Brian Kerr

The situation: you’re on a closed wireless network (often encountered in a conference center, hotel, or .edu environment) and want to share it without paying, or don’t have enough access codes to go around.

The solution: two Macs, one ethernet cable, three minutes of your time. What’s nice about this recipe is that as you are virtually guaranteed to have all the ingredients on hand.

Under the ‘Internet’ tab of the Sharing pane in System Preferences, you can share your internet connection. That’s really all you need to know.

1. Connect the first Mac to the wireless network. (Sign in or pay up, so this one can actually get online.)
2. Share the first Mac’s connection from Airport to Ethernet.
3. Connect the second Mac to the first Mac via the ethernet cable. At this point, the second Mac should be able to get online.
4. Share the second Mac’s connection from Ethernet to Airport. (The ‘Airport Options’ button in the sharing pane will let you name the network.)

Once this is done, others can connect their devices to the network you’ve just created.

I’ve done this with an iBook G4 + Macbook, and with two Macbooks.

Make sure that both laptops are plugged in, or otherwise won’t go to sleep. In particular, if the second Mac goes to sleep, upon waking, its Airport is likely to go into a weird state where it’ll report out as running an ad-hoc network, but in fact be totally unresponsive until you restart the Mac. (Harsh, but true.)

Incidentally, this is also a good way to get your Nintendo DS online: the DS can connect to some encrypted networks, but can’t handle the stupid web-based authentication or payment form so often encountered.

(tags: games mac umich)

Some days, keyboard shortcuts are not enough. On these days, what you need is a button. In particular, a USB button or gamepad.

Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) say that “buttons initiate an immediate action.” More about the history of the button, including a peek at the original HIG’s take on GUI buttons.

Equipment

Button candidates:

1. Self Destruction Button DX (~$35)
2. PowerMate ($45)
3. Old Gravis Gamepad Pro (cheap; what I am using)

If you’re running OS X, you need additional software to map buttons to keyboard shortcuts, mouse motions, etc.:

1. USB Overdrive (shareware; recommended)
2. Gamepad Companion (shareware; decrepit)

Also, weird branded versions of USB Overdrive may be included with game controllers, or you may also get some other crappy System Preferences panel which may let you map keyboard shortcuts.

Actions

Combine two of the above with (say) your web browser’s keyboard navigation, and you’re in a good spot.

Here’s how I have been reading feeds in Google Reader:

1. a button for the “Next” bookmarklet (⌘2)
2. a button for OmniWeb’s “Next page” keyboard shortcut (⌅), which does a good job of paging through multi-page articles
3. a button to post the page to del.icio.us (⌘1)
4. a button to save the page as a PDF (⌥⇧⌘S)
5. a button to press ↩ (needed for #3 and #4 above)
6. shoulder buttons to scroll up and down

Now you know why so many untagged links in my del.icio.us lately.

So what?

There’s not really any point to all this. But I’m finding it actually easier to focus on reading with the controller, without temptation to fiddle with iTunes, IRC, or whatever else. It’s the ungodly collision of several metaphors: game-playing, RSS/news reading, and television channel-surfing. It’s the future of RSI, closing the feedback loop.

(tags: design games web)

Nick Cramer @ Internet Archive:

(tags: music web)

You’re invited to an ArborWiki Work Session this Wednesday, October 11. We’ll be meeting from 4 — 6 PM in a U-M library, followed by an optional dinner. The wiki page has more details. I’m expecting a handful of people: a small group, but big enough to get something neat done.

ArborWiki collects interesting things about Ann Arbor. The cornerstone page is probably Lunch under 5 dollars, and the best way to browse is through the Streets of Ann Arbor (”Not quite the streets of San Francisco”).

ArborWiki is provided by the Community High Web Group and Matt Hampel, a Commie High alum and U-M undergraduate.

(tags: annarbor media weblogs wiki)

Liana switched to a Mac today, and watching her orient herself to OS X made me think about what took me a long time to like about it. The availability of more or less standard keyboard navigation was a big one, hence this post.

The bizarre little symbols

Commands in your application menus, and system-wide keyboard shortcuts, are given in a terse notation, where you’ll encounter bizarre little symbols for all of the meta-keys on a keyboard, which are:

• ⌘ — command / ‘open-Apple’
• ⌥ — option
• ⌃ — control
• ⇧ — shift
• ⇥ — tab
• ⇤ — backwards tab (type ⇧⇥)
• ↩ — return
• ⌅ — enter (numeric keypad, or between ⌘ and ← keys on a laptop)
• ⌫ — delete (backspace, not to be confused with ⌦ forward delete, a separate key not on laptops)
• ⎋ — escape
• ↑↓←→ — arrow keys

Even though letters are shown in upper-case, type them lower-case (I know).

Keyboard shortcuts

These are system-wide shortcuts, which you can see and change in System Preferences, under Keyboard & Mouse. It’s worth a trip regardless, to make sure that ‘Full keyboard access’ is on and set to ‘All controls.’

Window management:

• ⌘⇥ and ⌘⇤ — switch applications
• ⌘` and ⌘~ — switch windows in frontmost application
• ⌃F2 — select menu bar (for keyboard navigation)

Helpful when writing:

• ⎋ — tries to auto-complete the word you are typing; will match words in the dictionary and words in the current document
• ⌘⌃D — look up the word under your cursor in the dictionary
• ⌘⌥T — brings up Character Palette, which is worth exploring

Mucking with the display:

• ⌘⌥⌃8 — reverse color display, nice in extremely bright environments or for tired eyes
• ⌘⇧4 — screen shot mode: press this shortcut and the cursor changes into a little target; click mouse to save a screen shot to your Desktop, or press space to take a picture of a single window

Changing keyboard shortcuts

In System Preferences, you can see a list canned keyboard shortcuts, including those above. You can change the shortcuts, or even cooler, add your own shortcuts to any menu pick in any application.

Keyboard navigation conventions

In addition to actual keyboard shortcuts, there are keyboard equivalents for common things that are pretty conventional: you can rely on them, but will be infrequently disappointed. The best of these is

• ⌘, — open preferences for frontmost application

Also, if you’re presented with a modal dialog ’sheet’ — canonical example being a Don’t Save / Cancel / Save choice when closing a window — you can typically, but not always, just hit ⌘ plus the first letter of the choice you want. In the example above, that’d be ⌘D / ⌘C / ⌘S.

(tags: mac)

Via Dan Klyn. Usage: “When I grabbed the can opener, the cats laserbeamed over to the food dish.”

(tags: umsi)

The U-M Chapter of the Human Factors & Ergonomics Society is hosting a Bad Designs on Campus contest for National Ergonomics Month (October):

Following the principles of Human Factors and Ergonomics, a bad design can be anything that humans have problems interacting with. This may be a tool or device that one physically manipulates, such as a hammer or door, which results in unnecessary physical discomfort or fatigue, or that is confusing to operate. It may also be a virtual interface, such as a website, with confusing layouts, navigation schemes, or even one that is difficult to read because of poor text font/size/color/contrast. Several good examples of bad designs can be found at

Want a free bad design idea? The contest requires entries to be submitted as — get this — Microsoft Word documents. The relationship between proprietary / convicted-monopolist-boosting text formats and human factors in design is not too hard to tease out — but, giving the hosts the benefit of the doubt, I’ll assume that plain text and RTF could be considered Word documents in the sense that they are able to be accessed by the program. But still, that’s one hell of a bad design right there.

(tags: annarbor design umich umsi writing)