Searching around a bit, I found that Chris Brown had already thought of this way back in May 06. He created an applescript called TuneTag which was exactly what I was looking for. Except that I wanted to use the Grouping field instead of the more general Comments field (which I use for other purposes).

After a little bit of tweaking (actually just a search and replace), I integrated the script with Quicksilver (copy the .scpt files to ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions). Once you’ve gotten that done, pull up the Quicksilver menu, hit the “.” and type your (space-separated) tags, tab over and type in “tag” to pull up the script and hit Enter.

That should start you off adding tags to your current playing song. But proper organization goes a little further. I listen (read screen) a lot of songs to see if they’re up to my *ahem* world-class quality. I usually have a smart playlist set up to only include the songs added to the collection in the last day. I go through this list, and if I like any of the songs, I add a tag (using all the stuff above) called “atc” (add to collection). The final step is to add a new smart playlist to only keep off of the “atc” tag so that you can copy these songs over to your permanent collection while getting rid of the rest easily.

Here’s the modified script released under a Creative Commons license.

A few tweaks you may want to use to further enhance. I found myself typing “ls” for “list” too often and then having to correct it. To have “ls” also work as “list”, change line 271 from 271: "list" ) to 271: "list" | "ls" ). You can also do the same for “do” (or “done” as I like it). Change line 254 from 254: "do" ) to 254: "do" | "done" )

Finally, I edited the todobot.pl script to support multi-user control. Download the updated todobot.pl script. Rename the file to todobot.pl. You can add multiple usernames by separating them with commas like: my $commander = 'username1, username2, username3';

Update: I’ve changed the todobot.pl to include a “die” command so that you can take it offline remotely. This signs the bot out of AIM, and also gracefully kills the todobot.pl script. This is included in the todobot.pl script above.

Now you can run the script as perl todobot.pl > /dev/null & (pipes the output to null so it doesn’t clutter up your Terminal and also pushes the process to the background). This is where the “die” command comes in handy – no more having to figure out the process id to kill your IM bot.

Please email bugs to mxz at headphono.us


1. sudo emacs /etc/ssh_config
2. add a new line "ServerAliveInterval 60"
3. save and exit


That should do it. The next time you ssh (using either Terminal or iTerm), you’ll be sending ‘Keep Alive’ packets every 60 seconds if the client doesn’t receive anything from the server. Optionally, if you have sysadmin access to the server you’re connecting to, you can add

"ClientAliveInterval 60"

in the same location server side.

After much searching, being unable to find a widget for the 2006 World Cup schedule (atleast for the Mac), I decided to code it up real quick. It was a very rush job – snippets of code thrown together – so it may be a little buggy. Please forward all bugs to me at mxz AT headphono DOT us. The current version is 1.00. Watch out for bug releases (if any).

As always, I’d love to hear all suggestions.

UPDATE: Direct download link here.