Control Option Command

The odds are good that you have to keep track on how much time you spend on any individual project for billing reasons or what have you. If you’re anything like me (and why wouldn’t you be) your fantastic right hemisphere of the brain makes you profoundly sucky at performing this dreary task.
Enter On the job, a quite wonderful little app that’ll do the job for you. However; If you are afflicted to the degree I am with this complete and utter incompetence at important but boring chores, you have difficulties even remembering to open the app to let it do it’s thing. ‘Why Martin, it’s simple’, I hear you exclaim, ‘you just put it in your start-up items, so that every time you start up your work computer it’ll launch the app!’ Well, no. You see, I use a MacBook which I carry between the office and home, and my innate loathing of shit starting up each time I start up my Mac would annoy me to no end. Besides, a more than likely scenario would be me quitting the app when going home and then forgetting to start it up again when I’m back at the office. Yes; I’m that terrible.

I considered this while in the shower, as these things are wont to happen, and came up with the idea of trying to make my laptop sniff out which wi-fi I was connected to and thusly be able to perform certain tasks based on that information. I started trying to work out whether it’d be possible to AppleScript a solution, or whether I’d have to try and apply my nigh-non existing Cocoa skills to pull this off.

Ask and ye shall receive. Of course, if there’s a good idea to be had, most likely someone beat me to it. Enter Marco Polo.
This absolute gem of an app promises (and in the 30 mins I’ve used it; Delivers) context awareness for your Mac based on a whole load of criteria. For my purposes all I had to do was to make it sniff out the SSID of my office Wi-Fi and launch On the Job whenever the rule matched. I’ll also be setting it up to launch MediaLink when at home so that I’ll instantly start streaming media to my PlayStation. Yet these examples are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The possibilities are, perhaps, not endless but certainly numerous. I highly recommend checking out this killer combo, or just Marco Polo if your short term memory is better than mine (not hard) but context awareness might be interesting for you anyway.

On the job is shareware ($25) and Marco Polo is free as in speech and beer.

I love my (1.gen thoroughly hax0red) iPhone and one of the nice things I discovered a while ago (I can’t remember if this is a firmware 2.0 only trick so I can’t say exactly when) is this little trick. When you’re typing a URL in Safari you can hold down the .com key and get a few more choices (.org, .net, .edu), I thought that was pretty cool and attributed the strange choice of “.edu” over say “.co.uk” to a US-centric perspective from the developers.

Before firmware 2.0 I had the dictionary on my phone turned off because it just interfered with my typing, but now that switching between English and Norwegian dictionaries is just a tap away I’ve really come to like it. I was also pleased to see that when I activated the Norwegian keyboard “.no” was now added to the list of domains, and baffled to see that “.net” had been removed while “.edu” was stil there…

Seriously. I can’t remember once typing a .edu URL into a browser. Seeing that I’m on my “Fix everything that bothers me” crusade nowadays I traced down the offending .plist on the phone and fix0red it good. Here’s a two-step guide to get this fixed. You will of course need a Jailbroken iPhone you can SSH into. If that means nothing to you you’ll have to go do some searches on “JailBreak iPhone” and “PwnageTool” first. Come back when you’re ready.

SSH into your iPhone and navigate to

System/Library/Frameworks/UIKit.framework

Find the file corresponding to your language. Norwegian would be “Keyboard-nb.plist” (Norsk Bokmål. Hence the “nb” instead of “no” folks).

Open this file in a plist-editor, such as “Property List Editor” which you’ll have if you installed the developer tools with OS X. If not just google it and get an app that’ll do the job. Scroll to the line that says UI-TopLevelDomain and expand it. You’ll have to change the values in two places as pictured below.

That’s it. Save the file, reboot Safari (just hold the Home button for a while) and you’ve banished that pesky .edu, or whatever you set out to do.

Macs are awesome.

1. Invert the screen

To freak out your friends just wait until they leave the keyboard for a sec and hit CMD – CTRL – OPT – 8.
In fact I used to do this when using my mac during lectures because the inverted screen was less disturbing in the dark.
To reset it just hit the aforementioned key-combo again.

2. Distorted browsing.

1. Set your Dock?s minimize effect to ?Genie? (or the hidden ?Suck? choice, using TinkerTool).
2. Open Applications ? Utilities ? Terminal.

3. Type “killall Dock” (no quotes) but don?t hit Return just yet.
4. Open Safari and load a decent sized website, like Digg.
5. Switch back to the Terminal, keeping the Safari window in view.

6. Shift-click the yellow minimize button of the Safari window, and hit Return to execute the command while the window is busy morphing.

The Dock process will be killed, and it will disappear, leaving the Safari window with nowhere to go. The window will freeze mid-transition. The cool part is that the window is still responsive, and you can scroll around and see the content transform in real-time.

The Dock automatically relaunches, so you don?t have to worry about breaking anything. Finish minimizing the window, or do CMD-W to close it.

(Via Command-Tab.)

3. Zoom with the scroll-wheel

Another functionality that was probably intended for accessibility but can be loads of fun as a prank on a less savvy friend. With a scroll-wheel mouse press ctrl and scroll the wheel to zoom the screen to some ridiculous proportion. Stand back and watch as your buddy panics. To really screw up someones day if the have a pre-Leopard Mac; Zoom the screen just one pixel. This results in everything getting slightly blurry and your buddy/mother-in-law will think there’s something wrong with their monitor.

4. Free psychoanalysis

1. Open a new Terminal window. (Finder -> Applications->Utilities->Terminal).
2. Type “emacs” (no quotes) and hit enter.
3. Press ESC and “X” simultaneously. “M-x” should appear at the bottom.

