Convenient iTunes 11 Keyboard Shortcuts

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Beyond the basic arrow key navigation and space bar to start and stop song playback, there are a few other keyboard shortcuts in
iTunes 11 that can be used to help you navigate its features.


Since the release of iTunes 11, a few convenient keyboard shortcuts have been revealed that offer quick ways to manage playback, navigate the windows, or otherwise deal with some of iTunes' common functions. As with most programs, various shortcuts can be found in the application's menus. However, along with these there are some hidden options that may prove convenient.


Clear play queue
When playing songs in iTunes, we often use the space bar to play and pause a song; however, this does not fully stop playback of the songs in queue. Instead, it functions as a pause command -- when you press the space bar again, the song resumes where it left off. If you would like to stop the playback of the current song in the play queue you can "cancel" it by using the common "Command-period" keyboard shortcut for cancel operations in OS X. A variation on this is to press the space bar followed by the right-arrow key to select the next song without playing it.


Select sections in iTunes
iTunes organizes content into Music, Movies, TV Shows, Books, Apps, and other categories based on what you have purchased from the iTunes store or what you have added to your library. You can select these areas of iTunes by holding the Command key and then typing a corresponding number key:


  • Command-1 = Music

  • Command-2 = Movies

  • Command-3 = TV shows

  • Command-4 = Podcasts

  • Command-5 = iTunes U

  • Command-6 = Books

  • Command-7 = Apps

Adding songs to Up-Next
One of the changes in iTunes 11 is the "Up Next" feature. If you hold the Option key down, a plus button will appear next to the song under your mouse cursor. If clicked, this will put the song in the Up-Next queue. In addition you can simply press Option-Enter to add a selected song to the queue. This is convenient if you are searching and browsing your library with the arrow keys.


Unfortunately this feature does not work with multiple file selections. If you select more than one song and press the Option key, they will all show a plus button; however, if you then press Option-Enter or click the plus button, only the first selection or that which you click will be added to the Up Next queue. This may be a bug in the program or an upcoming feature, but currently is not an implementation in iTunes 11.



Enable keyboard control for "All controls"
By default, Apple offers keyboard support only for interactive controls such as text boxes and buttons. However, you can enable keyboard commands for all controls by pressing Control-F7 or selecting the "All Controls" radio button in the Keyboard system preferences. This allows you to tab through various toolbar and window elements and activate them with the space bar. In iTunes, this enables you to tab through the play and fast-forward buttons, the volume control, the Up Next menu, and the sidebar and its menus, among other window elements.


Custom shortcuts
While these built-in options are useful in iTunes, you can also assign custom shortcuts to various menu items in iTunes for frequently used controls that do not have a default shortcut. This can be done for any application using the "Keyboard Shortcuts" tab in the OS X Keyboard system preferences.



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Be sure to check us out on Twitter and the CNET Mac forums.


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Space Pictures This Week: Green Lantern, Supersonic Star

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o.getItemByID(o.defaultItems.shift());
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WH Lashes Out at 'Congressional Stupidity'

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With only days to come up with a deal to avoid the fiscal cliff, the White House said “congressional stupidity” was damaging the economy but an agreement can be reached if Republican leaders don’t get in the way.


President Obama cut his Hawaiian vacation short and headed back to Washington today while the Senate is scheduled to reconvene on Thursday. House Speaker John Boehner said previously that he would give House members a 48 hour notice of any upcoming vote, which means that the soonest the House could consider a bill would be Saturday — just two days before a deadline to make a deal or trigger a rise in taxes and steep budget cuts.


Boehner, R-Ohio, and other GOP leaders issued a statement today following a conference call saying, “The House has acted on two bills which collectively would avert the entire fiscal cliff if enacted. Those bills await action by the Senate.  If the Senate will not approve and send them to the president to be signed into law in their current form, they must be amended and returned to the House.”


While Boehner put the onus on the president and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a White House official used testy language to  put the responsibility back on Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.


“What we need is for the Senate Minority Leader not to block a vote and for Boehner to allow a vote,” a White House official told ABC News. “The hits from our economy are not coming from outside factors they’re coming from Congressional stupidity.”


