The Warne Account

The personal blog of Dan Warne, Australian geek and tech writer

Posts Tagged Mac

Make Safari use CMD+K for Google Search

Apr 8

Posted by Dan Warne in Apple | No Comments

picture 2 Make Safari use CMD+K for Google Search

One of the things that really annoys me about Apple Safari is that it doesn't use the CTRL+K / CMD+K keyboard shortcut for activating the Google Search dialogue box, which is standard across most browsers — particularly Safari.

Instead, Safari makes you use CMD+Shift+L which is a "twister" of a keyboard shortcut — not very ergonomic. 

Amusingly, in their efforts to make Firefox 3 more Mac-like, the Firefox team has implemented the CMD+Shift+L keyboard shortcut as an alternative to CMD+K in Firefox 3. However, I still much prefer CMD+K. 

I found this great post over at 5thirtyone about how to make Safari recognise CMD+K as a keyboard shortcut for activating the Google Search box. It works a treat! Hurrah!

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Fantastic collection of contextual menu items for Mac

Mar 23

Posted by Dan Warne in Apple | 6 Comments

Ever wanted to change the desktop picture in Mac OS X by selecting the file in the Finder, right clicking and selecting "set as Desktop Picture" from a context menu?Or perhaps select some files, then "move files to a new folder", "create folder enclosing these files" or "make new folder for files"? (It's about time Apple built a "move files" option into OS X rather than just having copy available via the GUI.)

The answers to these needs are at a great page listing various context menu plugins for Mac OS X. Check it out. The two mentioned above are DeskPicChangeCM and MoveItemsX.

I also discovered a wonderful program that sits in your menu bar and lets you change your desktop picture. It can change desktop pictures on a schedule, too (with very nice transitions). It's called PictureSwitcher (pictured below). It's $US30 shareware, which I will happily pay once I've got some damn money in the bank again ;-)

screenshot Fantastic collection of contextual menu items for Mac

And then there's this handy Utility… Desktop 2 Login, which replaces the utterly hideous, gaudy, un-Apple-like purple starscape that sits behind the OS X login screen. It simply copies your current desktop picture to be displayed instead. Why couldn't Apple have provided that as an option!! Grumble grizzle!

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How to turn off slow sleep / hibernate mode on a MacBook Pro

Mar 13

Posted by Dan Warne in Apple | 13 Comments

Putting a Mac notebook to sleep is taking progressively longer and longer as time goes by. The reason? We're all ordering notebooks with 2 to 4GB of RAM now, and by default, OS X writes the entire contents of memory to disk before going to sleep.

Since Apple is pretty good about force-sleeping the computer before the battery runs out entirely, it's actually very rare to run out of battery altogether. I think in the entire time I've been using Macs, the safe sleep function has only been necessary once — and that was when I changed an old worn out battery over to a new one.

Fortunately, you can disable safe sleep mode, by entering the following into the terminal:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

If you want safe sleep mode back, just change the '0' to a '3'.

Voila — your Mac will be back to the good old days of instant sleep.

There's also a preference pane that can do this called Smartsleep, which lets you select a nice middle-ground: only use safe sleep mode if the battery is running low at the time you sleep the notebook. For me, who is usually plugged into the power point, that's ideal!

pixel How to turn off slow sleep / hibernate mode on a MacBook Pro

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