Passing the Phaser: 10 Tips for Turning Geeklets into Trekkies

The GeekDad blog once again makes another of their famous Top Ten lists…., This time it is Passing the Phaser: 10 Tips for Turning Geeklets into Trekkies. Don\’t expect a serious list with this one, but it is quite funny in it\’s own rights… Go ahead, and take a look. Just remember…. KHAAAANNN!!! I wonder […]

New promos mark transition of SCI FI to Syfy

Well, it\’s happening…. Sci Fi Wire has posted a few videos with the new SyFy promos from the rebranding/rebranded SciFi channel. To me, they are less than inspiring… What are your feelings about it? I still believe that this is a mistake for SciFi… – Benjamin

Switch Power Management Plans With a Shortcut

Have you ever wanted to quickly switch from High Performance to Power Saver mode to save some battery life? With a quick command line in a shortcut, you can do it with a keystroke. Here\’s a quick-and-dirty method to create a shortcut for switching between Windows power management plans—and once you have the command line, […]

Laptop fan running constantly? Check this first…

Typically Mac OS X is configured to set the default printer to the last printer you just used…  But that\’s not always correct… In some cases, people with laptops have attempted to use a printer that isn\’t available, and that has caused the laptop\’s fan to run constantly, since Mac OS X is attempting to […]

Time Machine Last Backup Date Check..

Folks, One Major issue that I have with Time Machine, is that the OS does not warn you (reliably) if you go too long between backups. Here\’s a python script that can do so…  It\’s primarily designed for attached (usb/firewire) storage, but I have added support for Time Capsule style backups…  When run, the script […]

Shutting Down a Windows PC from a Macintosh

If you\’ve ever wanted to remotely reboot a Windows box from your machine, the following tip can be useful… Any Macintosh OS X system can reboot a windows machine, assuming that you know the credentials of an Administrative Account on the Windows system.  Open the Terminal and use the following command line: net rpc shutdown […]

Convert this!

Apple includes as part of the Printer Libraries, a small conversion utility.  I presume it is used to help convert certain formats to either PDF or Postscript internally…  But here\’s some fun we can have with it. For example, let\’s say we have a file called \”my.html\”, but using this command line: /System/Library/Printers/Libraries/convert -f my.html […]