Smart Playlists on the road

One of my favorite unsung (and almost undocumented) features of iPods is their ability to do live updating of Smart Playlists on the fly. It's not 100% consistent with the way it works in iTunes; you have to back out of the playlist screen and reenter it to make the list change. There are other minor glitches in the way it works. But I like that it happens at all, and it means that Smart Playlists can offer variety over the long haul without even syncing the iPod.

I don't have one of the iPod models that got a firmware upgrade with the most recent revision, but those who have report that live updating of Smart Playlists has quietly disappeared. (Some are unnerved by this Apple page claiming that the feature never existed, but if you look closely, you'll see that the page is from 2002, which was before iPods actually did this. The feature is briefly documented here.)

If you use a lot of Smart Playlists on your iPod, you might take notice.

Update: Sheesh, Apple just pulled the old page from 2002 saying that Smart Playlists don't update live. I guess the conspiracy theorists fretted about them editing history sufficiently to drive them to edit history. (To be fair, these Knowledge Base articles aren't there primarily for historic archival purposes...)

O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!

...and the symphony cycle is complete.

Remember that time I said torture was bad?

Inspired by John Baez, The Poor Man gives us a helpful index for evaluating statements about torture.