Silvamerica

Software Tips for Meetings & Presentations

Thu, 25 Sep 2014 08:33:00 +0000

There are two pet peeves that I have about Mac laptops connected to external displays in meetings. The first is when someone fumbles through system preferences to toggle display mirroring when there is a keyboard shortcut, and the second is when someone’s display goes to sleep and they have to type their password to get the presentation back.

Well, both of these are easily preventable.

Toggle Display Mirroring

This one is super simple. When you have an external display connected, Command(⌘)+F1 toggles between extended desktop and mirrored mode. If you’ve switched off Mac special function keys (by checking System Preferences -> Keyboard -> “Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys”), then you’d use fn+Command(⌘)+F1. To test which version you would use, press the F1 key. If it dims your display, then use the former combo, otherwise use the latter.

Keep Your Display Awake

This one is a little more involved (ooh, installing software!), but there are several options out there that beat going into System Preferences each time you present and changing the settings. The one that I like to use is called Caffeine.

Caffeine is a tiny little program that installs a coffee cup in your menu bar. Click it and your display won’t sleep. You can configure things like starting at login and the default amount of time before it deactivates itself. This will help you avoid that awkward moment when everyone watches you enter your password incorrectly enough times to get locked out.

Bonus: Clear Your Desktop

Have you ever been embarrased when your audience catches a glimpse of your desktop cluttered with folders, screenshots, text files, and code snippets? Do you have a method to the madness that gets completely messed up if you try moving it all to another folder temporarily? Worry no more! Just drop down into Terminal:

	cd ~ && mkdir DesktopHidden && mv Desktop/* DesktopHidden

This will create a new directory in your home directory and move everything from your Desktop into that folder. When you move everything back, they will keep their positions and ordering on your desktop!

	cd ~ && mv DesktopHidden/* Desktop && rmdir DesktopHidden

This actually works because you’re moving the .DS_Store file back and forth, and that’s what keeps track of the positions of icons (now you know what it’s for!), however I’ve found that this is a pretty easy way to do this.

Extra Bonus: Do Not Disturb

Starting with Mountain Lion, Apple introduced a “Do Not Disturb” mode for notifications. You can set it to auto-enable when you’re mirrored to a TV or projector. This only works for notifications that go through Notification Center, but it’s a good idea if you want to make sure a new Software Update reminder doesn’t show up on the big screen. For anything else (personal chat?), it’s probably best to just make sure that you don’t have the clients open.

Game 2: Lock Puzzle

Sat, 12 Jul 2014 13:47:00 +0000

This isn’t as much a game as it is a puzzle. It’s basically the fifteen puzzle, however you can swap any two adjacent tiles instead of having to use the empty tile space. I tried at one point to utilize the empty tile space but it made it more complicated so I cut it out. If you solve the first puzzle, it will just get bigger and bigger to a point where you probably don’t want to play any more.

Game 1: Circles

Sat, 12 Jul 2014 13:47:00 +0000

My first HTML game is tentatively called Circles and it’s not really a game yet. It’s only just a working Pixi renderer that loads a sprite and makes it grow larger. That’s it… The terrible terrible code is on Github. It’s a game… sort of. Let’s see if I can do better next week.

Find Who Added a File With Git

Thu, 08 May 2014 06:13:00 +0000

I don’t know why this was so hard to find. I searched extensively, tried to paste multiple process substitions from git and ls, and who knows what else. This command will show you, in reverse chronological order (by commit), who added the file or files and when:

git log --name-only --diff-filter=A --date=short \
--pretty=format:"%an <%ae> on %ad in %h" -- path/to/files/*

Add Audio Delay Keyboard Shortcuts to Plex

Wed, 07 May 2014 07:52:33 +0000

It’s always frustrated me that by default you can’t affect the audio sync in Plex Home Theater without bringing up a distracting menu. It’s especially annoying when you have friends over and you don’t want to interrupt the show because you’re more obsessive over the audio sync than everyone else. I’ve finally figured out how to fix this. Just go to:

~/Library/Application Support/Plex Home Theater/userdata/keymaps

and create a new file called keyboard.xml. Paste in:

<keymap>
  <global>
    <keyboard>
			<b>AudioDelayMinus</b>
			<n>AudioDelayPlus</n>
		</keyboard>
	</global>
</keymap>

Restart PHT and now the b and n keys will reduce and add 25 milliseconds of audio delay, respectively.

Open Links From Mac Terminal

Sun, 04 May 2014 20:54:33 +0000

From this SO post, ⌘-DblClick on a link will open.

Force Dig to Not Cache

Sat, 26 Apr 2014 12:19:56 +0000

I found this post particularly helpful in debugging a DNS cache issue. The gist of it was:

	dig @ns1.dynadot.com www.silvamerica.com

to force dig to not use the cache when asking for domain records. You have to specify an authoritative name server with an @.

First Post

Sat, 26 Apr 2014 11:29:34 +0000

This is my first blog post! I’m intending this to be a searchable repository of information that I want to refer back to, like step-by-step instructions on how to install random software that I use. Maybe someone else might find it useful.