Read the rest of this entry »Here’s how I setup a Hot Corner to show or hide my DesktopShelves.
(Note that this trick can also be used to launch any program or AppleScript using a Hot Corner.)
Archive for the ‘Mac OS X’ Category
Show/Hide DesktopShelves using a Hot Corner
Monday, October 3rd, 2011Start iPhoto screen saver from AppleScript
Monday, October 3rd, 2011Read the rest of this entry »Starting the screen saver from AppleScript is simple enough. Even starting another screen saver than the default from System Preferences is simple, if you want one of the standard screen saver. But it becomes much more complicated if you’d like to start the iPhoto screen saver, and use another as the System Preferences default. Here’s how I did it.
Videotron Internet Usage Monitor
Wednesday, March 30th, 2011Read the rest of this entry »Would you like to monitor your monthly Videotron Internet quota easily? Use either my Mac Dashboard widget, or my Google Chrome Extension.
Hacking Crome extensions – How I added keyboard shortcuts to 1Password in Chrome
Friday, May 14th, 2010Read the rest of this entry »I love 1Password. It looks good, it’s safe, it has a web-accessible UI, it has an iPhone/iPad application…
What I didn’t like about it was it’s Chrome extension, which required me to use the mouse to click the 1Password icon in the toolbar each time I wanted to auto-fill a form with login details!! That was so annoying.
So annoying in fact that I took upon myself to implement keyboard shortcuts in the 1Password extensions.
Network-wide incoming calls notifications using Growl, Boxcar and XBMC
Wednesday, May 12th, 2010Read the rest of this entry »Earlier this week, I stumbled upon an iPhone app that allowed users to receive push notifications on XBMC.
When a notification is received in XBMC, it appears in the lower right corner of the screen.
Pretty cool.This made me think it would be nice to see incoming phone calls there.
So I took out the Ovolab Phlink device I had sitting on a shelf, and created a small ‘ring’ script for it. That (Apple)script checks for the caller ID when the phone rings (and for a matching entry in my address book), and if it is available, calls an external PHP script that handles the network-wide notifications.
Mac Widget: Vidéotron Internet Usage Monitor
Saturday, January 30th, 2010Read the rest of this entry »Having received earlier this week a letter from Vidéotron, my ISP, about my account getting capped at 100GB monthly in the upcoming months, I decided I needed an easy way to monitor my monthly bandwidth usage. A Dashboard widget was a good fit.
Remote-controlled air conditioning using Mac OS X and Shion
Saturday, July 18th, 2009Read the rest of this entry »My central HVAC system has issues cooling down the 3rd floor of our house during the summer.
To solve the problem, I started using my central HVAC system to cool the 1st & 2nd floor only, and I’m using a portative air conditioning unit on the 3rd floor.
To control the AC unit, I use my PowerMac (which is always on), to which a SmartHome PowerLinc USB Controller is connected.
I created a small PHP script which runs every minute, and determine if the AC should be on or off, and tells Shion to turn it on or off. Shion talks to the USB controller, which in turns talk to the SmartHome ApplianceLinc, which then either activate or desactivate the power outlet.
Auto-start XBMC on Apple TV boot
Friday, July 3rd, 2009Read the rest of this entry »Here’s how to have XBMC auto-start when your Apple TV boots.
TV Forecast widget not working? Here’s how to fix it.
Thursday, March 5th, 2009Read the rest of this entry »TV Forecast is a nice widget that Matt Comi created. You tell it what TV shows you watch, and it will keep track of the upcoming episodes for those shows.
The only down side to that widget is that it data-scrape TV.com to get its data.
Not only is this illegal, but it also tends to break the widget every time TV.com change their layout in any way.Getting tired of that, I decided to open the widget’s code, and change the data source to something more stable: TheTVDB.com
Encrypt Gmail offline (Gears) data
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009Read the rest of this entry »Since Gmail released the Offline feature in Labs, I guess many people have enabled it. I did, as soon as the feature was available in my account. And one of the first thing I did after enabling it, is trying to see how I could secure the data it downloads.
