Posts filed under 'Apple'
In System Preferences > Energy Saver, I have my display set to turn off after one minute. Since my iMac never goes to sleep, and it’s in my room, I prefer this setting. But it can get annoying when my display goes to sleep after one minute because I’m reading something and thus am not using the mouse or keyboard.
I tried finding a way to manually turn off the display (app, AppleScript, shell script, anything), but in vain. However, I stumbled upon a very simple workaround: Whenever I wish to prevent my display from going to sleep, I simply turn on the Visualizer in iTunes.
Note: This will not work if hide iTunes or disable the iTunes window, as both of these will stop the Visualizer.
February 27th, 2006
The other day I installed iLife ‘06. When it was done, the Dock quit but did not relaunch. To get it back, I would normally log out and back in. I didn’t want to do that in the middle of a DVD burn, and I didn’t want to wait either (duh! I’m an impatient, solution oriented geek).
Using the system without the Dock would normally have been pretty much impossible. However, I was running QuickSilver, so I just used that to lanch Opera. I googled, but wasn’t able to immediately find anything useful. Then it struck me that I’d seen the Dock in Activity Monitor running as an application, not a service or anything fancy.
So I fired up Terminal (again thanks to QS) and typed find / -name "Dock.app". And bingo, there it was: /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/.
With that little piece of information, launching the dock was trivial:
open /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/
There you have it. You know, just in case.
February 3rd, 2006
Sometimes it’s annoying that you can’t carry your iBook (and PowerBook/MacBook Pro I must assume) around in “clamshell” mode; that is with the lid closed, but not in sleep mode. When I wish to carry my iBook from e.g. my desk to a meeting room, I close the lid as much as possible without putting the iBook to sleep. I found out that the difference between too little and too much is the equivalent of the width of my thumb. Try it: Let your thumb rest (sideways) on the edge of the hand rest, then pull the lid down until it touches your thumb–my thumb has the perfect size, but your milage may vary. That’s it!
When I set up my blog, I created a category called “Tips & Tricks”. The idea was to supply exactly what the name says. This was very trivial but it’s a start and I hope someone can use it.
January 29th, 2006
I’m a Dvorak typist (yes, it’s better, stop asking) and really enjoy the Dvorak layout that comes with Mac OS X. I like it especially because it allows me to easily enter characters which happen to be outside of the A-Z range. I press Option-S to enter “ø” and Option-F followed by A to enter “ä” for example (these examples are based on the keys’ physical position on my iBook’s US Qwerty keyboard). Although a bit difficult to get in to, it is much better than other flavors of the Dvorak layout, which try to solve the problem by having separate keys for each character. But that introduces the problem of jumbling the keys around once more, and still doesn’t allow me to easily type “ménage à trois avec Synnøve et Amélie”. As if that wasn’t enough, characters I often need (< , >, [, ], {, }, ~) also scatter like antelopes running from a predator. The OS X flavor of Dvorak let’s me have my cake and eat it, too.
At work I use Ubuntu Linux on my primary machine, along with my iBook and a machine running Windows XP [sound of an old sailor choking on his snuff and spitting heavily]. The Dvorak flavors included in Linux distributions suffer from the symptoms mentioned above. I have been resorting to replace “æ”, “ø” and “å” with their phonetic or historic counterparts (”ae”, “oe” and “aa”), respectively), which obviously is suboptimal. There had to be a better way.
The biggest part of the problem was to learn how the keyboard configuration files work, and how the system treats them. The documentation for the different solution candidates I could come up with was–as it sadly is with many open source projects–scarce and poor, and left me back at square one. (If you feel like bashing me for the previous statement, you’ve probably been there yourself. So don’t start.)
I ended up circumventing the problem entirely and did what I should have done from the start: I simply copied the layout from Mac OS X. It was a fairly simple process. First I exported the OS X Dvorak keymap by issuing the command xmodmap -pke >> outputfile. After copying file to my Linux box, I manually replaced the key codes [1] using xev for reference. A little bit of testing and error correction followed and that was it. Satisfied with the results, I renamed the file .xmodmaprc and placed in my home directory (.xmodmap is read at login).
For anyone out there interested in using my layout, I have made it available for download.
As for the Windows box, it is controlled by Synergy, so I really don’t have to worry about its layouts [2]. For anyone using multiple with machines with one monitor each, I highly recommend giving Synergy a go.
[1] I chose the Windows key as the modifier key, as I have absolutely no other use for it. It works quite well, especially because it’s in the same spot as the Option key is on my iBook’s keyboard.
[2] For the record, switching keyboard layouts on Windows is the definition of pain in the ass. If you ever used Windows with a non-English keyboard, you probably had it switch back and forth randomly. Imagine the same scenario where only M, W and the number keys are in the same place!
August 24th, 2005
I was playing around with VoiceOver on my Mac this evening. When selecting a voice, it speaks to let you hear what it sounds like. In Mac OS X Panther, the voices would all say something different. In Mac OS X Tiger, however, all of the voices speak the same sentence: “Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come”–a quote attributed to Victor Hugo in various forms.
Quintessentially Apple one could say. Naturally, that notion alone was not enough to satisfy my curiosity; I simply had to investigate. Thus, I opened Spotlight and entered the quote. Spotlight’s top hit came as a bit of a surprise: it was the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, the bible of Mac application interface design and interaction. Bemused, I continued my exploration.
Using the same query, Google led me to a page, which had a very interesting paragraph:
Among the many other recent vegetarian celebrities are … Steven Jobs (former chairperson of Apple Computer and current head of Next, Inc.) [1]
Of course, all of this could be entirely coincidental, but I like to believe that the good folks at Apple are having fun inserting small hints here and there. “Apple is in the details”, if you will–another sentence which sends the Apple Human Interface Guidelines to the top. That, or Spotlight is very fond of the guidelines.
[1] The quoted information is from 1993. Jobs–a renowned vegetarian–was ousted from Apple in 1985 only to return with a vengeance in 1997. In the meantime he had started NeXT Computer Inc., which was aquired by Apple one year before Jobs’ comback. NeXT produced the NeXTSTEP operating system, whose elements later became part of what we now know as Mac OS X.
August 18th, 2005