It’s the little things

I know that I shouldn’t be too starry-eyed about the new Administration. Government has an enormous amount of inertia. It’s hard to make big (positive) changes and harder to do it quickly but I just can’t help but be encouraged by the little things that they are doing. Small bites that can make a meal of large problems.

For example the Stimulus package requires that government agencies report how they spend the money in an Atom/RSS feed. By itself this is not a big deal, what percentage of the population knows what RSS is or could do anything with the data that comes out of it. What excites me about this is that by making data available to organizations that can do something with it the Administration is taking its job and its citizens seriously.

Find Lost Podcasts Again

I use iTunes to manage podcasts. I typically delete the podcasts after I’ve listened to them. This is fine for most episodes, but every once in a while I want to refer to one again later. The default behavior of iTunes is to remove the podcast from the list on deletion. I would prefer that it revert to un-downloaded with a “get” button. I’d peered at the context menu over and over again, willing an option to be there but no. Refresh seemed like a candidate, but it only checks to see if there is a new episode since you last checked and does not “refresh” the list. The only way I knew to get the whole list back was to unsubscribe and then resubscribe. This has the unfortunate side effect of requiring you to delete and reacquire any podcasts you haven’t gotten to yet.

It turns out there is a way around this. Hoist the list by clicking on the triangle to the left of the show title. Then hold down the option key while clicking it again to expand the list. iTunes will refresh the entire list for you. Yay!

I need to remember the option key more often. I get decent results when I am wishing that an app would do something different by trying the logically closest command or button again with the option key down.