4. Type “doctor”.

This should launch the Eliza shrink-sim. Fairly silly stuff, but hey! Why shill out for a therapist when you’ve got one sitting in your terminal?

(Apparently you can play tetris and do all sorts of wacky stuff in the terminal. Find more at The Easter Egg Archive.)

5. Knock knock…

Open the “Speech” prefpane in System Preferences and activate “Speech recognition”. Tell your mac to “Tell me a joke” to get a plethora of inane knock knock jokes.

Whenever someone argues their reluctance to buy a Mac I seem to hear the same reasons over and over again. In an attempt to never have to repeat myself again, here's some food for thought on those same old, same old arguments.

1. All my friends have PC's and I need to be able to share files with them.

Ok… This is one of the most-often repeated reasons, and of course it's complete hogwash

.mp3 .doc .pdf .wmv .wma .mpg .mov .txt .rar .zip .psd .jpg .gif .ai .eps .torrent .bmp .xls .csv .rtf .ppt .pps .wav .tif mid .mp4 and just about any other file you would ever get from your PC-friends is cross-platform compatible and you will have no problems whatsoever.
You can't open .exe files (unless you install Windows as well as OS X, which is easily done) of course, but why on earth would you?

2. I only know how to run Windows. I'm afraid I wouldn't understand / like Macs.

Google “Switch to Mac”. Have a look at the results. Now google “Switch to Windows”. The first page turns up only negative stories (“Why I can never Switch to Vista”) and a couple of stories unrelated to people changing their operating system.

So maybe that's unfair since Apple used the exact phrase “Switch to Mac” as an ad, and therefore it's more likely to be used, and in turn searchable. Try “from Mac to Windows” and “from Windows to Mac” then.

Alright. So that didn't really prove anything, but the story repeats itself every time. Switchers love their Mac experience. It's just less painful. That's it. Keep in mind if you click those links by the way; There's about 5% percent Macs against 94% Windows machines out there, and still there's more Mac-lovers than Windows-lovers.

3. There's so much more software available for PCs.

That might be in terms of quantity, but most of that is crappy versions of the same functionality. In terms of quality; as in software needs fulfilled I have yet to be unable to find an app for whatever I want accomplished. And generally speaking; it looks and feels better than the PC equivalent. Check iusethis.com for excellent overview of apps for the Mac.

4. But I don't need a Mac. I only use my computer to surf the web and check my email.

Then why do it on the machine that gets viruses (Or is that virii? Vira? Not nice anyway.)
The Mac platform isn't something you have to justify by being “Power user” or “pro” or anything like that. It makes the simple stuff simpler. The slightly harder stuff simpler and the dangerous stuff safer.

5. Macs are more expensive. I get more for my money if I buy a PC.

Are they now? It seems that may not be true.
Anyway; the marginal difference in price between the two doesn't take into account neither the value of a yummylicious user experience, nor what you'll save on Virus Protection Software.

6. Macs are just for creatives. I need to do real work.

Alright. Let's talk “real work” (although of course, I would generally be talking in terms of not doing it, but I'll make an exception). If you don't need spreadsheets, you'll do fine with iWork + iCal + Mail. (Oh and rumors say the spreadsheet thing will be taken care of in about a week.) Not good enough, even though iWork exports to and imports from your usual Office formats? Alright. Be that way. Go buy Microsoft Office and sully your Mac if you must. So with all that; why not go for the work machine that makes your spare time fun?

7. I don't want to be locked into using just Apple hardware. That “Mighty Mouse” looks sucky.

The Mighty Mouse does look sucky. Personally I use a LogiTech MX Revolution. I also occasionally use a Wacom Tablet, and I've got my EPSON printer, Canon Scanner and Nikon Camera hooked right up. Oh, and with my Sony Ericsson telephone I sync between my Outlook calendar at work and my iCal calendar at home.
There not being drivers for OSX is a complete and utter myth.

8. A Mac is just some sort of gimmicky product that turn people into complete zealots.

Even though this is sort of a throwback to the reasoning I had on #2; Why do you think that is? Do you really believe that all those
Mac users that keep on saying that working on OSX is wonderful compared to Windows first fell in love with the company and then try to defend that position out of some blind loyalty to Steve Jobs?

Consider this; Of all the people you know on Windows, how many of them argue that it's a fantastic experience and that they could never ever switch back to a Mac? Remember that most Mac users have worked a lot on PCs while most Windows users have never tried a Mac, so isn't it pretty obvious that those who choose a Mac make an informed decision? I'll happily admit to being a Mac zealot, and the reason I'm a Mac zealot is because I spend huge amounts of time working at the computer, and therefore I've tested and chosen among the operating systems, and I find OSX wildly preferable to Windows. (Although I do sort of like Linux).

9. Macs are just for toying around. I have no use for ease-to-use iLife or glossy GUIs. I'm a power user and I need a serious platform.

Alright. Let's talk nerdy. My Mac came, out of the box, with a UNIX core, an Apache Server and Ruby On Rails preinstalled. The best text editor for coders I've ever used, bar none, including EMACS is the Mac only appTextMate. (On windows I'll make do with Notepad++). I have installed several Linux distributions on my spare partition and…

Ok… So I'm posing. I'm a nerd, but I really don't know the way of the hacker, or what you really use a UNIX for, so don't take my word for it. Listen to a real nerd, and of course John Gruber has several posts on the topic.

10. I'm a gamer.

Buy a PC.

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Postscript: While writing this entry I googled “reasons not to buy a mac”. The five pages of hits were links to pro Mac articles either refuting or making fun of supposed reasons to stay away from Macs.