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So Much Stuff I Can't Recall

Sunday, October 29, 2006

Expanding the Usefulness of Your iPod

Granted, the iPod's already a handy little gadget. What I want to listen to, when I want to listen to it (I've got over 3,400 songs on mine), with little more than a few spins and clicks to get things started. I've got the Buffy musical and a few other videos loaded (Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice" music video with Christopher Walken, the SNL "Cowbell" sketch, f'rinstance). Texas Hold'em poker, anyone?

All entertaining. All keeping me from playing in traffic. But useful? Not so much.

Say I wanted to do some research on a magazine I'd like to submit a short story to. Now I could print out a few stories and carry around a dozen or so sheets of paper until I have a chance to read them. How 2004.

Or I could load the stories to my iPod (under "Extras -> Notes") and read them that way. Hmmmm. Only problem is the notes have a 4Kb maximum size and a short story from The Town Drunk can easily be five times that size ... or larger. How do you manually break the story into 4Kb nuggets without going mental?

Well, I was failing that task, but then I found the "Clipboard to Note" applescript (via). Highlight the entire story, copy it to the clipboard and run the script. It breaks the text into 4Kb segments with a "next" link at the bottom of each, so you don't have to manually close one file and open the next. Nifty!

Whether you read the stories the old fashioned way or on your iPod, there are some fun things at TTD. Graveyard Shift is my favorite so far. Check it out.

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Mikesell

1 Snarky Remarks:

I found something a while back called Book to Pod, which does the same thing. You can take any text file (ebooks from project guttenburg, for instance) and run them through the thing and it breaks them up into the right size files.

There's also a nifty thing called the iPod Bible -- KJV already to go into your notes section. I've got some of it on my iPod, but I have a mini and the screen is pretty tiny. But still, it's there if I want it.
Blogger lindaruth, at 8:35 AM  

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