Reid’s plan would serve as a Democratic counterpart to Boehner’s plan B, which failed to gain enough support for a vote last week. Boehner left the ball in the Senate’s court after withdrawing  his plan Thursday.


Any plan from Reid is expected to include extending the Bush tax cuts for Americans making $250,000 or less.


Related: What if Bush tax cuts expire?


This has been a sticking point for the left and the right throughout discussions. Democrats believe that lower- and middle-class families should keep the  tax cut, while letting it expire for households making more than $250,000. Republicans counter that no Americans should be forced to pay higher taxes come Jan. 1, though Boehner’s plan would have required those making more than $1 million to lose the cut.


Reid could also propose cuts to tax deductions to generate more federal revenue.


Related: Can the mortgage deduction survive the fiscal cliff?


Michael Ettlinger, vice president for economic policy at the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, said that would make his plan very similar to Obama’s.


“I think this is likely to go smaller more than bigger as they try to gather votes in the Senate,” Ettlinger told ABC News Wednesday. “The Democratic vision of things is fairly clear. Where the Senate Republicans are willing to go is less so. That’s going to be the issue.”


Dan Holler of conservative policy advocacy group Heritage Action for America expects the plan to include an extension of unemployment benefits, something he says would be “extremely counterproductive for the economy.”


Democrats “see it as one of the most stimulative things you can do,” Holler told ABC News Wednesday. “Heritage has great research to go ahead and say this doesn’t really help.”


Related: Fiscal Cliff negotiators search for cuts without sacrifice.


In addition to an immediate measure to stop taxes from going up, Holler suggested there would be a mechanism to compel leaders to do more further down the road, a method he said has not historically been effective at reducing the deficit.


“I think Republicans are going to look at the entire package skeptically,” Holler said of Reid’s expected plan.


Boehner press secretary Michael Steel told ABC News the speaker’s office “will take a look” at Reid’s proposal once he brings it up for a vote or shares his ideas with the House.


Garnering consensus among both parties will be difficult for any plan now. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is trying to bring D.C. politicians together with every coffee cup sold in the District.


Critics have called into question  Boehner’s ability to bring his own party together.


“It seems that, in the House now, Boehner has no control over his extreme right-wing faction,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said on MSNBC Wednesday. “You have, over in the House, a situation where the Republicans are saying, ‘Hey, we don’t think billionaires should pay a nickel more in taxes, but we do think there should be devastating cuts in programs that are impacting working families who are already hurting as a result of the recession.’ So that’s the problem that we have.”


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New Scientist 2012 holiday quiz

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THIS was the year we held our breath in almost unbearable anticipation while we waited to see whether physicists at the Large Hadron Collider would finally get a clear view of the Higgs boson, so tantalisingly hinted at last December. Going a bit blue, we held on through March when one of the LHC's detectors seemed to lose sight of the thing, before exhaling in a puff of almost-resolution in July, when researchers announced that the data added up to a fairly confident pretty-much-actual-discovery of the particle.












Early indications were that it might be a weird and wonderful variety of the Higgs, prompting a collective gasp of excitement. That was followed by a synchronised sigh of mild disappointment when later data implied that it was probably the most boring possible version after all, and not a strange entity pointing the way to new dimensions and the true nature of dark matter. Prepare yourself for another puff or two as the big story moves on next year.













This respirational rollercoaster might be running a bit too slowly to supply enough oxygen to the brain of a New Scientist reader, so we have taken care to provide more frequent oohs and aahs using less momentous revelations. See how many of the following unfundamental discoveries you can distinguish from the truth-free mimics that crowd parasitically around them.












1. Which of these anatomical incongruities of the animal kingdom did we describe on 14 July?












  • a) A fish, found in a canal in Vietnam, that wears its genitals under its mouth
  • b) A frog, found in a puddle in Peru, that has no spleen
  • c) A lizard, found in a cave in Indonesia, that has four left feet
  • d) A cat, found in a tree in northern England, that has eight extra teeth

2. "A sprout by any other name would taste as foul." So wrote William Shakespeare in his diary on 25 December 1598, setting off the centuries of slightly unjust ridicule experienced by this routinely over-cooked vegetable. But which forbiddingly named veg did we report on 7 July as having more health-giving power than the sprout, its active ingredient being trialled as a treatment for prostate cancer?












