Frames.
8. Click the drop down button just underneath each frame image (circled in red in the image below). This will bring up a menu where you can set a duration. Since all frames are selected, all frames will be set to the same time. Each change be changed individually, if desired.
9. The drop down button circled in black in the image above will change how many times the animation will loop; either a fixed number of times, or forever.
10. Once the frame order and timing as been set up, it is time to save the image! Click File > Save for Web & Devices, change any options if needed and save the image!

You will now have an animated GIF taken from a folder full of the individual frames. In fact, as long as each frame exists as a separate layer in Photoshop, the Animation palette can be used to create the GIF. But, with CS5 it is easy to make separate layers from a folder of the individual frames as described.

Grouping in Adobe Illustrator is a useful tool to “bundle” objects that need to be moved around together. Groups can also easily be duplicated to create multiple instances of a set of objects. However, what if you needed to change a property of one particular object within all copies of a group? There is no easy way to select all sub-objects of the same type. If you are editing within a group, you might try Select > Same > Appearance, but this will only select objects within the current group, and will not expand the selection to other copies of that group. In the Layers palette, you might be able to select the specific sub-objects you want inside of each group, and then perhaps save the selection for use later (Select > Save Selection). But this can be tedious, especially when there are a large number of group copies.

The simplest solution I found to selecting identical objects within multiple copies of the same group involves use of actions and the Note feature in Illustrator. This must be done before copies of the original group are created.

1. Open the Attributes palette (Window > Attributes)
2. Begin editing within your original group and select the desired sub-object
3. In the palette options drop down, click “Show Note” if it isn’t visible already.
4. The attributes palette should now have a white text box on the bottom.
5. Type a name for that object into the Notes box which you will use later to refer to this object type.
6. Open the Actions palette (Window > Actions)
7. Start recording a new action by clicking the “Create New Action” icon on the bottom of the Action palette, next to the trash can. The action should begin recording automatically.
8. Now click the palette options drop down in the top right corner, and click “Select Object”
9. Type in the note text you used earlier in the object attribute palette.
10. Stop recording the action by clicking the square.

This procedure creates an action which selects objects with the same note text, no matter what group they belong to. Now, you can duplicate your group as many times as you want. Running the action (by clicking the “play” icon when selected in the Action palette) will now select all of the same sub-objects in every instance of the duplicated group. This way you can easily modify each one at the same time!

Setting Note text for objects is an easy way to select specific sets of items later, but it is particularly useful when dealing with objects within groups. This tutorial was written with Adobe Illustrator CS4, but the method should work for other versions similarly.

Every now and then on my Treo Pro, the unread SMS notification icon gets “stuck” on the default time screen that shows when the backlight turns off or when the power button is hit. My Today screen will show “No unread messages” but I will still see the icon which should let me know there are unread texts. There is a simple registry fix I used to clear this. If you don’t have a registry editor on your phone, PHM Registry Editor is a good one.

If you are sure you really have zero unread messages, go to the following registry locations:

HKEY_Current_User\System\State\Messages\MMS\Unread
HKEY_Current_User\System\State\Messages\sms\Unread

In each location, there will be a key titled “Count.” Change these values to zero. In my case, the key for MMS was set to 4294967295 (0xFFFFFFFF in hexadecimal, or, -1 in two’s compliment), which clearly is an erroneous value. Once I changed this number back to zero, the unread notification icon disappeared!

Back in iTunes 8, Apple removed the preferences option to disable the arrow links to the iTunes music store next to the name and artist of a highlighted song. I find these highly annoying, since I never intend to use them. For the Windows version of iTunes, I found two different ways to get rid of these arrow icons:

Method 1
Go to Edit > Preferences > Parental Control, and check “Disable: iTunes Store”

While this is the simplest way of getting rid of the arrows, in the latest versions of iTunes 9, disabling the iTunes Store also disables Genius and automatic album art downloading. If you use these features, like I do, disabling the iTunes Store altogether is not an option. In this case, there is another way:

Method 2
Follow the instructions found here. Basically, you first close iTunes, then with a text editor open C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Apple Computer\iTunes\iTunesPrefs.xml on Windows XP, or C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes\iTunesPrefs.xml on Windows Vista/7. After the following lines:

<key>User Preferences</key>
<dict>

add the code:

<key>show-store-arrow-links</key>
<data>
AA==
</data>

When iTunes is reopened, the arrow icon links will be gone! Since I use Genius and downloading album art, I used the second method and it is working great so far in iTunes 9.01!

How many seconds are in a day? 86,400. Thanks, Kris.

