Despite all the compliments I pile on Mac OS X here, it is missing one feature that can be found on every version of Windows since Windows 2000: A keyboard hot key that locks the desktop regardless of the screen saver’s normal security setting.

Hit the link below for the rest of the guide…

One thing Linux, OS X, and Windows all have in common is a static screen saver lock setting. This setting tells the OS to lock the desktop if the screen saver is ever activated, or to leave it alone and never lock the desktop. In Windows, you can leave the persistent lock setting off and still lock the desktop by pressing the key with the Windows logo on it and L at the same time. I like to think of this as “selective desktop locking”.

I use my Macbook at work every day, but I don’t want it to always lock the desktop whenever the screen saver turns on because I take it home every night.

Surprisingly, after myself and a couple other Mac fans at work spent some time trying to find a solution, there doesn’t appear to be any existing info online covering how to set this up on an OS X system. So the three of us decided to set it up ourselves.

Requirements:
- OS X (written while on 10.5.5, works fine on 10.5.6)
- Quicksilver
- Keychain menu bar icon
- Apple’s Script Editor (you may need to install the Developer Tools from your OS X system discs, not sure though)

To add the Keychain menu bar icon, open the Keychain Access application (found in Applications -> Utilities). Open preferences for the app, and check the box marked “Show Status in Menu Bar”. You should now have a small padlock icon in your menu bar, like so:

Note the position of the icon (far right). If you want to follow this guide exactly your icon will need to be in the same place, otherwise you will need to modify some of the values in the script below. Hold down the apple button/command button/whatever you want to call it and drag the icon with the mouse to move it.

Now we need to create a script that will do the actual work. Open the Script Editor application (Applications -> AppleScript) and create a new script with the following code:

tell application “System Events”
click menu bar item -1 of menu bar 1 of application process “SystemUIServer”
keystroke (key code 125)
keystroke return
end tell

You should have something that looks like this:

A very special thanks to mark at the osxhints.com forums for helping me figure this part out!

You can save this as either a script or an application and it should still work correctly, however we have seen some odd behaviors from it when saved as a script, so I recommend you save it as an application. Open the File menu and choose Save As. In the window that appears name it whatever you want (I called mine LockDesktop) and change the File Format drop down menu to Application. I have a directory I called Files inside my user directory that I use for items like this one, but you can put it wherever you want.

Now it’s time for some Quicksilver-fu. Open Quicksilver’s preferences and go to the Triggers tab. Click the + button at the bottom of the window and add a new hotkey setup like this:

Click the Save button. Click on your new trigger and then the i icon near the lower right to open the inspector screen. Set a Hot Key (I used ⌘ L).

All done! Close the window (make sure your new trigger is saved and shows up in the list), close the Quicksilver preferences, and test your new hot key. You may need to adjust the variables in the “click menu bar item X of X” line of the script if your keychain icon is not in the far right corner.

One last important item: While this setup replicates selective desktop locking, it is not perfect. Sometimes, especially after a reboot or if you just logged in, the application can take several seconds to launch and run correctly. Subsequent launches will be speedier but can still take a couple seconds to complete.

Questions/comments/etc are welcome, just post a comment here.

Here is a peace offering instead:  My favorite (and default) video player for OS X, NicePlayer, has finally been updated in the form of a preview build.  This preview includes the return of remote control support, something which has been broken since 10.5 originally came out. Yes, that is quite a long time now and yes, I did wonder up until the moment I found this preview build if the application was dead in the water.

Enjoy!

This mostly has to due with flexibility and the fact that it supports the Apple remote. Up until now I defaulted to NicePlayer (which also supports the remote but only under 10.4).

The only problem with VLC is the application icon which is about as smooth as a car wreck in the dock. MacRabbit has a very nice replacement icon set which also supports file types.

This post is an effort to fix that problem with my backups, or rather an excuse to not have to bother remembering it anymore.

rsync -avz -e ssh –delete –stats –progress /Users/jay jallen@(hostname/IP):/home/jallen/stuff2 –exclude ‘.Trash’ –exclude ‘.DS_Store’

All of the options starting with delete are double dashes. For some reason when I copy and paste the above into a terminal it pastes them as single dashes which screws up the command.

Note: This is being used to backup a MacBook to a remote SSH-accessible drive, hence the exclude statements for .Trash and .DS_Store.

The 512×512 icon support gives an already polished operating system an even cleaner look. Try looking at your applications using Quick Look and you’ll see what I mean. Apple even hid a few things in their default icon set, like the Font Book icon (letters are A F K) and a letter written in the TextEdit icon (good overview w/pics here).

You can find all of the default icons for 10.5 at /System » Library » CoreServices » CoreTypes.bundle (right-click and open package contents) » Contents » Resources. (via macosxhints.com)

public.generic-pc.icns is my personal favorite

Stacks is a cool feature and is actually somewhat useful, but Apple should take note of these sweet overlays.

If you have the developer tools installed you will find two extra screen savers located at /Developer/Examples/Quartz Composer/Compositions/Screen Savers. Copy the two files to /Library/Screen Savers or ~/Library/Screen Savers. The Security screen saver is fun and is actually motion activated.

Photobooth can now make animated GIFs. Handy for buddy icons.

