Pocketmod Makes Pretty Neat Little Organizer Things

I originally discovered the Pocketmod service some time ago on Lifehacker.com. It’s an interesting little online utility that creates disposable pocket organizers that you print out on plain paper, scribble on, and throw away after about a week or so.

This is my current PocketMod setup. (I dream of a day without CamelCaps.)

The joy and guilt of PocketMod is in this disposability: it’s incredibly basic and shouldn’t last for more than a week (unless you laminate it for some reason), then, you toss it. There’s a certain elation in keeping a full-featured organizer that doesn’t need batteries, is free, and fits in a wallet. I wouldn’t try synching it with Outlook, though.

To use PocketMod, you design it yourself from a drag-n-drop Flash app, print it out, cut a slit in it, fold it, write on it, refer to it occasionally, then toss it when you’re done. It’s beautiful in its customizability, cheapness, and disposability.

It’s also ugly in its disposability and bowing to our evil capitalistic and productivity-monitoring overlords. Fine, whatever.

Me, I use one about a week every six months or so, then go back to being an organizational wreck. Better than buying a $20 planner every year that ends up with 312 blank pages.

Visit PocketMod.

View doctorfrog’s current PocketMod.

Neil Young cover “It’s a Dream”

Permit me a melancholy moment. And let’s not look down our noses at power chords.

If they could just fire Garrison Keillor (out of a cannon into the sun) from his weekend-swallowing series on NPR and play this song for a few minutes, we could give the elderly their weekly shot of nostalgia inside a few minutes. And then get back to the business of Worthy Information Dispersal instead of waiting two hours for Keillor’s terrible show to finish.

Top-Secret Photos from Last Night’s IL-2 Game

Listen up, nuggets. Some good… well, some very nice men risked their lives just this last night for your freedom. You’re sittin’ there, eating your corn chips, drinking your sody pop, when it was that thin blue line on the Pacific holdin’ back the four winds of Evil. Just remember, if it weren’t for these guys, you’d be eating sushi and watching generic anime on TV. *shudder*

iTunes 9 Is Hideously Ugly, Part 2: Let’s Not Look At It Too Much, Then

This is an update to my earlier post, in which I smugly and fecklessly skewer Apple’s visual redesign of their cross-platform music store/music management mega-app, iTunes.

Here’s the update: It’s still ugly, still visually inconsistent with both Microsoft and Apple operating systems, and the ‘fade to pale’ action when the app is not in focus is still terrible.

Fortunately, there are at least a dozen apps out there that allow you to control iTunes without ever having to look at it. Here, I’m quickly covering three programs with three different approaches:

• ExTray – has hotkeys and album art, but is somewhat clumsy.
• hktunes – has basic hotkeys, is super small and focused, but limited.
• bbBroamTunes plugin for Blackbox (my personal choice) – offers more flexibility over the other two and is bug-free. But, it’s not as easy to configure, and only works in Blackbox.

Quickly Toggle Mouse Sensitivity Settings with Mat

This post is a dual plug, for both the simple software solution Mat (Mouse Acceleration Toggler), and for the DonationCoder.com forums.

Mat doesn't have a GUI; it just eats, shoots, and leaves.

Download Mat here.

In short, this utility allows you to alter mouse speed and acceleration settings with a simple Windows shortcut, rather than having to open the mouse properties dialog and adjust a slider or tick a box. Just create a shortcut to the program, add your desired parameters to the shortcut (see the above screenshot for an example), and launch the shortcut anytime you need a specific mouse speed setting. I use it to toggle between a basic touchpad and a rather sensitive gaming mouse.

This utility is small, free, and best of all, immediately stops running once it completes its task.

How I Got Someone to Make This For Me, or Why DonationCoder.com Is Pretty Awesome

I have a mouse that I use for gaming, but otherwise, I prefer to use a touchpad to save my wrist some wear and tear. The problem I ran into was that my touchpad is of a different sensitivity than my mouse, and in Windows, both devices use the same mouse settings. The result was that when switching between the two devices, my pointer would either move very sluggishly, or go flying across the screen. I knew I needed something simple that could quickly toggle these settings for me.

iTunes 9 is Hideously Ugly

What? No! What is wrong with you?

Now, I am not a graphic designer, nor a professional UI guru, and am, at my best, a completely false artist. But Apple software on Windows has long been designed with great pains to import, inject, and invade the visual style of Apple computing into the Windows domain. They call it a halo effect. It’s supposed to make you want to ditch your current PC and buy an Apple. It’s why you can’t look at brushed metal without shuddering, recalling 1998’s Quicktime slowly coming to life after having hijacked your media file preferences (if it wasn’t that, it was RealPlayer, another insidious and sluggish piece of tech).

But at least with iTunes 8, I could bear seeing the music player in the background. It was even nice seeing the album art out of the corner of my eye. Now, I can’t play a single track without minimizing the player. It’s that 1980’s stone-washed jeans look it gets when it’s not the foreground app. Why is it so bright? Why is the background white in Apple’s newest (and more or less worthless) album view?

What’s worse, is that this ugliness is likely deliberate. It’s the app, calling attention to itself. It’s that same halo effect nonsense: lookit me, I’m an Apple app! No, wait, don’t click off of me, I’ll get brighter! Shut up. Go to the system tray, until I need to fast forward to the next track.

And yes, I could switch to a different music manager, but a) I have four years of historical data sunk into iTunes: ratings, Smart Playlists, playcounts, etc. b) I have an iPod, c) It’s not worth the money or effort to rig up a whole new music player with all my preferences, and d) there are a lot of things that iTunes actually does very well with minimal fuss, Podcasts for one.

So go be smug somewhere else. This is a legitimate complaint, iTunes 9 is  inexcusably ugly. As the screenshot shows, even Mac users hate it, and they have fewer choices than PC fans.