  • a) Poison celery
  • b) Murder beans
  • c) Inconvenience potatoes
  • d) Death carrots

3. Scientists often like to say they are opening a new window on things. Usually that is a metaphor, but on 10 November we reported on a more literal innovation in the fenestral realm. It was:












  • a) A perspex peephole set in the nest of the fearsome Japanese giant hornet, to reveal its domestic habits
  • b) A glass porthole implanted in the abdomen of a mouse, to reveal the process of tumour metastasis
  • c) A crystal portal in the inner vessel of an experimental thorium reactor, to reveal its nuclear fires to the naked eye
  • d) A small window high on the wall of a basement office in the Princeton physics department, to reveal a small patch of sky to postgraduate students who have not been outside for seven years

4. On 10 March we described a new material for violin strings, said to produce a brilliant and complex sound richer than that of catgut. What makes up these super strings?












  • a) Mousegut
  • b) Spider silk
  • c) Braided carbon nanotubes
  • d) An alloy of yttrium and ytterbium

5. While the peril of climate change looms inexorably larger, in this festive-for-some season we might take a minute to look on the bright side. On 17 March we reported on one benefit of global warming, which might make life better for some people for a while. It was:












  • a) Receding Arctic sea ice will make it easier to lay undersea cables to boost internet speeds
  • b) Increasing temperatures mean that Greenlanders can soon start making their own wine
  • c) Rising sea levels could allow a string of new beach resorts to open in the impoverished country of Chad
  • d) More acidic seawater will add a pleasant tang to the salt water taffy sweets made in Atlantic City

6. In Alaska's Glacier Bay national park, the brown bear in the photo (above, right) is doing something never before witnessed among bearkind, as we revealed on 10 March. Is it:












  • a) Making a phonecall?
  • b) Gnawing at a piece of whalebone to dislodge a rotten tooth?
  • c) Scratching itself with a barnacle-covered stone tool?
  • d) Cracking oysters on its jaw?

7. Men have much in common with fruit flies, as we revealed on 24 March. When the sexual advances of a male fruit fly are rejected, he may respond by:












  • a) Whining
  • b) Hitting the booze
  • c) Jumping off a tall building
  • d) Hovering around the choosy female long after all hope is lost

8. While great Higgsian things were happening at the LHC, scientists puzzled over a newly urgent question: what should we call the boson? Peter Higgs wasn't the only physicist to predict its existence, and some have suggested that the particle's name should also include those other theorists or perhaps reflect some other aspect of the particle. Which of the following is a real suggestion that we reported on 24 March?

























Continue reading page

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If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.




































All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.


If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.








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Hawkish Abe to be named Japan's next prime minister

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TOKYO: Japan's conservative leader Shinzo Abe is to be named as the country's new prime minister Wednesday, after he swept to power on a hawkish platform of getting tough on diplomacy while fixing the economy.

The powerful lower house will name the 58-year-old as leader in an extraordinary session Wednesday afternoon, following a resounding national election victory for his Liberal Democratic Party earlier this month.

As Japan's seventh premier in less than seven years, Abe will replace outgoing Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda whose Democratic Party of Japan suffered a stinging defeat at the polls.

The party, which came to power in 2009, was seen as being punished for policy flip-flops and its clumsy handling of last year's atomic disaster at Fukushima.

Noda's cabinet is to resign en masse Wednesday morning before the LDP-controlled lower house names Abe as Japan's leader.

Abe, who previously served as prime minister from 2006 to 2007, is expected to form a new cabinet later in the day as he rushes to draft an extra budget to spur the nation's flagging economy.

Japanese media have suggested Abe was likely to tap close associates and senior party members for key posts.

Taro Aso, another former prime minister in Japan's revolving-door political system, was widely expected to be named as both Abe's deputy and also finance minister, the reports said.

Japan's new foreign minister was likely to be Fumio Kishida, 55, who served as a state minister in charge of Okinawan affairs under Abe's previous tenure.

