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iTunes Skip Count

It’s been mentioned before, for example on Digg, but iTunes 7 has a new feature that counts the number of times you’ve skipped a track, which is defined as playing the song for at least two seconds but no longer than twenty (after which it is counted as played fully).

I’m curious how they chose twenty seconds as the cutoff - when I was working on an (unreleased and unfinished) project for generating smart shuffles, I defined skips as not listening past the first fifteen seconds, but didn’t count a full play until the song ended.

It’s an interesting feature, and it’s apparently kept up to date by some iPods, so I can see it helping me keep bad songs off my small iPod by using it in a smart playlist rule. However, often I find myself skipping songs I really like because I’m just not feeling them at the moment. So - how about the option of a smart playlist rule that lets me define a skip percentage? If I skip a song far more often than I play it, then it’s a pretty good bet I don’t need it on my iPod.

Previously:
Supercomputing 2006 BOF: “Is 99% Utilization of a Supercomputer a Good Thing?”

For those few readers who are interested in High Performance Computing and might be going to this year’s Supercomputing conference in Tampa, my advisor Allan Snavely and Jeremy Kepner from Lincoln Labs are putting on a BOF with an intriguing subject: “Is 99% Utilization of a Supercomputer a Good Thing?”

It’ll be on Thursday Nov. 16th [...]

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Back it up

My Powerbook’s been back for a couple of weeks now, and I had a good overall experience dealing with OC Data Recovery to get my data off the drive. Their San Diego Location is in Sorrento Valley. I didn’t test their speed, since my main concern was cost, but they managed to get about 98% [...]

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Dear GMail spam filter
October 6, 2006

Dear spam filter,

I cannot read Russian. If a message is in Russian, it is spam, just like all the other Russian messages I have marked as spam.

Thank you for listening - your pal, mike

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