sleepwatcher
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Terminally Geeky: Deadline reminders using Growl, sleepwatcher, and GNU date
When I have a large deadline looming, I like to keep track of how many days I have left. I've tried Dashboard widgets, iPad apps and just about anything else you could think of, but they all have failed for one simple reason: they require me to check them. I can go days or weeks without triggering the Dashboard, and an iOS countdown app still requires that you check it. I could use something like Due app, but I really don't want something actively distracting me -- I want something passively reminding me. Nor do I want these cluttering up my iCal. I found my solution by cobbling together several bits of free Unix utilities that are essential to any true geek's tool belt.
Timelapse of iSight wakeup captures
A few months back, we wrote about reader Dylan's iSight autocapture project-- he rigged up the code to have his iSight on his MacBook Pro snap a photo every time the lid was opened (and even released all of his work as open source). At the time, he mentioned eventually combining all of the photos together into a timelapse video, and seven months later, here it is.Unfortunately, he says the Sleepwatcher daemon he was using doesn't work as of 10.4.10, so the project is over until it gets updated, if ever. But he did share with us how he compiled the images together into a timelapse-- he punched out a Perl script (which is reprinted after the jump) to rename all of the pictures into sequenced filenames, and then squished them together with Quicktime's "image sequence" feature. Very nice.