The expected appointment was seen as a reflection of Abe's desire for progress on the relocation of US military bases in the southern island chain.

Sadakazu Tanigaki, the head of the LDP when the party was in opposition after ruling Japan for most of the past six decades, is tipped to become the country's justice minister, the reports said.

Abe won conservative support with nationalistic pronouncements on diplomacy in the midst of a territorial row with Beijing over a group of East China Sea islands, saying Japan would stand firm on its claim to the chain.

But he quickly toned down the campaign rhetoric and has said he wants improved ties with China, Japan's biggest trading partner.

Abe called for a solution through what he described as "patient exchanges".

The new leader, whose key campaign platform was reviving the world's third-largest economy, has also said he would look at revising Japan's post-war pacifist constitution, alarming officials in China and South Korea.

He vowed to pressure the Bank of Japan for further easing measures to boost growth, while also promising big government spending to spur the economy.

Analysts said Abe was likely to hold off drastic policy measures ahead of upper house elections next year, while the LDP's moderate junior coalition partner New Komeito could balance his right-leaning instincts.

-AFP/ac



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Netflix outage mars Christmas Eve

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Netflix's video streaming service suffered a Christmas Eve outage on "many but not all devices" across the Americas, according to the company.


The outage continued into Christmas morning for some customers. The company tweeted on its Netflix US account at 8:45 a.m. PT today that the service was "back to normal streaming levels."


Netflix first started responding to tweets about disrupted service before 1 p.m. PT yesterday. About three hours later, Netflix offered an apology on its main Twitter account.


"We're sorry for the Christmas Eve outage. Terrible timing! Engineers are working on it now," Netflix said in a tweet in the late afternoon yesterday.



Netflix pinned the issue on Amazon Web Services servers and said it was working with Amazon engineers on a fix.


By evening, Netflix noted that the problem was not yet resolved and promised to tweet as soon as it was back up.


Netflix spokesman Joris Evers e-mailed a statement to CNET today about the outage, noting that "streaming was available again for the majority of our members late on Christmas Eve Pacific Time."


Netflix tagged the outage as starting around 12:30 p.m. PT. The number of devices affected by the outage was "initially limited but grew in scope" over the afternoon, Evers said.




"We...apologize for any inconvenience caused last night," today's statement said. "We are investigating the cause and will do what we can to prevent reccurrence."


Not surprisingly, many angry customers poured out their wrath via social networking. However, Joel Braverman, developer program coordinator at Roku, looked at the bright side.


"Thanks to @netflix outage we can likely expect a moderate population explosion in nine months," he tweeted today.


This story was updated at 10:50 a.m. PT.

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Photos: Humboldt Squid Have a Bad Day at the Beach

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Photograph by Chris Elmenhurst, Surf the Spot Photography

“Strandings have been taking place with increased frequency along the west coast over the past ten years,” noted NOAA’s Field, “as this population of squid seems to be expanding its range—likely a consequence of climate change—and can be very abundant at times.” (Learn about other jumbo squid strandings.)

Humboldt squid are typically found in warmer waters farther south in theGulf of California (map) and off the coast ofPeru. “[But] we find them up north here during warmer water time periods,” said ocean sciences researcherKenneth Bruland with the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).

Coastal upwelling—when winds blowing south drive ocean circulation to bring cold, nutrient-rich waters up from the deep—ceases during the fall and winter and warmer water is found closer to shore. Bruland noted that climate change, and the resulting areas of low oxygen, “could be a major factor” in drawing jumbo squid north.

Published December 24, 2012

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Gunman Killed Firemen With Bushmaster, Left Note

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A convicted killer, who shot dead two firefighters with a Bushmaster assault rifle after leading them into an ambush when they responded to a house fire he set in Western New York, left behind a typewritten note saying he wanted to "do what I like doing best, killing people," police said.


William Spengler, 62, set his home and a car on fire early Monday morning with the intention of setting a trap to kill firefighters and to see "how much of the neighborhood I can burn down," according to the note he wrote and which police found at the scene. The note did not give a reason for his actions.


