OS X Tips - Tagging Contacts in Address Book

I get pretty irritated with adding and removing people from groups in my Address Book all the time. I recently found a way to remedy this situation. Now, maybe this has always been the way users were supposed to use smart lists, but it was new to me.

I like to keep lists of people for emailing for different purposes. For instance, a 'rock climbing' group, and 'bad movie' group, a 'snowboarding' group, and so on. So, what I've done is created smart groups for each of these, and then, in the notes section for each contact, I've added the tags that will trigger addition to the smart group. No more manual management when something changes! Voila!

OK, well, at least I'm excited about it...

Quicktime AVI Problems

I'm a Mac user. Generally, I love it. Once in a while, I have a problem that's decently irritating. My most recent source of aggravation has been playback of AVI files in Quicktime. Sometimes, depending on the codec, the sound just doesn't work at all.

Up to now, my solution has been to use VLC to transcode files to MP4 with MP4 audio. This time, no luck. So, I decided to be a good computer scientist and actually try to fix the problem instead of hacking away at it. I found a lot of posts online suggesting using the AC52 package or the xvid quicktime components, but none of that worked. Then, and I don't know why I hadn't found this before, somebody pointed me to Perian. Installation was remarkably easy, and voila, problem solved. So, use Perian to solve your Quicktime codec problems! Then, have fun playing back AVI files in FrontRow!