I was a huge fan of MP3 until I prop­erly dis­covered AAC a few months ago. Essen­tially, AAC provides bet­ter qual­ity at lower bitrates — allow­ing you to save loads of hard drive space. The only prob­lem is that there aren’t that many devices and play­ers out there that sup­port AAC whereas vir­tu­ally everything sup­ports MP3. As it hap­pens, though, I only use iTunes and my trusty iPod to play my music — both of which sup­port AAC.

I’ve now had a few months to adjust to AAC and I’ve had no hic­cups at all. I’ve com­pressed my entire col­lec­tion to 96kbps (vari­able) AAC and can’t dis­tin­guish it between CD qual­ity. Of course, you may not have the same exper­i­ence as me and I heav­ily recom­mend that you do a bit of ABX test­ing before you com­mit to any compression.

I recom­mend any­one who listens to their music col­lec­tion on devices that do sup­port AAC, to con­vert their col­lec­tion to AAC.

Hav­ing spent the last three days sort­ing and import­ing some 300–400 images into Power­point, there’s a very use­ful tip that I learnt. And it meant that a job that could have taken a good week took just a few hours.

Instead of drag­ging every single image into each slide, go to Insert in the rib­bon and click the Photo Album icon. There you can select the images you want, order them and decide how many you want on each slide. It will make a new present­a­tion with all these new slides so you will have to copy the slides back into the ori­ginal present­a­tion if you want them there.

I’ll be get­ting a laptop for Sixth Form next year and just wanted to share a few tips with you all:

How Long Will You Have This Laptop?

Laptops are very dif­fi­cult (or expens­ive) to upgrade for the aver­age com­puter user so make sure the hard­ware will still be OK for the life of the laptop.

Do You Really Need A Power­ful Graph­ics Card?

In most cases of school work, you’ll never need a graph­ics card. That said, if you may need one, get one.

Can You Risk Low Bat­tery Life?

Using wall sock­ets when avail­able is obvi­ous but what about when you can’t access mains power? You’ll need to depend on your bat­tery which needs to be fully charged and, where pos­sible, have a lot of power.

Get A Mouse

Even if it’s just a cheap one. Using the track­pad every­day for two years can really be a pain and a time waster. Just get­ting a cheap mouse can save a little time and it may make it easier for you.

Is That Key­board Comfortable?

Quiet­ness is an issue but what’s more import­ant is how com­fort­able you feel typ­ing on it. If you can, try test­ing it out before you buy. You can always buy an external key­board but it’s a lot big­ger than a mouse and can be a hassle in itself.

Are You Get­ting The Best Deal?

Shop around and see what prices you can get.

Don’t Buy Unne­ces­sary Hardware

If you’re able to cus­tom­ize your laptop (like on Dell), then begin cus­tom­iz­ing the cheapest model, only adding on hard­ware that you’ll need. You’ll save a lot of money this way.

Have You Got A Decent Bag?

It’s best not to advert­ise your laptop but you need a decent bag to carry it around. Try one with lots of pad­ding — it’ll pay off on your back and maybe if you drop it.

Instead of turn­ing off your com­puter, you could use it to help fight dis­eases such as AIDS and can­cer with World Com­munity Grid. Its a dis­trib­uted com­puter pro­gram that uses many stand­ard com­puters to per­form the same task, col­lect­ively, as a super com­puter. By using the spare CPU cycles of your com­puter, it can even sur­pass the pro­cessing power of a super com­puter, and hardly make an effect on your pro­ductiv­ity or the speed of your computer.

Cool ways to dis­cover new music are Last.fm and Spo­tify, but what about dis­cov­er­ing your old music? Many iTunes lib­rar­ies have loads of tracks that are never played. By set­ting up a Smart Playl­ist in iTunes, you can auto­mat­ic­ally find these unplayed tracks and redis­cover them.

Smart Playl­ists are dynamic playl­ists, you can use them to just select songs from a group of artists or from a whole dec­ade or genre. Songs that match the rules are placed in the playl­ist. If you so choose, these playl­ists update as you work — any music that fits into the smart playl­ist will auto­mat­ic­ally go in there.

1. Cre­ate A New Smart Playlist

   Go to File > New Smart Playl­ist or press Ctrl+Alt+N. This will be dif­fer­ent on a Mac.

2. “Play Count is 0″

   Using the first drop-down box, select Play Count. Make sure is and 0 fol­low in the drop-down and text box after it.

3. Avoid Pod­casts

   If you want to avoid includ­ing pod­casts, like I do, cre­ate a new rule by press­ing the + but­ton, right of the rule you just cre­ated. This time set the drop-down box to Pod­cast and the second to is false.

4. More Options

   If you only want a cer­tain num­ber of tracks in the playl­ist at any one time, you can use the option boxes under the rule list. It can be ran­dom or sequential.

5. Nam­ing

   After hit­ting OK, you can rename it. I just called it Unplayed.

Check out more Smart Playl­ist ideas at Life­hacker.