Yesterday, I upgraded my 64 bit Vista machine to Windows 7. The installation went fine, however once it was finished and Windows 7 was up and running, I found that I could no longer run any program beyond a few of the built in operating system programs such as the control panel, windows explorer, notepad, etc. Opening other programs such as Firefox, Word, Photoshop and even Internet Explorer would hang for a few seconds after I double clicked their icon, but would never appear. When I checked the task manager, the executables were listed in the Processes tab, but windows for the programs would not display. I also occasionally received a delayed error message from Explorer.EXE “Server execution failed” after trying to open Internet Explorer. I uninstalled my antivirus software and VMWare just in case they might have anything to do with the problem, but this didn’t work.

Eventually, after a long Google search without any success and after considering trying to reinstall Windows 7, I came upon this forum, which described the same problem. It turns out there were two instances of a program “HsMgr.exe” which run on startup, and were somehow causing my programs not to execute. My fix was:

1. Click on the Start menu
2. In the search box, type msconfig and hit enter
3. Click on the Startup tab
4. Look for any item named HsMgr (such as HsMgr.exe or HsMgr64.exe) and uncheck these
5. Click OK
6. Restart your computer

Your programs should now be able to open. This problem seems to be due to lack of compatible drivers with 64-bit Windows 7.

[Update:] I discovered that the true problem had to do with my HT Omega Striker 7.1 sound card drivers. After installing a Windows 7 compatible driver update from HT’s website, the HsMgr programs can run in the background without preventing applications from opening.

Yesterday I was bored waiting for my tires to be balanced & rotated at Costco, so to kill some time I decided to run a little social experiment that I had been meaning to do for a while. The experiment consisted of asking a single question, which I texted to almost everyone in my cell phone. The question was this:

Think- If you had to rate your life right now on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the WORST imaginable and 10 being the BEST, what would it be? Text me back -BD

Before I sent it out, I decided that my own answer would be a “7″ …pretty darn good, but not so much that it can’t improve in certain areas. In my mind, a “1″ would be defined as ultimate low, where life just could not possibly get any worse, save for death. I picture someone with absolutely no family, no friends, no hobbies, no hope for the future & some type of terminal illness. On the other hand, I would imagine a “10″ being the ultimate perfect life, where nothing goes wrong, there are no regrets and no limitations. Both scenarios I would expect to be essentially impossible, but, hey, you never know. I was curious therefore, to see where other people would place their lives on a scale from 1-10. And so I sent the text to around 108 people. Of those, 62 responded back. Here is a histogram of the results, showing the number of responses for each category:

This survey turned out to be really interesting. Six people responded with a 10, while two responded with a 1. The mean and median were both 7, but the most popular response was 8.

The best part about this survey though, were the responses I got from the people who answered with 9s or 10s. My favorites are below. I found them really encouraging, so I thought I’d share (anonymously, of course):

It’s got to be a 10, i’m in full time service which brings the greatest joy, the happiness of giving, i just saw Gilead intros, and as one of the students put it “happiness isn’t the destination but rather the journey.” so yah i’d say life is good.

It would be a ten… the reason i say it, although i pass through hard times. I love jehovah and that makes my life great!

10… Haha I got baptized yesterday so how can I not be good right now?!

9 i have my issues and complaints were not perfect but We make the best of everything. the fact that we know the truth makes our lives awesome

Hmm, I think I notice a common theme! Obviously, my idea of a 10 being 100% perfection was a little different from how they responded, but neither is right or wrong, the question was subjective. It is very clear though that being in the truth definitely notches up one’s life rating! It really helps you see what’s really important in the end.

I do wonder though, what it would take to bump up your rating one point. For example, what would one need to do to go from a 6 to a 7? Or from a 7 to an 8? I also wonder how one’s response would change over time, since it’s really dependent on current circumstances which constantly fluctuate. I want to try to ask this again, say, a year from now & see what differences there are.

Overall though, I gotta say, I must have some pretty happy friends! =D

1. Chill for a minute before you get out of your car and finish that song that’s playing.
2. Stare at the stars. Think about how big the universe is & how lucky you are to be here.
3. Without doing anything else, sit & listen to a song that you love in its entirety.
4. At random times & places throughout your day, stop & look at the scene in front of you as if it were a photograph or painting in a museum. What details would you notice? What would make it “beautiful?”
5. Play an instrument. Play whatever comes to you; don’t worry about if it sounds good or not.
6. Ignore conventions; love something that no one else loves, & be proud of it.
7. Forget worrying about what people think.
8. Find a good comic strip that always makes you laugh & read it often
9. Be honest with yourself. There is really nothing to lose.
10. Once you are honest with yourself, figure out your weaknesses. Either accept them, or improve.
11. Find the humor in unfavorable situations.
12. Cheer people up. It’s easy to do since so many people are stressed about things.
13. Always have a plan B, or a worst case scenario you can live with.
14. Listen to classical music.
15. Find answers to your questions. Unravel the mysteries of life.