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Friday Apple Fun
It's the weekend, and it's Friday the 13th (depending on when you read this), so have some fun making your Mac windows unusable and buying copyrighted (and copy-protected!) silence from iTunes Music Store. Read on for details.
Crazy Window Effects
ZackSchil writes "Open a terminal window and type on the prompt: killall Dock. Don't press return. Position a large window behind the terminal window, then shift-click on the large window's minimize button (so it goes slowly). While still holding shift, quickly hit the return key to execute the command and kill the Dock (it comes back right away). As soon as the dock's process is killed, the window will cease minimizing, leaving you with a working, draggable, active window halfway through the warping animation! While the system is at a loss how to translate mouse clicks to the window, you can still move bits that haven't changed location too much. After having some fun, just press Command-M to get the window all the way into the Dock and click to get it out again."
I had a similar experience with iChat the other day: I somehow caught a chat so the window was transparent. And more fun: open System Preferences, click on Network, and before it loads, move the window; when Network opens, the whole window moves back to where it was when you first clicked on it (this isn't new, but it annoys me).
Paying for (Copy-Protected) Silence wayneh writes "As the Apple Turns turned out a great story about several silent tracks available via the iTunes Music Store. They are all subject to the same digital copy protection as tracks with actual sound and at least one has a thirty second preview. Interestingly, a number of them are listed as explicit and have alternate clean versions available as well. Next time you need a few minutes of quiet time, consider purchasing it from Apple."
I had a little trouble doing the window trick (it didn't seem to take the return character), so here's another method:
1. type "sleep 1; killall Dock" without the return
2. Hover the mouse over the minimize button
3. hit return
4. You have up to a second to shift-click the minimize button. (for more time, use "sleep 2" or 3)
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
4'33", otherwise as the Silent Sonata, was written by composer John Cage. A pianist would enter onto the stage and sit at a piano for a timed interval of four minutes and thirty-three seconds. During this period, the normally insignificant ambient noise of the audience and environment became the music itself. Of most interest, while there were no written notes for the piece, the performance produces a different sound each and every time.
On an amusing note, it would be interesting to simply sit down at a computer and click the stop button on WinAMP to listen for four and a half minutes to the noises that are habitually ignored at a computer workstation. And besides--what kind of a world would we be in if silence becomes patented?
That crazy window effect is absolutely amazing. All the window functions are still functional, the mouse clicks just mapped slightly wrong. Thanks for sharing.
at least give credit where credit is do! (me) :)
in case you want proof, here is my 1st publishing of the above directions (including an example)
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
This hack works almost the same if you kill the dock while doing expose thingies. See
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story
This is all true. In fact, there is actually printed music to the 'piece' that simply has movement numberings and instructions like so:
:oP
I
(tacet)
II
(tacet)
III
(tacet)
as you can see, the piece is in three movements. For you non-musicians, 'tacet' simply means that you do not play in this section of the piece. This term is usually used in a orchestra/band setting where certain instruments would not play in a movement.
For my own safety, we'll call this an analysis so that I don't get sent to jail for copyright infringement.
if anyone is interested, here's a screenshot of a partially minimized safari.