Tippopotamus' Crucial Gadgets: a shameless plug

I looked into Amazon.com's advertising and found that you can customise a store of your own, called your aStore. I am going to use this to show my crucial gadgets (as I've had a lot).

I think it will be useful to show all the products I absolutely cannot live without. I will add to this as and when I think of more.

I would also be very interested if anyone else has any gadgets and widgets that they can't live without. If I like the idea, I will add it to my list.

Remember - I live in the UK, but I see most of my readers are in the US. Therefore product availability may be a little different, but this is mainly for showing what I like rather than for commercial purposes.

It doesn't display brilliantly below because of the narrow width of my blog. If you fancy seeing the whole thing, click on the title and it will open in a new tab/window.

Question: how do you organise your iTunes library?

Here's one for the commenters: I would like to know how you organise your iTunes library.

I am specifically trying to find out what your playlist structure is like. I'm not talking smart playlists here - I'm interested in your permanent playlists that you use to segregate your music to make it more manageable.

For example, I have about 25,000 tracks and I have bee 'umm'ing and 'err'ing on how best to organise them and structure them for listening (since I want to at least go through all the tracks and chuck out anything I don't like anymore). See this post to see where I've come from and where I'm trying to get to.

My latest 'idea' involves splitting my library into 3 main categories:

• Music I bought on CD before the advent of the mp3 revolution
• Music I have downloaded (and yes, I used Napster back in 2000 and 2001, so please don't judge me)
• Music that was shared with me

I then have sub-categories under this do break the music down a bit more into nice chunks. Here is a screenshot of all my non-smart (thick?) playlists:

I am hoping that this will be a little less overbearing that a huge list of 25,000 tracks. At work, in the car and on my iPhone I have started listening to all the singles I bought on CD (1995 to 2000) which is quite amusing as I haven't heard all this stuff for years. At home we use the Genius function to give us random playlists based on a song we feel like hearing at the time.

I started listening to my entire library at about the same time I started this blog. Let's see how long it takes to get through it all…

Let me know how you organise your library or if you have a better way altogether.

A reverse date prefix file and folder naming convention

I always used to name files and folders randomly. I never followed a particular convention of any sort. One thing I did like to do was to include the date I worked on the file in the file name, but I never thought of this tip until recently - I'm sure it's not a completely original idea, but it makes complete sense to me.

What I now do (for pretty much every file that I work with) is to put the date at the beginning in reverse in this format:

YYYY-MM-DD filename.ext

What this does for me is the following:

• Sorting by the file or folder name quickly sorts chronologically
• Any desktop search you use can quickly search on the date in the title
• I can easily scan through the list of files and see how they interrelate in time
• If I change the date every time I make a change I can see when I last made an update
• Following on from the point above, it enables me to keep a very simple version control system which is extremely easy to maintain

I use this for all files except my media files. For music, I let iTunes manage the naming. For videos, I just name them (apart from home videos, which I use the date format). However, I go a little further with my photos…

After a long holiday and multiple photos from different cameras, I realised that making a universal slideshow would put everything in the wrong order unless I used a chronological naming convention. Hence I took it a step further and used this format:

YY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS (orginal photo number).ext

I reduced the year to two digits (to keep the file name a little shorter). I also did away with any description of the photo as it takes too much time to write. The folder gives the date and the general content which is good enough unless you are doing something specific with the photo.

The great thing about this was that using the excellent (and free!) piece of software Bulk Rename Utility, I was able to do this right from the context (right click) menu. But that will be the subject of another post as it really is an indispensable utility for the file-naming-obsessed-geek, albeit a rather complicated looking one on first principles:

If anyone else has any useful hints on file naming conventions they care to add, please let me know in the comments section below as I'm always trying to get more organised. For me, simplicity and effectiveness are the key measures of success.