MacMost Now 75: Wide Dock Stats Lyrics

Hello. Gary here. Welcome to another fine, hand-crafted episode of MacMost Now. Today, it's time to answer some viewer mail. 

Let's get right to it. Marcio writes: "My question is about software, free or shareware to check out my system health, like temperatures, hard drive space, amount of processes, etc... Any suggestions?". Well, yes indeed. Got some great suggestions. One is to use something called "iStat". iStat comes from islayer.com and it comes in different flavors such as a dashboard widget or a menu. And this thing allows you to go ahead and check all sorts of stats like the temperature of every sensor inside your machine, fan speeds, hard drive space, your network connection, everything. And of course you could also go ahead and use the standard activity monitor to go ahead and check for the processes running on your machine. You can look at that in your Applications, Utilities folder.

Here's one from Joe. Joe writes: "Is there a way to keep an alias to the Applications folder in the dock?". Absolutely. Matter of fact, this is a great thing to do. Just drag the Applications folder to the dock. That's all you need to do. But you need to drag it to the right side of the dock in Leopard, past the dotted line. Then you'll have a stack and a stack can pop up and show you all your different applications. You can also Control-click on the stack and control how it looks. This is a really handy feature. I not only have one for my Applications folder but for my Utilities folder as well.

Brian writes: "I have a pretty large iTunes library. Is there a simple, automated way to find lyrics online and import them into iTunes?". Well, yes there is. None of the solutions out there are really great because there are a lot of controls over the copyrights of the lyrics. There are some rumors that iTunes will soon have the ability to actually get lyrics for all the songs available on the iTunes music library and perhaps more. But, until then there's something called "Gimme Some Tune". You can get that at gimmesometune.com. This is a little menu item that works on your Mac with iTunes and when you're listening to a song you can have it automatically download lyrics and artwork. Now the problem is if you want to get all the lyrics for all the music in your library, you have to listen to every song. But, there's a little solution to that, kind of a hack. You can set Gimme Some Tune to actually download the lyrics automatically and then you can use an Applescript called "Needledrop" -- just search Google for "needledrop" -- that will actually play the first ten seconds of every song, thus forcing Gimme Some Tune to download all the lyrics and possibly all the artwork that it can find.

Cam had a question that puzzled me at first. He wrote: "What I have noticed in viewing your videos is they don't appear to fit on my iPod screen. More often than not I will miss certain things to the right or left of the screen as it will be out of shot for me.". Now, on my iPod things look fine. You see, the MacMost video podcast is in wide-screen. So, it should appear with black bars on the top and bottom on a standard four-by-three iPod screen. However they weren't working this way for Cam. Turns out there's a setting under "Video,Video Settings" on the iPod there's something called "Widescreen". If you turn that off, then you won't be able to see things. You won't be able to see just about to here and about to here. You should barely see both of my hands if you have things working right.

Female Guest: 

Hello! And welcome back to Geek Girl TV. This is episode number 57. The first episode of season three.

Gary: 

That's right, this week marks the return of Geek Girl TV. You can watch the new episode and subscribe to the podcast at MacMost.com/geekgirl. If you've got a question for me, you can always email me at questions (-at-) macmost.com. I'll either answer them in person or on a future video podcast. Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.