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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."
It's not that it isn't registering the return, it's just that the dock animation is getting priority. If your machine is too fast or too slow (I forget the way it works, probably both ways) the command will not go through in time to stop the window. A better solution is to, after executing the command to kill the dock, start clicking at the slowly moving window animation to slow it down even more to give the kill command time to execute. In addition, the effect on a window is far cooler if the dock is to the right or left, rather than at the bottom.
even cooler would be to option-shift click the minimize button when you have lots of windows open in that application... that way you get a bunch of squshed windows to play around with. ;)
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
I'm posting this from a very unusually shaped Firefox window. It's like drunken typing.
Pudge seems to believe that researching and crediting sources is retarded behavior. May be right, may be wrong...
This is...
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Try looking for the Cage piece on Kazaa...there are several versions available (really!!) Just think, you would owe royalties if you performed the piece exactly as recorded on the record (with audience coughs and everything).
And my preferred bunny:
(Y)
(~.~)
(")(")
I am Jack's witty signature line
How long would it take to download 5 minutes of silence on a 56k modem?
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
"A great musician once said... "Silence is also music."
That reminds me of something that happened over at an art forum a couple of years ago. A dude there had a really good reputation for generating interesting art. Unfortunately, over time, people started getting maliciously nitpicky about some of the details of his work. He invited this form of nastiness as certain subject matter caused him to respond rather negatively. The last pic I remember him releasing was all black. The title: "The Nitpick Proof Image". Almost immediately after it, somebody responded "Put credits on it!"
"Derp de derp."
Well I run Gentoo-unstable, does that count? I'm compiling unreleased kernels with unreleased GCC versions built on a system with a prerelease glibc version.
What do I get out of it? Not much. I can file bug reports so the bleeding edge becomes the cutting edge in less time.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
to fit in on the Seattle scene
you gotta do something they ain't never seen
so thinking up a gimmick on day
we decided to be the only band that wouldn't play
a note
under any circumstances
silence
music's original alternative
--Todd Snider
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Actually, if you want to see a *really* cool effect, trying doing this minimize/kill-dock thing with a movie in the Quicktime player. Since it plays the movie even while it's minimized in the dock, it also plays it on the way there...so you can catch it half way, and watch the movie all skewed up. Quite interesting. :P
:)
Here's the one I got... I'm surprised it doesn't even seem to have an effect on the framerate, either. Strange stuff.
-Munki
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
Okay, I don't get what you're complaining about - are you saying that the slient tracks somehow lowers the value of the rest of the songs? Not trying to flame, just need an explanation...
Other non-music tracks I can think of:
One of Offspring's albums has an "intermission" track.
At least one Marylin Manson album(Antichrist Superstar) has 99 tracks, the maximum allowable under the CD audio standard. The album cover only lists tracks that are actual songs.
One Beatles album(Sgt. Pepper's I think) in vinyl form had a last track that was an endless loop which would play some noise forever until you stopped the record.
Lots of anime soundtracks have a 'drama track' where the voice actors do a radio drama type thingy.
And these days, a lot of CDs come with data tracks that contain extras like video and art.
Claude Debussy said "Music is the space between the notes."
Powerbook G4/1.5GHz 12", Toshiba Satellite 1135-S1554
... and have a still usable window. Using Camino and Terminal, Minimize the Camino window (the Slashdot page is very effective). Type the killall Dock command into Terminal. After you shift-click the Camino window and can see it starting to crawl out of the Dock QUICKLY go over to the Terminal window and hit Enter. If you time it well (you can also try the sleep version if you are having timing problems), you will be left with a Camino window that is still usable, although squished. I did this and had the top part of the window full and the bottom part at about 1/3 size. I was able to browse a few websites with the window like that. It actually will draw everything to fit in that skewed perspective!
Instant 20" display (to scale :)
i don't have any QuartzGL capable machines, but i would think that shift or sift-control would slow it down, just like it does with most of the other effects.
if i think about it, i'll try that next time i'm in CompUSA, or an Apple Store.
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.
Strangely, I think the article doesn't explain the 4'33'' meaning, which was 273'', as -273 Celsius, aka Absolute Zero (0 Kelvin). Like the deep calm that ends this piece representation.
The conceptual aspect of the performance is still the fundamental of this piece and I don't believe WinAmp (or iTunes or mpg123) can't do the trick as well as a full concert hall. But perhaps the buying act can do a little, but should be organized, theatralized, like a performance.
ClaudeBBG
Noisy.
It doesn't really matter, anyway, silence (meaning quiet, really) has suffered the "tragedy of the commons" and barely exists. There are almost no acoustic wildernesses left (where you can't hear internal combustion, eg.) and silence has become a golden commodity reflected in real estate values and construction techniques. We're habituated to the constant hum of fans and machinery and all policy decisions on the topic are oriented towards noise reduction, not quiet protection; technological solutions are generally oriented towards masking or reduction, not noise elimination.
In communication studies, silence is like the water we fish swim in: everyone notices it's there, but almost no-one studies it. Without some degree of relative silence, acoustic communication is impossible. We've traded some of that away for progress, and the results are subtle but disturbing.
Damn those pesky terrorists