I’m a pretty big nerd. One of the things I’m pretty nerdy about is Macs. I’ve been using them since I was a little kid. Over the years, I’ve discovered a lot of useful programs and a few tips and tricks that have helped me out along the way. I know not everyone has the time or desire to religiously read infinite loop, so I would like to share some of my Mac-related wisdom.

One program that everyone asks me about when they see my computer is iCalViewer. It displays my iCal calendars on my desktop. In this regard, it’s sort of an ambient display for calendar information, because it makes me aware of appointments and events without really taking my attention away from anything else. It also looks really cool.

On the topic of iCal, over the years, I’ve developed a ridiculous alarm clock system. In its latest incarnation, I’ve got things set up to wake me up by gradually fading in iTune’s “party shuffle” playlist every morning at either sunrise or 6:30 AM, whichever comes later (since I realized that waking up before sunrise sucks). The calendar I use for this can be found here. The applescript it triggers to fade in iTunes is below:

set volume 0
tell application "iTunes"
set sound volume to 100
activate
play playlist "Party Shuffle"
end tell
set delayTime to 0.01
set myVolume to 0
repeat until (myVolume ≥ 10)
set volume myVolume
delay delayTime
set myVolume to myVolume + 0.01
set delayTime to delayTime * 1.008
if (delayTime > 60) then
set delayTime to 60
end if
end repeat

I don’t actually know applescript, but I pieced it together using stuff I found on the internet and a bit of trial and error. The one thing it is currently missing is an “off” button. One of these days I need to add a little dialog box with a button to stop the script. For now, I just force quit it. One nice thing about the script is that it is manipulating the system volume, not the iTunes volume, so you can mute your computer before you go to bed, and it will still work.

If there is one program to rule them all on the Mac, it is Quicksilver. It took a while to get used to, but now I can’t live without it. Any time I have to use a Mac without Quicksilver, I want to tear my hair out. In fact, if I’m helping someone else out with their Mac, and I know it’s going to be a fair bit of work, I’ll usually install it on their machine, just to make my life easier.

What is quicksilver? It’s a launcher. Any time I want to do anything, I press a key combination (in my case: control-tab) and Quicksilver pops up. I then type a few letters of what I want, and Quicksilver finds it for me. I hit enter, and it does it for me. For instance, if I want to open Safari, I type “sa”, Quicksilver figures out that I want Safari, and that’s it. I also use it to open files and bookmarks, perform google searches, etc. For bookmarks, I installed the “social bookmarks” plug-in and hooked it up to delicious. For google searches, I installed the “web search” plug-in, did a google search for “***” and added the result to my bookmarks. You can do the same thing with other search sites, and in my case I’ve done it without google maps as well. There’s a lot more you can do with Quicksilver, but that should get people started.

I use a program called AlmostVPN to access UofT’s computing resources from home. I could connect to the cslab VPN, but then all of my network traffic would go through cslab and it would still present issues when I wanted to use cslab and eecg resources simultaneously. Instead, AlmostVPN is an SSH tunnel manager that does some trickery that I don’t fully understand so that using ssh tunnels is a completely seamless experience. I have it set up so that I can easily print to both cslab and eecg printers from anywhere in the world, I can connect to my machines at school, which aren’t visible to the outside world, and I can use the cslab smtp server. If anyone wants me to help them with their configuration, just send me an e-mail.

AlmostVPN allows me to ssh into my machines at school. MacFusion provides a nice front-end to google’s FUSE, which allow me to access the contents of the drives on those machines. Basically, anything that I can ssh into, I can mount as a network share on my Mac.

I just got a cheap USB audio interface for my macbook, because the contacts on the headphone port were starting to flake out. It may be all in my head, but I feel as though the sound is a lot richer. I’d always thought my sound was kind of flat sounding because I had cheap speakers, but maybe the built in audio on the macbook just wasn’t that good.