Murphy Mac

Wait until you see what a clever pun this title is. Using the sleep command in Terminal you can update your Twitter status while you’re away. Or sleeping.

Apple has jumped around a little with regards to command line scheduling tools, but the sleep command is still dead-simple to use. (Read more about scheduling with lingon and launchd here)

Suppose you have a command you want to run once, at a future time. Use sleep followed by the number of seconds to wait. Then use a semi-colon to separate the command to run at the appointed time.

sleep 30 ; command

The above example will execute command 30 seconds after you hit the return key. 3600 seconds is an hour. 86,400 seconds in each and every day.

So now you just need a command to update Twitter. The curl command comes with your Mac. Twitter Development Talk boasts the easiest way to update Twitter from the command line. Scroll down to The Easiest Way to Play Around with the Twitter API. Christopher Penn has a post on it too, but the command is cut-off on his blog.

The command should look like this:

curl -u username:password -d status=”your message here” http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

Enter that all on one line. It would be better to make it into a shell script. Just copy that line into a text file, maybe name it tw.sh, and replace the your message here part with $1. Then use chmod to make it executable.

Note: Don’t know how to make it executable? Read more about making a shell script. Learn even more about shell scripts: make an interactive shell script.

From there you can enter the following in the Terminal:

./tw.sh “Looking into starting my own airline…”

And you’ve updated your Twitter status.  You can make that cleaner by setting an alias for your shell script.

Finally, to have your tweet post onto Twitter hours later you could enter something like this in the Terminal:

sleep 7200; ./tw.sh “I’m sleeping” (you’ll need to leave your Mac on)

If you’re a stickler about your Twittering and want to be accurate, this is the way to go. Schedule that I’m in the shower tweet in advance. People need to know.

If you use Windows you might not be overly fond of the little bubbles that pop up down on your Task Bar. You know the ones — warnings about your firewall and unused items on your desktop?

A simple registry edit will stop the bubbles, for all applications. You can watch the screencast to see two ways to make the change. You can either make the edit manually using regedit, a registry editor that comes with Windows. Or you can download a file from Murphy and double-click it. The file will make the change.

You don’t have much to worry about. In fact, you can right-click the file (after unzipping it), select Edit, and you’ll see it’s just a couple lines of text. The change is easily undone. Simply delete the entry from your registry.

The balloons will stop appearing for all applications - only for the user you’re logged in as when you make the change. Log out and back in to test your results.

If you’re comfortable in the registry go ahead and make this entry:

Add a DWORD value in the following key, and name it EnableBalloonTips. Set its hex value to zero.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\

CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

Not a registry person? Watch the screencast.

I don’t even know if they have bubbles in Vista…

Murphy used to control iTunes using a laptop. With an almost two-year-old little girl on the loose that’s not always so convenient. Laptops are a prime toddler target. If Murphy’s little angel isn’t beating on the MBP she’s slamming the lid shut and saying, “Buh-bye.”

Remote Buddy changes everything. A toddler doesn’t always notice an iPod touch or an iPhone. So now Murphy can select a playlist, skip to the next track, rate a song - all kinds of things. If a toddler approaches you can jam the iPod between the sofa cushions.

Remote Buddy has a nice layout. The buttons are easy to tap and you can browse using a very iPod-like interface. Murphy has been making lots of progress rating songs and cleaning up his library.

Murphy’s music is on a G5 upstairs, but he listens on a stereo in the living room via an Airport Express. When it’s safe to use a laptop the interface is perfect. Murphy set a keyboard shortcut to open Remote Buddy in a custom sized window - using a special kind of bookmark.

The screencast shows some basic functionality. The Remote Buddy interface launches in Safari, so you don’t have to hack your iPhone or iPod touch.

Remote Buddy product site.

Do you have messages on your phone that you save every time you review your voicemail? A call from your daughter announcing your first grandchild? Mary Pat McBride saying she does love you and she will go to the prom with you after all? Your boss calling - fully intoxicated - and promising you the Penske account?

If you’d like to get these messages off your phone and store them somewhere else Murphy has a solution. Run Audio Hijack while calling your mobile phone via Skype. Save the recording on your computer and you can delete it from your phone.

To call a mobile phone from your Skype account you’ll need Skype credit. Maybe you have a free-of-charge way to call your mobile from your computer. Let us know in the comments.

If you’re not familiar with Audio Hijack you can watch the screencast for details on how to capture your voicemail.

It really works.  Here’s a success story based on the experience of Jean MacDonald from Smile On My Mac.  (textexpander and more)

Related Post: You can make Skype always start in invisible mode. Or whatever mode you choose.

A lot of people found they couldn’t get into their shopping cart for the last few days. They got an error from iTunes that said 5002, indicating a mysterious server error. Users could access the store and they could add items to their cart. They could even switch out of shopping cart mode and make purchases.

It’s happened before, it’ll probably happen again.

Murphy’s cart came back today. If you’ve got a lot of stuff in there you might want to make a backup of the list. Select the cart, go to the File menu and click Print. Choose “Song listing” and iTunes will make you a snazzy looking printout. Save it as a PDF or print it out for your fridge. Maybe you’ll work harder and save up for all those Fergie songs you want.

Murphy’s list was intact when the cart came back. But you never know - like anything in your online universe it could get lost. According to some reports users who called Apple to reset their cart lost the contents.

Click here for more posts about iTunes.