I’ve been playing with last.fm a bit over the weekend. Its a neat idea, you create an account and download a program that tracks both what you listen to in iTunes and what you play on your iPod, then uploads the track information to a central website so you can share your musical tastes with others. Once you have uploaded enough tracks they try and identify a number of people who are your musical “neighbors” and theoretically have similar musical tastes as you so you can browse what they are listening to and maybe find some new music.
I was somewhat inspired by this after seeing Adriaan Tijsseling‘s script that you can use to update your blog, but for now I think I’m going to just leave it as a link…

Alex’s last.fm page

When I picked up my first Mac a couple of years ago one of the few annoyances I found was launching programs. I missed the start button that most other GUIs such as Windows, Gnome, or KDE use for launching programs. You can stick your Application folder in your dock and fill your dock with shortcuts but its not a solution that worked really well for me.
Enter drag thing, probably the first piece of shareware I picked up for my new Mac. It allowed me to create sets of shortcuts to the applications I used arranged by a categorization scheme that made sense to me. Now, it can also do a lot more, but thats all I was really looking for and for the longest time I was satisfied.
Then, a while back I stumbled across a post (over at Ars if my memory serves me correct) where someone was raving about this other way to launch programs, something called Quicksilver. Quicksilver works much like how you would put together a simple sentence. Subject verb [optional object]. I find that typing out a brief intuitive key combination to launch an application is much quicker than reaching for the mouse and having to navigate a menu structure.
Again, there are a ton of other things you can do with quicksilver other than launch programs but thats what I mainly use it for – that, and sending shell commands to a terminal by entering text mode and changing my default action for text to “Run As Text Command In iTerm”
Quicksilver Website