Paul Tow

In my iTunes library and on my iPod, I have two thirty-minute playlists. One is called “Energize” and contains songs ordered by increasing speed. The other, “Rest,” is ordered by decreasing speed and helps me fall asleep. These playlist are automatically created by my computer and are constantly changing. My computer does this using the BPM (beats per minute) field in the iTunes metadata. Normally, this requires manually determining and entering that information by hand for each song, but there’s a much, much easier and less time consuming way. More… »

If you’re new to the Mac, welcome. I hope you enjoy it, and I’d like to point you to some resources to help you get started. Apple, of course, provides some help itself. The Mac comes with a useful but often forgotten Help menu. Apple provides a support site, AppleCare phone number, and genius bars at their retail stores where you can go to ask questions. Then, of course, there’s Google. Let’s move beyond those, though. More… »

RSS feeds have changed the way many use the web. People don’t go to content; content comes to them. Instead of manually checking individual websites for updates that might not have been made, they check just one place- their feed reader- and see new stories from all of their favorite websites. Feed readers are often used as an alternative to visiting the actual web site, but they don’t have to be. If you like the update notifications of RSS but prefer to visit the actual web page, there’s an app for that.

More… »

Screenshot of "Dark Blue Steel tabs 1.0"

With Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard,” Apple made all window backgrounds very dark, and this has been problematic for apps which used to be Aqua. For various reasons, Camino is particularly affected by this and likely will be for the foreseeable feature. All that being said, if you’re a Leopard user who’s using Camino either (1) without a bookmark bar or (2) with UnifyCamino, I’ve created a darker variant of Blue Steel tabs that may suit you better.

Screenshot of Blue Steel tabs 1.0

With helpful feedback from 8-bit and other mozillaZine members, I’ve created my first Camino tab theme: Blue Steel tabs 1.0.The active tab appears to pop to the front, giving your tabs a sense of depth.