Spengler, who served 18 years in prison for beating his 92-year-old grandmother to death with a hammer in 1981, hid Monday morning in a small ditch beside a tree overlooking the sleepy lakeside street in Webster, N.Y., where he lived with his sister, police said today in a news conference.


Police said they found remains in the house, believed to be that of the sister, Cheryl Spengler, 67.


As firefighters arrived on the scene after a 5:30 a.m. 911 call on the morning of Christmas Eve, Spengler opened fire on them with the Bushmaster, the same semi-automatic, military-style weapon used in the Dec. 14 rampage killing of 20 children in Newtown, Conn.




"This was a clear ambush on first responders… Spengler had armed himself heavily and taken area of cover," said Gerald Pickering, the chief of the Webster Police Department.


Armed with a Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver, a Mossman 12-gauge shotgun, and the Bushmaster, Spengler killed two firefighters, and injured two more as well as an off-duty police officer at the scene.


As a convicted felon, Spengler could not legally own a firearm and police are investigating how he obtained the weapons.


One firefighter tried to take cover in his fire engine and was killed with a gunshot through the windshield, Pickering said.


Responding police engaged in a gunfight with Spengler, who ultimately died, likely by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.


As police engaged the gunman, more houses along Lake Ontario were engulfed, ultimately razing seven of them. Some 33 people in adjoining homes were displaced by the fire.


SWAT teams were forced to evacuate residents using armored vehicles.


Police identified the two slain firefighter as Lt. Michael Chiapperini, a 20-year veteran of the Webster Police Department and "lifetime firefighter," according to Pickering, and Tomasz Kaczowka, who also worked as a 911 dispatcher.


Two other firefighters were wounded and remain the intensive care unit at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, N.Y.


Joseph Hofsetter was shot once. He sustained an injury to his pelvis and has "a long road to recovery," said Dr. Nicole A. Stassen, a trauma physician.


The second firefighter, Theodore Scardino, was shot twice and received injuries to his left shoulder and left lung, as well as a knee.



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New Scientist 2012 holiday quiz

Label:
















Continue reading page

|1

|2





































THIS was the year we held our breath in almost unbearable anticipation while we waited to see whether physicists at the Large Hadron Collider would finally get a clear view of the Higgs boson, so tantalisingly hinted at last December. Going a bit blue, we held on through March when one of the LHC's detectors seemed to lose sight of the thing, before exhaling in a puff of almost-resolution in July, when researchers announced that the data added up to a fairly confident pretty-much-actual-discovery of the particle.












Early indications were that it might be a weird and wonderful variety of the Higgs, prompting a collective gasp of excitement. That was followed by a synchronised sigh of mild disappointment when later data implied that it was probably the most boring possible version after all, and not a strange entity pointing the way to new dimensions and the true nature of dark matter. Prepare yourself for another puff or two as the big story moves on next year.













This respirational rollercoaster might be running a bit too slowly to supply enough oxygen to the brain of a New Scientist reader, so we have taken care to provide more frequent oohs and aahs using less momentous revelations. See how many of the following unfundamental discoveries you can distinguish from the truth-free mimics that crowd parasitically around them.












1. Which of these anatomical incongruities of the animal kingdom did we describe on 14 July?












  • a) A fish, found in a canal in Vietnam, that wears its genitals under its mouth
  • b) A frog, found in a puddle in Peru, that has no spleen
  • c) A lizard, found in a cave in Indonesia, that has four left feet
  • d) A cat, found in a tree in northern England, that has eight extra teeth

2. "A sprout by any other name would taste as foul." So wrote William Shakespeare in his diary on 25 December 1598, setting off the centuries of slightly unjust ridicule experienced by this routinely over-cooked vegetable. But which forbiddingly named veg did we report on 7 July as having more health-giving power than the sprout, its active ingredient being trialled as a treatment for prostate cancer?












