iMac Screen Dimmer?

Steve — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 19:25:01 +0000

New owners of iMac’s might have noticed theres no way of turning the display off like on the Macbook. With the Macbook’s you could keep F1 pressed and this would dim and eventually turn off the display. if you want to do this with an iMac you will have to hit Ctrl, Shift and Eject. Some might suggest using a hot corner in expose but I’m not a big fan of that.

Another shortcut to make the actual computer sleep is Option, Command & Eject.

GeekTool

Heiko — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 19:38:20 +0000

Some time back, I was looking to customise the desktop of my (at that time) new iMac. Going through several forums and pages like Deviantart, MacThemes and started to wonder how some folks got the Date, Time, Weather etc information on their Desktops. The Solution is Geek Tool.
A nifty little app that lets you add scripts which run in the background and can make your life easier and your desktop prettier.
Unless you bring programming skills, Geek Tool on it’s own doesn’t do much.
What you need now are so called Geeklets add them into Geek Tool and the magic happens.

Lets do a little date thing for your desktop, shall we..
Lets assume you downloaded and installed Geek Tool. Now go to System Preferences and in the bottom row (other) you should see GeekTool (click!). You should see something like this:

now drag ‘n drop a new ‘Shell’ on your desktop. A grey empty box and a Properties box will appear:

In the field ‘command’ you copy and paste the commands you want to have a output. In this case we want todays date: date +%d
Now you can change the font and the colour etc, how ever you want it to appear on your desktop.
If you want the date accompanied by day and month just drag and drop 2 more ‘shells’ and enter: (month) date +%B (day) date +%A.
Don’t forget to customise the ‘refresh rate’, otherwise your date won’t change (only on next login)
That’s all there is. Fairly simple. If you want more commands, just search for geeklets

I remember I was searching for a while for the weather code, so hear it is:
curl –silent “http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=GIXX0001&u=c” | grep -E ‘(Current Conditions:|C//’ -e ‘s///’ -e ‘s/<\/b>//’ -e ‘s/
//’ -e ‘s///’ -e ‘s/<\/description>//’
Please note that GIXX0001 stands for Gibraltar, if you don’t want to have the forecast of Gibraltar on your desktop have a look on Yahoo weather for your country code

iPhone APN (Firmware4)

Heiko — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 15:49:27 +0000

Since we have Firmware 4 a lot of things have changed and most of them not to the better. Unified Inboxes and Folders might be a good thing but if you are an iPhone 3G user like me you really regret to ever have done the update step to FW4. So many reports of crashing apps, slow or fully unresponsive devices. Some reports say people are completely unable to pick up calls.. isn’t that what a phone is all about, Apple?

According to Steve Jobs there is an update coming soon and we all will be able to enjoy our very expensive gadgets again.

Another thing that has changed is the missing (not if you are with AT&T) Tethering option. In Firmware 3 it all just worked and in FW4 Apple decided to take it all away from us… how cruel. But you can get it back without having to jailbreak your precious ‘brick’. Simply open unlockit.co.nz (on your iPhones browser!). If you can’t find your Carrier (guess what, gibtelecom isn’t on there) leave it blank. APN: www.gibtele.com (no username or password). This will install a certificate and the Tethering option will reappear.
Works very well, although I noticed that since FW 4.0.2 the 3G connection tends to drop for no reason (of course!!)

Graphics update

Heiko — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 07:32:49 +0000

The Snow Leopard Graphics Update contains stability and performance fixes for graphics applications and games in Mac OS X 10.6.4.
For more details check out Apple’s Support Article

Safari 5 Extensions

Steve — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 21:45:08 +0000

Recently Apple added Extensions (plug-ins) to Safari, I personally never saw the need for these until now. Basically an Extension is a script created by 3rd party developers and can range from simple weather information in the toolbar to download managers. I have been testing a few Extensions out such as Better Facebook This will clear all the crap from the Facebook main page, it does take some tweaking so be patient. If you are new to Extensions like i am you might be scratching you head after clicking Install, to see the effects you have to navigate to the related website to see the difference.

However the best extension I’ve seen so far is AdBlock this makes a huge difference to those comedy video sites such as break.com that spam you with car insurance and KFC ad’s! This is clearly demonstrated below; on the left is BEFORE and the right AFTER effects of AdBlock.

If you need to remove an Extension open Safari’s Preferences and navigate to the Extensions tab as demonstrated below.

TotalFinder

Heiko — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 11:15:27 +0000

It’s all about working efficiently. We browse in Tabs to reduce clutter, why not use Tabs in Finder and reduce some clutter? The above sceen-shot shows you how it looks like and here is the download link for the Snow Leopard version.

Needful Things

Heiko — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 15:15:13 +0000

having a backup is always a good thing. having a time machine backup is even better. true mac speaking. but, sometimes time machine is pretty annoying, due to the weird scheduling of the backup. if you backup several macs on one time capsule it can slow everything down like hell.
here is a nice tool that can sort out that problem – TimeMachineEditor – backup the way it should be, after your schedule!

Now Playing in iTunes

Steve — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 19:59:36 +0000

Maybe i’m just being an idiot? But i’ve just discovered the keyboard shortcut for Now Playing in iTunes. For years it has bugged me whist playing a song and browsing through my music library there was no button to quickly navigate back to whats currently playing. Well it turns out that pressing Cmd+L will switch your library view back to what is currently playing!

Whilst we are on the subject of ‘Now Playing’ here a nice and simple application that will sit in your menu bar on the top right.

NowPlaying Mac 1.0.1 displays the current playing track (name/artist/duration/artwork) in the menu bar. Just that simple, no funny business. NowPlaying integrates itself into the menu bar, taking no desktop space, no dock icons. All options are available through a simple menu

‘First’ look

Heiko — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 15:27:46 +0000

Today I got my hands on Office 14 aka Office 2011 for Mac. Tried to perform some simple Tasks like retrieving my emails but I failed due to some ‘unknown’ errors (haha). The usual I guess.. so I will only post some screenshots:

simple things

Heiko — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:28:08 +0000

Apple’s Unibody design is a nice thing but sometimes even nice things can become pretty ugly. For instance if you need to replace a ‘wobbly’ Power button on an iMac, Unibody can make your life complicated.
The Power button is actually part of the rear housing! Below you see a photo I took whilst I was ‘gutting’ the iMac which had indeed just a wobbly Power button!