damians personal blog

Ein herrliches Zitat, um den Abend abzurunden. Torsun, mittlerweile wohl gegen die Dreissig, Gründer und Haupttriebkraft von Egotronic:

Ich hätte es nicht besser formulieren können.

In tiefer Verbundenheit, damian

        10.Mai.2006, 0:25 :: life outside computers :: Permalink :: Comments (0)

... ist ab sofort nicht mehr de genervte Ausruf von Wänää, sondern ein Online-Dienst mit Kultcharakter: Es lassen sich zwei beliebige Festnetztelefonnummern miteinander verbinden. Basically eine gute Sache, denn es lässt sich:

• VOIP über herkömmliches Telefonnetz nutzen
• von einem fremden Telefon auf eigene Kosten telefonieren
• unschlagbar günstig ins Ausland telefonieren

Soweit, so gut. ABER was ist, wenn keine Nummer, die man eingibt, seine eigene ist? Das Schabernack-Potenzial ist leider nur dadurch getrübt, dass man nicht mithören kann ...

Auf jedenfall war meine Freundin sehr irritiert, als sie plötzlich vom Telefonbeantworter einer guten Freundin angerufen wurde, und ich mich vor lachen kaum mehr halten konnte! *prust*

(Per Zufall gesehen auf law blog)

        9.Mai.2006, 11:33 :: web world :: Permalink :: Comments (0)

Ever wanted to transform a normal folder into a folder with a "Burn" button? Basically, if the folder has a burn button, it ist just folder with the (hidden) extension ".fpbf". But if you try to rename a folder in the Finder manually there will an error telling you that .fpbf ist a reserved extension and you cannot use it. Unless you get the terminal at hand: % mv my_folder new_cd.fpbf and *poof* you can burn the folder on CD's as you like.

        8.Mai.2006, 22:45 :: mac os x :: Permalink :: Comments (2)

The other day I thought about means to enhance battery life of my MacBook Pro. I'm used to the very looooong battery life of an 12" iBook, so the MBP's battery doesn't seem terrific to me. Besides the usual low brightness screen setting I disabled the second core via the Processor preference pane which is installed along with the CHUD tool from the developer tools.

Then I thought it would be great if, everytime you wake the system from sleep, a little script would check if the power adapter is plugged in and set the core's activities in function of that. It doesn't seem that there is a possibility to call a script on wakeup, but I found an alternative which can be called from your favourite app-launcher:

Use this link to create the applescript document or open the Scripteditor.app and paste the code below. Just preceed as described in the previous post: save as, enter a name, Application bundle. If you want to reactivate the core again, you have to change the applescript by uncommenting the line click menu item "2" of menu 1 of pop up button 1 and commenting the other line with two hyphens.

To change the number of active cores now, I hit [cmd][space] and type "mono" to save battery or "duo" when I need more power.

tell application "System Preferences"
    activate
    try
        set current pane to pane "Processor"
    on error
        display dialog "System Preferences pane \"Processor\" is not available.
You need Apple's CHUD-tools to be installed to change the number of active cores."
    end try
    try
        tell application "System Events"
            tell application process "System Preferences"
                activate
                tell window "Processor"
                    click pop up button 1
                    --to activate 2 cores:
                    --click menu item "2" of menu 1 of pop up button 1
                    --to activate 1 core:
                    click menu item "1" of menu 1 of pop up button 1
                end tell
            end tell
        end tell
        tell application "Finder"
            set visible of process "System Preferences" to false
        end tell
    on error
        tell application "System Preferences"
            activate
            set current pane to pane "com.apple.preference.universalaccess"
            display dialog "UI element scripting is not enabled. 
Check \"Enable access for assistive devices\""
        end tell
    end try
end tell

        5.Mai.2006, 22:39 :: mac os x :: Permalink :: Comments (0)

The last days I noticed that the MacBook Pro has a very inefficient sleep mode. If you are on the road for 4 hours not using your MBP, batter power is already below the critial 95%, and if you leave it over night, it wakes in the morning with less than 90%. This is quite annoying because every charge cycle decreases your battery capacity.

I've been looking for a way to activate hibernate on demand and found the hint "A helper script to enter SafeSleep on demand" on macosxhints.com. If you follow the discussion you see that there are other ways to do so, but the original hint works fine with me.

• Use this link to create the Applescript document or open the Scripteditor.app and paste the code below:

  do shell script "/usr/bin/pmset -a hibernatemode 1" password "_password_" with administrator privileges
  ignoring application responses
      tell application "Finder" to sleep
      do shell script "(/bin/sleep 20 && /usr/bin/pmset -a hibernatemode 3) &> /dev/null &" password "_password_" with administrator privileges
  end ignoring
  

• replace _password_ with your administrator password

• save as; enter a name you want; select format "Application Bundle"; activate option "Run Only"

• in the original hint it says you should add the following lines to the Info.plist file (rightclick on the application , show package contents, open contents, open the file):

  <key>LSUIElement</key>
  <string>1</string>
  

  I am not very sure what this is supposed to do but you might want to change it.

The number 20 tells how many seconds the computer presumably needs to go into hibernate sleep. After that the sleep mode is set back to normal sleep. If your computer goes into hibernate mode all the time you want to activate normal sleep, 20 seconds might be too short. The MBP takes rather long to go into sleep compared to PPC macs, so if you run this script on a PPC machine (with a rather small amount of RAM) you might substitute 20 with 15 or even 12.

        3.Mai.2006, 11:20 :: mac os x :: Permalink :: Comments (0)