  • a) Poison celery
  • b) Murder beans
  • c) Inconvenience potatoes
  • d) Death carrots

3. Scientists often like to say they are opening a new window on things. Usually that is a metaphor, but on 10 November we reported on a more literal innovation in the fenestral realm. It was:












  • a) A perspex peephole set in the nest of the fearsome Japanese giant hornet, to reveal its domestic habits
  • b) A glass porthole implanted in the abdomen of a mouse, to reveal the process of tumour metastasis
  • c) A crystal portal in the inner vessel of an experimental thorium reactor, to reveal its nuclear fires to the naked eye
  • d) A small window high on the wall of a basement office in the Princeton physics department, to reveal a small patch of sky to postgraduate students who have not been outside for seven years

4. On 10 March we described a new material for violin strings, said to produce a brilliant and complex sound richer than that of catgut. What makes up these super strings?












  • a) Mousegut
  • b) Spider silk
  • c) Braided carbon nanotubes
  • d) An alloy of yttrium and ytterbium

5. While the peril of climate change looms inexorably larger, in this festive-for-some season we might take a minute to look on the bright side. On 17 March we reported on one benefit of global warming, which might make life better for some people for a while. It was:












  • a) Receding Arctic sea ice will make it easier to lay undersea cables to boost internet speeds
  • b) Increasing temperatures mean that Greenlanders can soon start making their own wine
  • c) Rising sea levels could allow a string of new beach resorts to open in the impoverished country of Chad
  • d) More acidic seawater will add a pleasant tang to the salt water taffy sweets made in Atlantic City

6. In Alaska's Glacier Bay national park, the brown bear in the photo (above, right) is doing something never before witnessed among bearkind, as we revealed on 10 March. Is it:












  • a) Making a phonecall?
  • b) Gnawing at a piece of whalebone to dislodge a rotten tooth?
  • c) Scratching itself with a barnacle-covered stone tool?
  • d) Cracking oysters on its jaw?

7. Men have much in common with fruit flies, as we revealed on 24 March. When the sexual advances of a male fruit fly are rejected, he may respond by:












  • a) Whining
  • b) Hitting the booze
  • c) Jumping off a tall building
  • d) Hovering around the choosy female long after all hope is lost

8. While great Higgsian things were happening at the LHC, scientists puzzled over a newly urgent question: what should we call the boson? Peter Higgs wasn't the only physicist to predict its existence, and some have suggested that the particle's name should also include those other theorists or perhaps reflect some other aspect of the particle. Which of the following is a real suggestion that we reported on 24 March?

























Continue reading page

|1

|2



























If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.




































All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.


If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.








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Son of late icon Kennedy rules out US Senate run

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WASHINGTON: A son of late political icon Edward Kennedy said Monday he will not run for the US Senate in Massachusetts -- the same state his father represented for nearly five decades -- US media reported.

Edward Kennedy Jr's brother, former US representative Patrick Kennedy, had said over the weekend that the health care lawyer was seriously considering running for the US Senate seat that John Kerry will vacate if he is confirmed as secretary of state.

But Kennedy Jr, who lives in neighboring Connecticut, denied in a statement that he was seeking public office in Massachusetts.

"Although I have a strong desire to serve in public office, I consider Connecticut to be my home, and I hope to have the honor to serve at another point in my future," the 51-year-old said in the text cited by CNN.

Kennedy, who also owns a house at his family's compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, said he was "extremely grateful for all the offers of support" of a potential run, and left the door open to running "at another point in my future."

A source familiar with his decision said Kennedy had ruled out a run because he did not want to uproot his family, did not feel right about moving from Connecticut to Massachusetts to run for the seat and Connecticut officials have urged him to stay for a later political campaign there, according to the Globe.

"He really wants to run," an unnamed family friend told CNN. "He just thinks this isn't the way to do it. Uprooting his family right now doesn't make sense."

If Kennedy had run, he likely would have had to face outgoing Republican Senator Scott Brown, who was defeated last month in his bid to be re-elected to the seat left vacant when the late Edward Kennedy died in 2009.

Just six weeks after Democratic consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren defeated Brown in the November election, President Barack Obama nominated Kerry on Friday to be his secretary of state.

If Kerry is confirmed in the post, Brown is expected to vie for his Senate seat. Among Democrats, US Representatives Michael Capuano and Ed Markey have hinted at a possible run.

-AFP/ac



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