Tag: Tutorials

Take Screenie, Upload to Dropbox

I made this little AppleScript today which I’ve personally found to be very useful. On my Mac I have it so the script is activated by BetterTouchTool when I do a 5 finger tap. It will take a screenshot of a specific area, upload it to Dropbox, and copy a convenient bit.ly link to your clipboard. So here it is for your enjoyment:

set filename to do shell script "date '+date-%Y-%m-%d-time-%H-%M-%S'"
do shell script "screencapture -i ~/Dropbox/Public/Screenshots/" & filename & ".png"
set dropboxurl to "http://dl.dropbox.com/u/[dropbox id]/Screenshots/" & filename & ".png"
set tinyURL to (do shell script "curl --stderr /dev/null "http://bit.ly/api?url=" & dropboxurl & """)
tell application "Finder" to set the clipboard to tinyURL

If you want to use this you have to replace [dropbox id] with your Dropbox ID number. You can usually get this from any link to a shared file, for example my ID of 3759922 can be found in the url https://dl.dropbox.com/u/3759922/Screenshots/date-2010-02-02-time-23-24-48.png

EDIT: @joshbetz came up with a better solution for this tutorial. Go check it out!

Run Boot Camp Within OS X

Recently a friend of mine, Josh Betz, has been trying to get his Boot Camp partition to run as a virtual machine (VM) from OS X. It’s a great idea and I would recommend, but there are a couple of disadvantages. Let’s look at the pros and cons:

Pros

  • Able to access all of your existing files
  • Saves hard drive space by not requiring a virtual disk
  • Allows you to run Windows without restarting your Mac
  • Completely free (I will outline how to do this free with VirtualBox, but VMware can do this natively, but it costs $$$ and we don’t like that!)

Cons

  • Usually pretty slow at booting up
  • Must install Windows 7, and in a certain way (Only Windows 7 is proven to work, I haven’t tried Vista, but if you’re running Vista… well I’m sorry I just won’t help you.)
  • A few hacks need to be applied

Obviously the pros outweigh the cons, but hey, everything has some trade-offs. Anyway, this process isn’t very hard and should take the average Terminal junkie ~5 minutes. Now there are two ways we can go about this…
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Change your external IP

I ran into a problem today; I was trying to connect to an external server via SSH, but the server kept dropping me. I narrowed it down to the idea of the server blocking my external IP address. I tried everything from SSH proxies to SSH web clients. The web client consoleFISH worked out sorta well, but it was slow and it didn’t give me the feel of Terminal’s “Homebrew” view.

Then I thought, “Wait a minute, what if I just changed my IP address?” knowing that I had a dynamic IP with my ISP. Turns out that it was the easiest solution, though it may not work for everybody. I read up on the subject and found that most cable ISP’s give you an IP address based on the MAC address of your router. It makes sense too if you think about it. Whenever I swapped out my router I noticed that we got a different IP address, and because the MAC address was really the only thing that changed (from a connection standpoint) it just clicked.

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