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.

You can check out my twitter profile below.

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 developer of QuickProxy was nice enough to leave a comment on this post informing me that the firefox add-on is alive again! I just installed it in my copy of Firefox 3 RC 3 (Mac) and can’t wait to start using it, as it is definitely the best proxy switch add-on I’ve used.

Awesome!

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Update April 13 2008:

I’ve been running the Firefox 3 beta for a while, and unfortunately it appears quickproxy is no longer being updated. Check out ProxySwitch, which does the same thing.

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A couple months ago I posted about using a SOCKS proxy to secure your traffic when using an open wireless network (or any time you need to redirect traffic in a VPN-like fashion). Ever since then I’ve been using this tip a lot, but it has led to an annoying amount of opening and closing Firefox’s network preferences to check the proxy status.

QuickProxy to the rescue! I just found this today and it is perfect for what I need. It adds a simple icon to Firefox’s status bar which is green when the proxy is in use. Click on it and it turns gray, disabling the proxy.

And it makes it so much easier to find in my backpack! The first thing everyone says when they look at it is “I’d be so afraid of losing it.”

I bought this shuffle a few months ago after I’d quit smoking and reached the 3 week point. I love it, and it easily gets as much use as the 30GB ipod video my parents got us for Christmas.

You can see the full sized pic in the Gallery or at Flickr.

I opened up dashboard for the first time tonight and this is what I saw. Sure enough we are having a clear night and a new moon, meaning no moon visible at all.

Pretty nifty.

Click the thumbnail for the full version.

A coworker of mine recently came down with some kind of outer space soul sucking virus and was ordered by his doctor to take a week off. Any hardcore geek will tell you that automatically means a lot of potential keyboard time, so he decided to setup a remote connection to the work network.

Being security-minded is important in the hosting world (it should be more important everywhere else) and so the inevitable question arose as to how he could best pull this off. Like an increasing number of laptop owners he also uses open wireless networks a lot (so do I) and you really shouldn’t be using open wireless with any password or data you really care about.

VPN’s work well for remote connections but can occasionally be a pain to set up depending on how your company has theirs configured.

If you have a computer/server running Linux or any other variety of OpenSSH server which is connected to a more trustworthy network you can create a SOCKS proxy SSH connection to it using the following command:

ssh -D 9999 user@server

The -D creates the SOCKS proxy, 9999 is the port, and user@server is your user name on the server you are connecting to and its host name or IP address. Then just set Firefox to use the SOCKS proxy as localhost and set the port to 9999. Presto – instant secure web traffic.

Lifehacker has posted a series of tweaks you can make using about:config. I just tried the browser.cache.disk.capacity tweak and it reduced Firefox’s total RAM usage on my MacBook by almost 30%.

Good stuff.

Lifehacker link

Today I stopped using Thunderbird and switched to Mail.app. Both are on my system and I’m using IMAP so I can switch between them whenever I want.

Some of my friends might be asking “WHY???” Quite simple: Memory footprint. I noticed today that Thunderbird was using ~30MB of memory when running so I decided to compare them. Mail.app weighed in at about 18MB average.

Not too difficult a decision when you’re talking almost 50% difference.

I’ll be switching back when I can afford that 2GB RAM upgrade