Drives/devices mounted remotely seem to show up in the Shared section of the finder sidebar instead of the Devices section like in 10.4. Until I realized this I was only able to open them using Quicksilver. Turns out you can drag them in the sidebar from Shared to Devices, and the move is even permanent after the drive is removed and then remounted.

Quick Look is pure awesomeness in a bottle.

Time to stretch some gigabyte-wasting applications now that I’ve got twice the room available.

UPDATE: Shelby asked for the full details, so here we go.

Last Sunday, while I was running a 103 degree fever due to the flu, Jen sat down with my Macbook to look up a recipe. It woke up from the sleep mode without a problem but started acting strange. One by one everything on the desktop started giving the spinning beachball o’ doom. Nothing responded, and I mean nothing, so I shut it down hard using the power button.

Afterwards the Macbook would not start back up at all. No failed boot screens, no icons indicating a problem, just the startup chime and then a persistent blank white screen. I reset the PRAM and the PMU to no avail. Finally I stuck my ear next to the left-side wrist wrest area (where the hard drive is located) and confirmed my worst fears: A horrible clicking noise was coming from the drive, indicating it had died a messy death and took my data with it.

A little research also linked my dead drive to a bit of news I’d read not too long ago: Data recovery firm Retrodata reported towards the end of October that they are seeing 20 – 30 times the normal failure rate for certain 60GB Seagate drives used in Macbooks. Of course my drive matched the referenced model, but sadly Apple has not offered up any kind of replacement for these drives and my Macbook is no longer under warranty.

On a side note, I will never again buy an Apple computer without automatically including the cost of the 3-year apple care extension. Moving on…

Thankfully I had made a complete backup of the drive just before installing OS X 10.5 so I didn’t really lose that much data. The worst was a few reports for work that take me a while to complete but they can all be done again.

After fighting a long battle with the “instant gratification” side of my personality I bought a 120GB Fujitsu drive on newegg that was the best deal I could find. I patiently (ok, not so patiently) waited the few days it took to get the drive shipped. I had to go out and pick up a torx driver set to move the drive caddy from the old drive to the new drive, took care of that and put the new drive in. I figured my problems were just about over but sadly I was very, very mistaken.

Both my original 10.4 restore discs and the 10.5 disc failed to install. Both yielded I/O errors and would fail at completely random points in the installation process. My suspicions about my macbook’s DVD drive failing jumped to mind, so I borrowed a coworker’s identical Macbook and connected the two with a firewall cable using target disk mode (which is a really cool feature by the way). Sadly my macbook could see the drives on the other macbook but failed to boot off the DVD.

Later that evening it occurred to me that if the install was failing at random points I could try to install the OS with the smallest feature set possible, just to get the core operating system installed, figuring I could install iLife and everything else later.

Amazingly, after two attempts, it worked! Once I confirmed 10.4 was running I tried to upgrade to 10.5. I guess Leopard was determined to add its own bit of humor to this story because even though it told me the install failed it still booted into 10.5 when I took out the installation DVD.

Even though it now appeared to be working ok I did not really trust it. Considering the DVD drive is failing who knows what parts of the OS could’ve been corrupted during the install.

Co-worker with a external DVD firewire drive to the rescue! Using that drive I was able to reinstall everything completely with no errors (for the record, just hold the option key while starting up and a mac will give you a boot-device menu of everything it can see that is attached to it). My co-worker suggested converting the install DVD to a dmg file, citing the ridiculous speed increase you would get versus the standard DVD install method, but I just wanted a working Macbook again

I consider myself extremely lucky that this is the first personal hard drive I’ve had die in the many years I’ve been using computers. Most of my friends and co-workers have had several drives fail on them in their time.

Anèmona
Screen saver based on the liquidmac app.

Enabling HD Trailers in Front Row
(make sure Front Row has been opened at least once before running the command)

http://lifehacker.com/photogallery/Menu-Bar-Show-and-Tell/2777810

For anyone who doesn’t understand the big deal here I’ll just put it this way: Prior to today if me or any of my computer geek/coworker pals saw a Safari window open on a Windows desktop we’d probably shake our heads, think we started hallucinating, and then slowly back away.

I have no idea how well the Windows version runs, but I’m trying out the beta of Safari 3 on my MacBook and so far it really seems like it has some worthwhile improvements. Tabs can now be rearranged by dragging (and animate while doing so in the usual apple way), the memory load seems to be much more under control, and overall speed appears to have improved noticeably.

The more I use Safari 3 the more little tweaks I find. For example, while writing this post I noticed that all major text input fields can be resized using the bottom right corner icon that appears when you click inside the field.

If you are using Windows (and the site stats say that at least 48.6% of you are) I can’t stress the following statement enough: Do yourself a favor and download the Safari 3 beta now!

Update: Reports seem to pretty varied. The Windows version sounds like it really needs some improvement (I hate to be the OS snob here but seriously, that’s not shocking) and the OS X version is still has the family memory hog gene. But, and this is a big but, it’s fast. REALLY fast. Not all the time, but you’ll definitely notice what I mean if you try it on a similar system (10.4.9 Intel with at least a gig of RAM).

Irssi is still my tool of choice but sometimes a GUI-based IRC client is helpful.

In the end Growl support and a complete set of independent network connection preferences (yay SOCKS proxies!) won me over.