From The Tips Box: iTunes Ratings, Search By Extension

Readers offer their best tips for rating iTunes tracks with a keyboard shortcut, listing files in a folder with a certain extension, and getting rid of the favicons in Firefox.

About the Tips Box: Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips in our inbox, but for various reasons—maybe they’re a bit too niche, maybe we couldn’t find a good way to present it, or maybe we just couldn’t fit it in—the tip didn’t make the front page. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favourites for your buffet-style consumption. Got a tip of your own to share? Email it to tips at lifehacker.com.au.

Rate iTunes Tracks with a Keyboard Shortcut on OS X

Cinnamonster shows us an easy way to rate iTunes songs with a keyboard shortcut for Mac users:

I use this to create keyboard shortcuts for rating songs in iTunes. Go to System Preferences-> Keyboard->Keyboard shortcuts.

Create a shortcut in Application Shortcuts (doesn’t matter if it’s all or in iTunes). The menu item is just the number of stars you want to rate, and the character for star is “U+2605” (though you could just copy and paste it from here: ★). Repeat as necessary for different ratings. Your menu item will be “None” for 0 star. Works great. Only complaint is it doesn’t apply globally so you can’t rate while a different program is in the foreground focus.

For example, I set mine up using Command+Shift+1 for one star, Command+Shift+2 for two stars, and so on. If you want to make global shortcuts, you can do so using this trick and a bit of Applescript and Quicksilver voodoo.

Hide Favicons in Firefox’s Bookmarks Bar

PrairieMoon shares a userstyle that will make your browser look a bit more professional:

I wanted something to remove favicons (even the default placeholders) from tabs. This did it:

/* Remove favicon from address bar (0 width allows image to “prop open” the bar at the normal height) */

#page-proxy-deck { width: 0px !important; }

/* Remove favicons from personal bookmarks toolbar (but not folder icons) */

#bookmarks-ptf .bookmark-item[statustext].toolbarbutton-icon { width: 0 !important; }

/* Remove favicons from dropdown menus */

menuitem.bookmark-item .menu-iconic-left { visibility: hidden !important; }

/* Remove favicons from tabs (lose throbber as well) */

.tab-icon { width: 0 !important; }

It can be placed in userChrome.css or as a Stylish userstyle.

This script is actually almost outdated; Firefox 4 users will want to use the line:

#PlacesToolbarItems .toolbarbutton-icon {display:none!important;}

To hide the favicons. Alternatively, you can just install the Hide Favicons extension.

List Files of a Certain Extension in the Terminal

Cinnamonster shares a quick Terminal trick:

Once you’ve cded into a directory use ls *.[file extension]in Terminal to display files only of a certain type.

Use iTunes’ Search Function for Makeshift Shuffle Playlists

Roher4 lets us know a quick way to create a makeshift playlist in iTunes:

If you want to listen to specific artist(s) in iTunes, you can search for them and make sure iTunes is on shuffle. Click one of the songs inside the playlist and you’ll have a quick and “disposable” playlist.