The scenario:

1. I am bedridden from major leg surgery.
2. I am using my iMac as my entertainment center to keep me entertained while I’m stuck in bed.
3. Apple refuses to allow the user to manually turn off the screen without putting the iMac to sleep.
4. It seems that a USB device is causing my iMac to do a kernel panic when it goes to sleep, having to reboot it.
5. Pain triggers migranes and I must turn all light sources off.

So I needed to find a solution that would allow me to turn off the iMac’s screen ASAP without fumbling with a keyboard/mouse.

Well, so far that I know of there is no way to immediately turn off the iMac’s screen (*leers at Apple*), only within 1 Minute, which with a pounding migraine can seem like an eternity, but this is the best I’ve been able to figure out…

I found that Menu Master and Telekinesis provided a great solution to this and opens an unlimited possibility of remote control for my Mac.

Now, remember - I don’t want to put my iMac to sleep because it crashes forcing me to walk up to it and hold down the power button for 5 seconds, then turn it back on and login, so using the standard Sleep function already built into the Apple Remote is out of the question. (Plus I’ve been re-encoding videos overnight)

I had already created a couple of apple scripts to change my screen’s dim timeout via the…
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Windows Vista is going to be on the shelves for us to purchase in about seven or eight months and one of the features in it is the Sidebar with Gadgets. Gadgets are Microsoft widgets in Vista. They are little tools that float above your main application, though in Vista they can be located in other places.

Some Mac fans like to point out how similar Gadgets look to OS X Tiger’s Dashboard Widgets. Some Windows fans reply that Dashboard was stolen from Konfabulator. I disagree that Dashboard Widgets were stolen from Konfabulator.

Konfabulator is a utility for OS X (and now Windows) that installs an engine and then runs widgets that you can download. These widgets can be created by end users using Javascript and the UI layouts are specified in a custom XML format. Konfabulator was available for OS X before Dashboard showed up in OS X Tiger and some Windows fans say that Apple saw Konfabulator and ripped it off.

The problem with this is widgets were in the original Mac operating system back in 1984 and continued to be in the Mac OS up until OS X was released, which didn’t include widgets.

Wikipedia states about “widget”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widget_%28computing%29

One commonly referred to type of widgets are the Dashboard widgets of Apple Macintosh computer users. Widgets, in this case, are downloadable interactive virtual tools that provide services such as showing the user the latest news, the current weather, a dictionary, a map program, sticky notes, or even a…
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From the “Holy crazy fast development, Batman!” desk…

Pro wrestler and Mac developer The American Balloon has released version 2.0 of PopCopy, a complete re-write of the multiple-item clipboard utility for OS X. Version 1.0 was released early this month. From the press release:

PopCopy’s Menu Bar addition shows the user what is currently in the clipboard, and lets him/her place something he/she had previously copied, back into the clipboard.  The user can also select an item by pressing a user-defined (by default Command+Shift+V) hotkey combination, which presents the user with a menu to choose a previously copied item, and when the hotkey is released, places this item into the clipboard, and pastes it into the frontmost app.

PopCopy 2 was completely rewritten, sports new features like customizable hotkeys, a new hotkey interface which lets the user preview three items at once, and better item previewing in the menubar, letting you see a submenu with the full path of a file, a larger preview of an image, or a longer preview of text.  PopCopy 2 also adds support for text from Microsoft Office, something which previously didn’t work, due to Office’s odd handling of clipboard text.

PopCopy 1.0 was featured as Deep Thought’s Geek Toy of the Week on June 3.

A video of PopCopy in action is available for your viewing enjoyment. PopCopy is shareware and costs $14.  Also be sure to visit The American Balloon’s wrestling site: balloonsault.com/

It’s 11:45 PM, June 11th. I am anxiously watching the progress bar creep, little by little, hoping that nothing goes wrong. 3.12 gigabytes is most likely the single largest file I’ve ever downloaded. With each passing percentage, the time remaining conferms my estimation: the download will complete at 3:45 AM. Since I have plans for the next morning, I go to bed, but not before rigging up my air filter to pull the warm air out from under my desk and prevent the PC from freezing hard, as it has done once before during an attempt do download the file; Firefox was unable to resume the download, so I started over.

Fast forward to 8:15 AM, June 12. I get up and turn on my monitor, hoping that it had completed. As the LCD lit up, I saw that there was now progress bar. On my desktop lay the icon for the disk image. I checked the file size: all 3.12 gigabytes were there. I wanted to merge the ISO with a DVD, but I had other things to take care of.

Travel forward in time once more; this time to 12:00 PM. I have cleared my calendar, and I sit down to begin the installation. First I open disk copier and select the image; a blank DVD+R goes in the waiting tray. 10 minutes after clicking “Burn” the disk is ejected, and I insert another, this time opening Roxio Easy Disc Creator. I move everything I want onto the disc,…
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After all this time, my heart still belongs to AMD and Linux.

Windows this, OS X that, Shareware this, Nag-Screen there, - I just started to get sick of it all, and got a bit “home sick” (Home = Linux).

I looked around and saw a decent Motherboard/CPU combo that turned out even sweeter - an AMD Sempron 2800+ CPU and a Gigabyte K8 Triton Motherboard along with 256 MBs of RAM for around $160. Not a blazing system but it gets me “home”! Plus I can upgrade the CPU to an AMD64 later,albeit not to dual-core.

I tore out the guts from my old PC and installed the new hardware - everything SEEMED to be fine, but I somehow expected to be able to use the SVideo output connected to my EyeTV as a monitor, but that didn’t work. I ended up strapping it in a box behind my scooter and taking it to the office to set it up there. It was then that it dawned on me that I didn’t have any current Linux installation CDs at the office (or any current OS for that matter), took forever to download an ISO of Ubuntu 6.06, found an old blank CD that ended up failing… ARGH! Fine! I installed 5.04 (leaving some empty space to install another OS later), upgraded to 5.10 then 6.06.

A few hours later, “Frankie” (Frankenstein - as in it has parts from various systems) was alive and running beautifully! Altho it’s still at the…
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