Chris J Mears

After I started to get very weird songs pop up in my “4-stars and up” Party Shuffle playlist, I decided to embark on a more stream-lined iTunes song rating system.

Here is my proposal:

No stars

This song is unrated and needs to be put in a smart playlist to be rated, even if they’re all 3 star ratings. This is a fire sale people. Everything. Must. Go! (out of that unrated smart playlist!)

1 star

Denotes a supreme dislike for the song that immediate deletion would not be totally uncalled for.

2 stars

This song is a’ight. Not the most inspirational piece of music, but not worth deleting either, if it flows with the rest of the album.

3 stars

This is a good song. Not the best, but you would be indifferent about it showing up once in a while during a shuffle. And hey, you wouldn’t be totally against bumping it up to 4 stars if it revealed a glimmer of potential to get stuck in your head.

4 stars

This song is great! Not only wouldn’t you mind hearing it in a shuffle of all songs in your library, but you’d be happy when it came on! Not only that, it warrants a place in your “Best of Artist” and “Best of Album” smart playlists.

5 stars

OMG! O-M-G! You love what’s happening to your ears right now! It’s, like, amazing and you can’t get enough. In fact, this is a song you want to share with everyone when you get the chance!

Add any additional thoughts or suggestions in the comments.

I’m not going into the reasons here, but I recently needed to uninstall Symantec Antivirus from all client computers on our network (~25 computers) in order to install a new antivirus client. Since it was so few computers, I really could have just sat down at each one and uninstalled the program through Control Panel.  But what fun is that when you can do it remotely?

After reading an article on the subject, I did some more investigating and this is the process I came up with:

1. Download PSTools and unzip into C:\Windows\System32
2. Get the Symantec Antivirus uninstall registry ID from regedit by way of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Uninstall.  Go through the subkeys and search for the one that has Symantec in the Value Name.  For example, I had Symantec Corporate Antivirus v10.x and the ID was {78D891EF-9E2D-4FC8-A71F-E6F897BA1B21}
3. Remotely connect to Symantec System Center server using domain administrator account
4. (Optional: if you require a password to uninstall) Using regedit, remotely connect to each computer to edit registry.  What we’re looking for is under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ INTEL \ LANDesk \ VirusProtect6 \ CurrentVersion \ AdministratorOnly \ Security. Make sure the two values, “LockUnloadServices” and “UseVPUninstallPassword,” are zero.
5. Logged in as a domain admininistrator, using PsExec, run MsiExec to uninstall.  Example,
   C:\>psexec \\COMPUTER_NAME MsiExec.exe /norestart /q /x {78D891EF-9E2D-4FC8-A71F-E6F897BA1B21} REMOVE=ALL

Assuming all went well, you should get an error code of zero, which means everything went successfully.  Should you get any other error code, look it up.

Time Machine has always annoyed me with how frequent it wants to backup.  It takes no consideration what you are currently doing and if you have Time Capsule, your workflow grinds to a complete halt while Time Machine and Time Capsule get buddy-buddy over your network.

My issue is not with Time Machine itself.  It’s a great idea and great program!  I just wish there was a better control panel for it.  Oh well, time to get down and dirty.

From this hint I was able to set the Time Machine backup schedule from one hour to six hours.

Basically, in Terminal, you:

cd /System/Library/LaunchDaemons
sudo vi com.apple.backupd-auto.plist


Note: I’m using the vi editor to do this hack. You can choose any editor you wish, just make sure you have proper permissions.

Once open, you change the property:

<key>StartInterval</key>
<integer>3600</integer>


Where 3600 is the number of seconds you want Time Machine to run. I changed mine to 21600 and voila!

Now maybe I can play a DVD without Time Machine interupting my full screen.