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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 hope the estate of John Cage is getting royalties for the silence... they would all seem to be infringing on the copyright for 4'33".
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Nah, I prefer to pirate my silence.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
...you insensitive clod!
-CowboyNick
It ought to be plainly obvious why those silent tracks are there.
If you think it's dumb, you really should be laughing at the artists who think low enough of their fans to put silent tracks on their records.
That's the beauty of the 9.99/album dealy thingy.
If an album has a bunch of bs silence, and you're one of those people that has to buy the whole album (not a bad thing, I'm the same way), you aren't paying 99 cents per silent track.
Albums like Tool's AEnima have 4 or 5 BS tracks that nobody could possibly consider music, or need (not want, need). That albums comes out to less than $10 (and far less than an hour) when you buy the tracks individually.
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
A great musician once said:
"Silence is also music."
How about making your computer malfunction on purpose?
Just some more proof that yes, we ARE all crazy.
Goo goo g'joob.
Who wouldn't pay $.99 (or a lucky Pepsi cap) to listen to the grass grow? It's such a novel idea, I imagine someone's already working on a "one-click method for buying silence".
"See you, space cowboy." -Spike
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.
This hack works almost the same if you kill the dock while doing expose thingies. See
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story
Which format is best for my silent recordings?
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!
As with all conceptial weird ideas, the idea itself is nice, but I can't imagine myself cranking up the stereo to have a good listen...
I think, therefore I am...I think.
USA?
So if a tree falls in the woods with no one around, does it have to pay a royalty fee to John Cage?
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They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
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.
... 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 :)
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
if anyone is interested, here's a screenshot of a partially minimized safari.