Amuyu

Turns out that the Wiimote can be connected to the Mac via bluetooth. Apparently, there’s a ton of cool things you can do with this, including control all of the functions on your mac. You can use DarwiinRemote to pair the mote and nunchuck up. With it you can control VLC and most other media programs. Pair it up with RemoteBuddy and just about anything is possible.

If that’s not cool enough, some people have paired it up with some seriously cool audio processing tools (KymaX) with OSCulator. I’m in nerdery heaven. Check out this video:

That’s cool, but this stuff on the PC is even better. Someone - please port Johnny Lee’s stuff over:

If you ever had a powerbook, you remember the almost instant sleep that happened when you closed your laptop. Somewhere in the late powerbook or macbook/pro timeframe, Apple changed the behavior from sleep (save contents in RAM only) to hibernate+sleep (save contents in RAM and dump to disk). There’s been undocumented PRAM settings that let you change the behavior so that you can select sleep, hibernate+sleep, or hibernate only. However, it was a setting that affected the system globally.

However, now Patrick Stein, the guy who wrote JollyFastVNC (should be a separate blog post), has released SmartSleep. From his website:

SmartSleep.prefPane

DESCRIPTION
SmartSleep.prefPane is a preference pane that dynamically sets the sleep state of your machine. It’s a successor to Hibernate.prefPane.

The Problem
Your macbook or macbook pro knows the following sleep states:

sleep: machine will go to sleep only (saves state in RAM only, battery keeps RAM contents)

sleep & hibernate: machine sleeps and hibernates. (default)

hibernate only machine will go to hibernate only. (saves state on disk, battery will not be used)

Just sleep means that the notebook will go to sleep fast, but you loose the ability to change the battery as the battery is needed to keep the contents of the memory (RAM).
Just sleep and hibernate will wake the computer fast, but sleeping will take ages as the contents of the memory are saved to disk before entering the sleep.

The solution
SmartSleep let’s you select each select sleep state. Additionaly the new SmartSleep state lets your notebook just sleep while the battery has a high level. If the battery level drops below a certain point ( default is less then 20% or 20 minutes ) it will switch to sleep and hibernate. So you have the best of both worlds.

OK - this is one of those things that has bugged me since Leopard came out. I love QuickLook but it failed in the powerpoint department. It seemed like only 1/3 of my PPT and PPS files were visible using QuickLook. Well - this hint at macosxhints takes care of that. Contrary to the comments in the hint, my 10.5.2 did not have this on by default.

macosxhints.com - 10.5: View any PowerPoint document in Quick Look

Yes! I hate(d) the keyboard volume control because it’s such a pain to get it just right. Check this out: Macworld | Mac OS X Hints | Use fine-grain volume control in 10.5
The only problem is that I get cramps doing this on my MBP. I have to use FN-OPT-SFT-F[4|5] to get there. Still cool though.

Yes! Finally a place to find the newest and bestest quicklook plugins: http://www.qlplugins.com/

My personal favorites so far:

Folder Viewer (now you can see what’s in a folder, not just an icon for the folder)
Zip Viewer (peek into your zip, rar, tar, etc. files without opening them)

The only thing I wish I had was one that let you look at more and older M$ formats. Particularly PowerPoint. Why is it that PPT files are roughly 50/50 on being able to be previewed with quicklook? That’s the format that I use it the most for.

Take a read through all of the “fixes” that they are focusing on in this release patch. Maybe this will make leopard as stable as tiger?

Mac OS X 10.5.2 update to bring endless list of fixes | MacScoop:

The Mac is back! I’m working on it, and the screen is beautiful again. The SuSE laptop is going to stand by mode. Total elapsed time, 1 week calendar time of no Mac access. Painful, but livable. Apple did this right. They want to keep me as a customer. Well done.

The Mac is gone as of yesterday. DHL came by and picked it up. It was kinda scarry. I had no receipt from the guy that he took it. He was even scarrier. His uniform looked like it had been through a wet, muddy jungle. However, I was able to login to the DHL web site today and see that it was on its way overnight first class. The site allows you to sign up for confirmation of deivery. I was pretty happy with that and expected an update later today. However, I just got this:

Dear Juan,

The repair of your POWERBOOK G4 (17-INCH 1.67GHZ), Repair ID D8285XXX, is currently on hold, pending receipt of a needed part. We will notify you by email when the repair is complete.

Your repair status is available online.

Apple
——–

Ahhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!! (Written via web interface on a blackberry)

The box for the shipment to Apple Care has arrived. At this point, I’m getting some warm and fuzzies. The packing is very professional and includes all the necessary items: the box (huh?), the properly sized pads for above+below+sides of the laptop, a wrapper for the laptop itself, and even tape to seal the box with. The shipping label it arrived with is two layer. For the return, all I have to do is peel the top layer off and the bottom layer gets the box back to Apple. I will perform the final backup of my data on Sunday and ship it out on Monday. Oh god.

The other day, with no warning, I was dumped into a nightmare. My PowerBook’s screen develop a nasty, pixel wide, always on purple line. A call to Apple Care confirmed it - laptop needs repair (no duh). They suggested that they send me a box to pack my laptop into and then ship it back to them and then 5-10 business days they would have it back to me. The kicker - they recommend that I back it up before I send it because “sometimes the depot finds that the hard drive is bad and they will replace it out of courtesy.” Crap. Next step - go visit the closest Apple store. Seems to me that they would be able to figure this out, order me a new display, let me go home with computer, call me when the display comes in, another quick dash, slap the new display in, run back home in joy. Nope. Apparently fixing computers requires centralization (one of Houston or Memphis). Apparently, screwdrivers and Apple stores are not allowed to co-exist in the same spatial coordinates.

So, I am not faced with a dilemma: what do I do for 5-10 business days without my laptop? Fortunately, I have a work laptop I can use. However, I refuse, refuse I tell you, to use Windows as the primary OS. So, looking around, it seemed to easy to use Fedora. I have three other machines at home running it now. Looking around I have a zillion choices of Linux and BSD distros to use. Without much scientific effort (read: a complete rectal extraction), I chose SuSE 10.1 (new shinny) to use as the base. The installation was awesomely easy. Linux has truly come a long way. The only thing not detected was my wireless. That I’m working on. Next was to try to use Evolution to connect to corporate email. Quickly, I got stymied - no CISCO VPN client available (at least to me). So, install VMWare - install winblows + sp2 + all the other crap + office + cisco vpn for windows. That gives me working access to the work stuff I need to do to pay for this computer habit of mine.

The box from Apple Care is on it’s way. The SuSE box is ready with VMWare giving me a back line to the office. With this comes my great experiment: How do you survive Post Windows, Post Mac, into Linux in the corporate world?

Stay tuned.