Daily Battles: How To Keep Track Of Videos in a YouTube Playlist In Case Videos Are Deleted

If you create playlists on YouTube to group videos/songs you like together, it is a real pain when you go back to the playlist one day and find out that some videos are either deleted or made private (like the picture below). The worst part is that you don't remember what video you put in there, so you can't just find another copy to replace it!!

So next time after you have put in all the hard work for a playlist (like this one, for example, Lanny's List of Just Nice Songs), make sure to back up the names so you can always go back to find out which video on your list has disappeared.

So how do you back up the list easily? For example, as a text file?

What I found very useful is this free online tool at TuneMyMusic.com. The instructions on the screens are super intuitive:

1. You select YouTube as the source (you can also do this for other popular sites like Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, or Amazon Music).

2. Next, you put in the link of your playlist and click Load playlist.

3. On the next screen, you can leave everything selected, or only select the videos you are interested in saving. Then click Select Destination.

4. Now, just select Export to file. You have the option to select TXT or CSV as the output format. I personally prefer CSV (Comma Separated Values) format, because you can open it from any spreadsheet or database program, and then it's really easy to sort.

5. At the last screen, just click STart Moving My Music and then specify where you want to store the text file on your computer.

As you probably already figured out, you can use this same free tool to move a playlist from one music source (e.g., Amazon Music) to your favorite music platform (e.g., Spotify).

Here are the screenshots of all the steps in case you need it.

Always backup your playlist. Don't let your work go to waste!

By the way, if you are interested to know how you can download all videos in a YouTube playlist in batch, check out my other post below.

Daily Battles: How To Download All Videos In a YouTube Playlist In Batch

Leave a comment if you find my blogs useful. You can also follow me on Twitter for more useful tips and tutorials!

Video (Playlist) of the Day:

Lanny's List of Just Nice Songs (Be warned, it's a lot of nice songs!)

Starting with one from a neighbor indie artist!

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is blog.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: How to Restart Bluetooth on Mac Mojave from Terminal

Mac OSX is not a great operating system when it comes to Bluetooth. Things get especially bad when you use Bluetooth for external speakers or wireless headphones. If you were playing music, the sound will break up and stays breaking up. In other words, the Bluetooth service on your Mac doesn't know how to recover from a bad state.

One thing you can do is to just go to the top right of the menu bar and then right-click the Bluetooth icon to turn Bluetooth off and then back on. But sometimes that icon is just not there.

If so, you can always go to the system preferences screen, find Bluetooth settings, and then turn Bluetooth off there.

But one problem you likely will have is that as soon as you turn Bluetooth off, you realize you just disconnected your mouse or your trackpad because most likely they are Bluetooth devices.

So is there a way to fully restart Bluetooth service (turn if off, and then turn it back on, and then reconnect all your Bluetooth devices) just from your terminal (using the command line)?

You are in luck. The answer is a definite YES! And this method works not only on Mojave but also on other versions of Mac OS as well!!

So here's what you have to do.

1. First you need to install a utility called blueutil. Run this command to install it: 

brew install blueutil

2. Once the utility is installed, you just have to run this command:

blueutil -p 0 && sleep 1 && blueutil -p 1

If you don't want to remember all the parameters, just put this in a shell script file and call the script each time you want to restart Bluetooth service.

That's it, it's that simple!! You don't have to use the laptop touchpad to turn on Bluetooth again (because likely you have it closed and connect to multiple external monitors! You don't have to reboot your computer. You just run your script!! Credit goes to DjDCH on StackExchange.

If you find this kind of tip useful, you should definitely also read my other blog about restarting audio services on MacOS.

God created the keyboard so we can do everything just using the keyboard! 







BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://blog.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: How to Find Large Files on Your Mac Computer

If you are looking for tools for other operating systems or devices, see these links below.

Find large files on your Android Phone

Free space and delete unwanted files on your iPhone or iPad

How to find large files on your Windows Computer

No matter how big your hard drive is, one day you'll realize you are running low on storage space and have to do some housekeeping.

So what is the best way to find out what's eating up your hard drive space on your Mac computer? You could use Finder and search by file size. But that is just not a very convenient way to find where the large files are located. It also doesn't tell you if a folder is using up a lot of space, even though the files in that folder are not the largest ones.

The easiest way I've found is to use a free app called:

Disk Inventory X

Use the above link to download the installation file (.dmg) to your Mac computer, then double click to open the container and then drag the app file to your Application folder.

To open the app, you need to open the Application folder in Finder, and then Control+Click the app. Then select open, and you'll see a popup like the one below where you can allow the app to run.

Click open to start the app, and then select a hard drive it starts the scan (might take a while), and you'll see a screen that looks like this below.

On the left, you have a folder view where you can see which folder is taking up large chunks of your hard drive. You can also drill down to subfolders and see the space usage of each.

