For the iTunes playlist challenged among you (alright I'll count myself as well), Andy Budd has a nice article on getting the most from your music by really putting the Smart Playlist feature to work.

One of the problems with this is keeping your music collection interesting. You’ll want to hear newer songs more often than older ones, yet at the same time you’ll want to make sure that the old music doesn’t get lost. You want to hear your favourite songs slightly more often than everything else, but you don’t want to keep listening to the same old tracks over and over again. As such you need to make sure your playlists have a good degree of variety as well as and a high churn rate. The way to achieve this is by utilising smart playlists, however it can be quite difficult getting the right balance.

I've personally tried a number of ways to control the volumes of music that I seem to have acquired. However, none have really hit the sweet spot. Andy's system is certainly one of the most controlled ways of reigning in your wayward collection. If your music is getting out of control you might give Andy's system a try.

So I finally got one of the coveted MBPros and have spent the last several days getting my feet wet on this new architecture. There's already been A LOT of anecdotal reviews on the new "PowerBook" so I won't bother to go into that here. However, in the process of updating as many of my apps to Universal Binary as possible I've had occasion to try out an alternative browser or two. Don't get me wrong, Safari is a fantastic browser, and Apple has done an increasingly bang-up job with this program. But I moved over to Firefox last Summer and really never looked back. However, until Firefox releases a UB I need to consider other options that don't force me to endure the SPoD so frequently. Enter Camino. I tried this browser out once or twice back when it was Chimera and it just didn't cut it, especially compared to the competition. However, with its 1.0 release it has really come into its own. The operative word is "fast!". Even with Safari being UB, Camino just blows it away in the launching, loading, and rendering categories. I'll miss my precious Firefox extensions and will hopefully return to the fold soon (please Mozilla team!). But until then, I think I've found my new, second-favorite browser. You can read more about it here, here, and here. Or just check it out for yourself.

For those of you who don't quite get what all the hubbub is about RSS, the folks over at blogcritics.org have a really nice intro to RSS that does a much better job of explaining the concept than I have seen to date. I've even struggled myself to explain the ins and outs of RSS and its value to the average web user.

Chances are, you're not entirely sure what the point of RSS is. I saw that little orange icon in Firefox, I've also seen their "live bookmarks" feature, which just looks cumbersome, and just never thought it could be helpful to me. Now, I wouldn't live without it. Here's why.