Geek Chic – Smart Design for the Style Conscious

Automator is awesome. It’s like your own personal WALL•E, running all those mind numbing, repetitive, time consuming tasks you no longer have the time or inclination to perform yourself.

But it’s setup to run only when you tell it to. Crap right? What’s the point of having an awesome personal robot doing stuff for  me if I have to tell it to do the stuff in the first place.

Here’s the fix. Get iCal to tell it for you. By setting up each Automator task as an iCal Alarm Plug-in… Let’s get to it.

1. Launch Automator, located in the Applications folder, and create a new workflow window.
2. Select the iCal category, located in the Library list in Automator. Select the Get Specified iCal Items action in the Action list and drag it into the workflow area on the right side of the Automator window. Click the + or Add button to specify the calendar or calendars from which you would like to retrieve events.
3. Add whatever cool task you want Automator to run below the iCal task in the daisy chain.
4. Select Save as Plug-in… from the File menu in Automator.
5. Name the plug-in something awesome like “WALL•E Clean Up My Open Applications”
6. Choose iCal Alarm from the Plug-in for popup
7. Click the Save button
8. iCal will be brought to the front, and a new event will be created for the workflow. Set the start time for the new event to whatever time you want. Configure the event to repeat every weekday.
9. Once the event has been configured, the workflow will run every time that calendar event tells it to. How AWESOME IS THAT!!!

_theSheik

So you’re a Windows person right? And the way you are used to closing an application is by clicking that X in the top right hand corner, correct?

Well on a Mac it’s kind of different. The application itself is seperate from the windows, so you can have multiple windows open related to the application, close any one of them, and still have the application running in the background. Before the creation of “spaces” and even the utilization of window minizing, this was a nice way to close windows yet still have the benefit of the app running in the background. Take Mail for instance, You don’t necessarily need it up and in your face all the time, so by closing the window but keeping the app running, you still get to keep your mail coming in, but save the space. There are many more complicated benefits and uses for this technique which I won’t go into here, but you’ll get the hang of it once you tool around.

The best way to quit a Mac application is by using 1 of 2 different techniques.

1st Option – Using the Mouse

1. Go to the Menu Bar at the top of the screen
2. Select the Application Name in Bold ie: Mail or Firefox
3. Scroll down the menu to Quit “Application Name” at the very bottom, ie: Quit Mail
4. Apple does the rest.
5. If you have any open documents, web pages, or emails, Most applications will ask you if you wish to save the document for later use.

2nd Option – Keyboard Shortcut

1. Hit this keyboard combination Apple Key ( ⌘) + Q
2. Apple does the rest.
3. If you have any open documents, web pages, or emails, Most applications will ask you if you wish to save the document for later use.

Now… for those of you wonder why your beautiful Mac is running slow, I have a nifty trick you can add to the toolbox. Maybe it’s because you’ve got all those applications running in the background?

Check out my next article on creating an iCal Alarm to close those pesky brain drainers here.

First off, mac users are relatively late the the torrent game. Not that this makes them N00BZ or L00ZRZ or any of the other harsh and foul slanderous calls that get chucked around the forums, but lets face it. Macs were made for making pretty picture books and family slideshow, you know, nice things. They definitely were never made for hacking, slashing, tracking, tripping, warring, or any other Black Hat related activity… or were they?
Here’s to your first lesson in ripping off the man.

TORRENTS
    Def: BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) communications protocol. BitTorrent is a method of distributing large amounts of data widely without the original distributor incurring the entire costs of hardware, hosting and bandwidth resources. Instead, when data is distributed using the BitTorrent protocol, each recipient supplies pieces of the data to newer recipients, reducing the cost and burden on any given individual source, providing redundancy against system problems, and reducing dependence on the original distributor.
    Basically, if you want to share a movie, you would do better to break it up into little pieces and send them individually through multiple connections, rather than trying to wedge the big sucker through the single pipe. Kind of like putting potato peels into the insinkerator. Better in pieces right?

To get into Torrents your first going to need to know where to find them. Essentialy, the online equivalent of a library. And there are tons of places to go. But as a Mac user, you’ll do best at Mac friendly places, ie: they carry Mac software. I’ve found the best places to start are…

1. http://isohunt.com/
2. http://www.mininova.org
3. http://www.piratebay.org
4. http://www.bittorrent.com

IsoHunt is by far and away my favorite. It has the largest selection and the most amount of active users.
Now users are important, you want to have a lot of people in the Torrent community because the more people that are maintaining active connections, the faster the file will download and the less time you will have to wait. However let me make this part clear, the Torrent community is a very bitchy place. Don’t expect to just come in and take what you want and leave. By this I mean, users are broken up into two different groups. Seeders & Leechers. Seeders are the users who are providing access to their files. They are the ones who you are downloading that file from. Leechers are those that are doing the downloading. Much better to be an active Seeder/Leecher than solely a LEECH. There’s a reason for the name and people have little tolerance for selfish behavior. So give just as much as you take.

So now that you’ve found the best library selection for you, and you’ve located the file you were looking for, you’ll now need software to help you do all this seeding and leeching. I recommend Azureus by far as the best software available. It’s free and incredibly customizable. You can set your up and download speeds which is critical if you hope to do anything else while you are downloading. You can download a copy for Mac OS X here at www.azureus.com.

So you’ve got the library, you’ve got the software and you are off and running. Enjoy. There’s a whole world of content out there just waiting to be Torrented. Remember to play nicely.

As a sidenote, in no way do I condone the downloading of illegal or copyright protected content. There is plenty of legal content available out there for BitTorrent download.

_The Sheik

Which is better for you?
Face it, most of the time, you can get by knowing very little about how anything really works. You put the gas in your car and it goes. You put the potatoes down the insinkerator and they go. You flush the toilet and it just… goes. Who cares where or how, right?

As far as email is concerned, you actually might benefit from knowing the difference between these two bad boys of the email underbelly. Because choosing the right one for your lifestyle needs, just may save you some stress, time and/or embarrassment.

Here’s how it breaks down.
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Free email is AWESOME. no fees, no maintenance, built in junk mail filtering and you can dump the address whenever you want. I’ve brought together my faves in a kick ass list. Gmail, Yahoo, AIM, Hotmail, Inbox.com and friends. Let me know of any others you think are worth including…
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