How to "move" instead of "copy" a file into your iTunes Library

Handbrake users, rejoice! This seems to work:

1. Make a "temp" folder inside your Music/iTunes/iTunes Music folder
2. Whenever you get a new file you want iTunes to manage, e.g. from Handbrake, drag it to that temp folder
3. Then drag it from there into iTunes

It should disappear from the temp folder almost immediately. Note, you need to have "Keep iTunes Media folder organized" in the Advanced Preferences pane.

If you do this a lot, try making an alias to that temp folder on your desktop.

If you *really* do this a lot, leave a comment and I can probably be persuaded to make a folder action script that will automatically send those files to iTunes when dropped there.

(Update, I wasn't the first to discover this.)

Crossing the line in new and surprising ways

A few weeks back I thought I heard offer this quote during a lesson, but nobody remembers it being said or saying it, and I can't find it anywhere on the internet (which knows everything, right?).

Still, worth sharing:

If you set the example to your kids that it's okay to cross the line, they'll cross it in ways that are new and surprising to you.

On getting, learning, becoming

"They Shall Ask the Way to Zion", Shawn Miller:

Stuff beyond our basic needs does not liberate. Consider the overall investment of your time. You have to shop for stuff. You have to clean, maintain, and organize stuff. You lose stuff. You look for stuff. You polish stuff, secure it against theft, trip over it, recharge it, upgrade it, accessorize it, pack it, move it, unpack it, insure it, fix it, and eventually sell, trash, or bequeath it. Stuff has no use beyond this life, and it takes a lot from us.

Very much unlike stuff, knowledge has few such liabilities.

Eder Patrick Kearon

Another excellent talk from last night.



I've never even heard of Elder Kearon before, but he's an excellent speaker. (He's from England, in case you're curious.)

Elder Uchtdorf on pride

These talks usually take days to get online, but this one's already on YouTube -- Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf to the priesthood brethren on pride:

Spreading "culture"?

Remember my post on culture?

Looks like the "stool donor" approach is getting some traction -- Dr. Gordon is Director of the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, talking to Terry Gross on Fresh Air a couple weeks back about doing exactly that:

Dr. GORDON: Well, in this particular case, a fecal community was transplanted into a diseased individual's gut and there was a beneficial effect observed over time, reflected in improvement of their symptoms. ...

GROSS: I guess one of the things I find so interesting about this fecal transplant is one, its a fecal transplant. It's so odd to think of using in this case, a spouse's feces or the community of microorganisms in those feces to transplant into the ill person's gut. Its a way of transplanting good guy bacteria instead of using antibiotics to just kill the bad guy bacteria and in the process, kill the good guy bacteria too.

I still think someday it will be more common for doctors to administer bacteria cultures than anti-biotics.

Also interesting from this interview is that 90 percent of the cells we carry around aren't actually human -- but bacterial and other non-human microbes. By count, we're ~10x more bacterial than human. Surprising, hard to believe, but also very interesting.

Having politicians kiss your babies? Maybe a good way to get healthy/successful peoples' bacteria on your kids.