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My family has a shared iMac G5 running Leopard OS X 10.5.7 and iTunes 8.2 (both the latest as of 13 July 2009), and recently I noticed we were running low on disk space, so I did some digging via du at the command line. I found that we were eating space by ingesting CDs into iTunes, which would get copied to our respective local user folders.

After a little research, I found the Apple KB article that describes how to have a single storage location for music, so I set that up and made some other discoveries in the process. I thought I'd share how I did it.

productivity itunes shared library music

Text substitution tools. Personally, I use Text Expander which is quite excellent on the Mac, but LifeHacker recommends ActiveText for Windows. —Rick Cogley

|| From the site: These days, most of us end up having to type at the computer on a daily basis. Some of us are fast and some are slow - but regardless of your typing proficiency, text substitutions can save us all an unbelievable amount of time. The basic idea is to replace a small bit of text with a larger bit of text. So maybe you set 'name' to 'your full name'. Admittedly, this is probably overkill, but it gets the idea across. Apply a small amount of effort and simple text substitution becomes a tool more powerful and dynamic than you might have imagined. Let's see just how much we can streamline your time at the keyboard.

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An interesting web-based PM tool. I like the fact that they are flexible about file-storage size and are willing to create a plan that fits the user's needs. --Rick Cogley

From the site: "5pm™ is a next generation web based project management tool
Looking for a better way to stay organized?
5pm can be your central location for project and task management, team collaboration, time tracking, reporting and more...
Start today and get more done by 5pm! "

web2.0 tools organizer management project productivity 5pm projectmanagement

DEVONthink is a powerful personal information organization tool with artificial intelligence built in. Archive and analyze various pieces of info with this tool. Version 2.0 coming soon, as of Dec 2008.

From their website: "Meet DEVONthink — designed to manage and keep in order all those disparate pieces of information so important to your work or studies. As you become more experienced with DEVONthink and its easy, intuitive interface you will quickly find more exciting ways of using your data."

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Very easy-to-use time and expense tracking system, in the ruby-on-rails style of 37Signals. Free version for a single user and two projects, reasonable prices for more users and projects. Excellent reporting.

From their site: "Harvest lets you and your staff track time, log expenses, and create invoices in one simple, integrated workflow. Set yourself or your team up on Harvest in just a few minutes, and instantly start tracking time and expenses. Use the Harvest graphical reports to see the distribution of your company's resources in a visual, intuitive way. Quickly create an invoice, and with just a single click, bill your client. You'll see your revenue come in faster with Harvest. Give Harvest a try and improve your business today. "

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This is an interesting utility that allows you to automatically choose OS X Locations based on what connections are detected. A la: "I can see the company printer, so this must be the Location Company".

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Blank Canvas makes a plugin for Firefox that works in Flock too - it lets you put HTML in your Gmail signatures. Excellent!

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All about Twitter

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