Sleep Your Mac by Email

Murphy picked this tip up from Tim Margh last year and has been using it ever since. The Snippet shows how to configure your Mac to watch for emails matching certain criteria, like a particular subject. When the message comes in your Mac goes off to sleepyland. You could use this technique to have your Mac do other things as well. Perhaps more interesting things.

Some people will say this is stupid, you can simply set your Mac to sleep after x minutes. First of all, that’s no fun. Second, some people don’t want their Mac going to sleep on a timer. Ever.

On occasion Murphy wakes his Mac up remotely and connects with VNC. Sometimes he disconnects without putting the machine back to sleep. Instead of logging back in he just fires off a magic email.

You’ll need to download one file to try this yourself, straight from Apple’s site. It’s a sleeper action for Automator. Run the installer that comes in the dmg. The rest is all built-in.

So click Watch Now to view the screencast as Murphy acts out Tim’s tip. By the way, he uses text messages to sleep his Mac!
ps: Your Mac needs to be turned on, and Mail needs to be running.

Update: What about Windows? You can easily reboot Windows by email. Watch this to see how.

Note: Some readers have pointed out that you can do this whole thing in AppleScript. That’s true. But by using both Automator and AppleScript we’ve shown that you can kick off anything those two technologies can do - by email. Or text message for that matter.

Click for more ways to control your Mac by email.

Print a List of Your Files

The Finder isn’t very helpful when it comes to printing a list of your files. Sure - you could take some screenshots. Murphy considers that a sloppy solution.

You already know a little about the ls command. With your newfound Terminal skills you can list all the files in a directory or folder. And have the list written to a tidy little text file. This Snippet will show you how to list files by size or date. And how to explore subfolders too.

We’ll also review pico and cat. If you don’t remember those tools you should review them first. Watch the warning about using Terminal here.

After watching this Snippet you’ll know how to open a list of your files in Excel or Textedit or some other application. From there you can print.  Or check out how to make a PDF listing a folder’s contents.

Isn’t it Obvious?

iWeb has some great looking themes. But not all of them make your hyperlinks all that obvious. If you’re not into html you might find workarounds for changing a theme a little tough to take. Like changing the color of hyperlinks.
Murphy uses images for hyperlinks he wants to draw extra attention to. Then he reuses the image on other pages. Take a look at the Snippet to see how.

POST Christmas Poll

The dust has settled. What did you score from Cupertino under your tree? Click below to Answer the Poll Question.

Murphy will be back to business on Wednesday.

Christmas Question #1

Even Murphy likes to take a little R/R at Christmas time. The Snippets will be back on Wednesday. In the meantime, tell us about the sugarplums dancing in your head. What do you REALLY expect to find parked under that tree?

Click Answer the Poll Question to let us know.

And come back on Tuesday to tell us what you actually got!
Merry Christmas!

UPDATE:  Get your vote in!  Polls close Christmas Eve in a time zone tbd!