In the middle, you have what's called a "treemap" where large blocks represent large files. Blocks are color-coded by document type. For example, all movie files are in one color while all application files are in another color. You can click on a block to see where the file is located and how much space it is using. You can also just right click on the block and select "move to trash" to delete the file.

On the right, you have a breakdown of your hard drive usage by file type.

One important thing to remember is that after you "move to trash," you need to empty your trash to really claim the storage back.

Hope you find this useful. If you need a place to archive your large files such as movies or music, you can get a 4TB external hard drive that's completely powered by your computer from Amazon for about $90.

Moving on to the next Daily Battle!

Video of the Day:

Ran into an excellent Kung-Fu beer commercial! Be like beer!

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://blog.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: How to free space and delete unwanted files on your iPhone or iPad

If you are looking for tools for other operating systems or devices, see these links below.

Find large files on your Android Phone

How to find large files on your Windows Computer

Find large files on your Mac Computer

No matter how much storage space our iPhone (iPad) has, make it 256GB, we'll still find ways to fill it up and get the dreaded Storage Full warning message.

So what are ways to free up storage space on your iPhone? There are four categories you can look into.

1. Delete apps that you no longer use.
2. Offload apps you don't use very often.
3. Free up storage from apps that save a lot of data.
4. Find large files and remove them.

Delete apps that you no longer use

You can just press on the app icon and hold until all the icons start shaking and also shows a cross at the upper corner. Then press the cross will delete the app.

What I recommend is to go into Settings, General, iPhone Storage, and then scroll down to see the apps with their storage data usage listed. Then select one of them will open the settings page for that app and you have the option to Delete. This way you can delete the app that uses a lot of storage.

Offload apps you don't use very often

Sometimes you have an app that you don't use often but would still want to use it occasionally. So you don't want to delete the app and lose your data.

In this case, you can use the feature in iOS called Offload Apps. What this feature does is that it will remove the app from your device to save space, but it will keep the icon still on the screen and also keep all the user data. Next time you open the app, it reinstalls the app and then puts your data back so you never lose any settings or user data.

To enable this feature, you can follow the instructions in this article:

How to enable offload unusaved app on your iPhone and iPad

Free up storage from apps that save a lot of data

Some apps are notorious when it comes to using a lot of space. One such example is WeChat, which will just keep using Gigabytes of free space until your storage is full. Other social media apps might also use a lot of your space, such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc..

What I recommend with this kind of apps is to delete the app and then reinstall it. This will get rid of all the saved data (such as old video clips, large images, etc.) and really free up lots of storage space.

Just following instructions from the first section of this blog by going into Settings, General, iPhone Storage, and then scroll down to see the apps with the most storage usage and delete from there.

File large files and remove them

The last one, actually probably the most useful one, is to manage large files on your iOS device. These are typically video files either attached in a message or email or simply videos you recorded yourself.

For large file attachments, you can actually review large attachments. Go into Settings, General, iPhone Storage, and then scroll down to the app that might have large attachments. Click on the app and you'll see the Review Large Attachments option.

For videos you recorded yourself, with older iOS versions, there's really no easy way to review file size. The best you can do is to open the Photos app, and then just scroll through to see if you have long video clips (you can see the length info in the clip thumbnail). The longer the clip, likely the larger the file size.

With newer iOS devices (e.g., with iOS 14.2), though, Apple has made life a bit easier for users.  Just go to your Albums and look under Media Types Videos. You can see all your videos with their size information right there. You can also go into Photos settings (Settings, General, iPhone Storage, and select Photos app), and then click Review Personal Videos. Just find the really big ones that you don't really need and delete them to free up more space.

Hope this can be helpful for iOS users. Remember, maintenance is always an important task for your computing devices.

The more resource you provide, the more resources people will use.







BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://blog.lannyland.com

Daily Battles: Microsoft Word Synonym menu empty and not showing any synonyms

If you use Microsoft Word for creative writing (or translation), you probably use a feature in Word called Synonyms Suggestion. You select a word in your doc, right-click on it, and then select Synonyms from the menu. Word will then suggest a bunch of words that have similar meanings to you. To be honest, it is also a good way to learn new vocabulary.

And one day, after right-clicking on the word, you find an empty list when you go to the Synonyms submenu. Does it mean there are no synonyms for the word you selected? You start testing other words and soon realize something is wrong and you can no longer use the synonyms feature.

Well, I had the exact problem. But don't worry, I also found the solution. The problem is because Word somehow got confused on the language of the document. And when it doesn't know or think you are using a different language, it doesn't know what synonyms to get (such as the one shown below).

To fix this problem, use CTRL+A to select the entire document, then go to Review on your menu, and then click the Language button on your tool ribbon. Make sure you select English and then click OK. Now if you try the Synonyms submenu again, everything is back to normal.

Hope this helps those that also ran into this problem. Happy writing (or translating)!!

Caring for indoor plants can reduce stress (unless it is a cactus).

BTW: The easiest way to remember my blog address is http://blog.lannyland.com