Reason #564 to love my iPod

My iPod is a wonderful thing. Aside from the fact that it has all my chick rock, Beatles records and yoga music on it (among others), my favorite feature is this: it saves me paper.

That's right—in its brief life as mine, my iPod has prevented me from printing out countless sheets of directions to various places, text from websites, and it's occasionally served as a replacement jump drive in times of need.

For those who might not be aware of this feature, those of us who are on Mac OSX already know that the iPod is set up to sync with iCal and your Address book. What I do is cut and paste directions to wherever it is I have to go from Yahoo Maps into the "notes" section of the iCal event (it's important to note that when you do this, you have to manually type in the R's and L's that normally appear in circles in the Yahoo directions, as they don't show up in your iCal text). In doing this, I have managed to save about a half a ream of paper thus far that would normally be used to print directions from Yahoo Maps.

Another handy little feature I've found is that you can also move text-only files over into the "Notes" section of your iPod and read them on the screen. This works well if you have BBEdit Lite —I've found that Text Edit leaves funky characters in the text.