I know I can somehow control the volume using applescript and I know I can assign a script to be kicked off at certain times by setting a scheduled even in iCal so I thought I should marry these to ideas and stop my Mac from bothering my wife an I at night.

Here is how I did it:

Open up the AppleScript Editor, I used Spotlight to do this…

Once you have that open type in the following:

set volume 0

You can test if this works by setting your volume to the max from the menu bar or on your keyboard. Now press the “Run” button and watch the magic happen.TaDa! Volume set to zero. Obviously we don’t want to run this script manually each time we want this to happen so let’s save this script to your Documents folder, I named mine “Mute Sound.scpt” and move on to iCal.

Close the AppleScript Editor and load up iCal.

If this automation thing is new to you I’d imagine you’ll be using this more and more,  go up to File and select New Calendar and then select “On My Mac”. Why “On My Mac”? well for me I sync all my calendars to my iPhone and iPad and I dont want to be alerted when my Mac is doing these automations so we’re making a mac specific calendar to house these. Set the name of this Calendar to be “Automation”.

After that right click on todays date and select “New Event” and name it “Mute Sound” then double click on it and select “Edit”.

From the edit screen set the time you want your computer to be muted, for me I set it for 10pm since I’m old and go to bed a decent hour most nights. Since I want this to happen “most nights”  you can set this to run say, Sunday through Thursday for 10pm like me then on Friday through Saturday set it for 11:59pm or whatever fits your schedule. To do the 2 tier’d scheduling just make 2 events. Anyhow, to kick off the Alert change the Alert to “Run Script” and then locate the “Mute Sound” script from your Documents folder.

Click apply and now you have your Mute Sound kicking off at the time you specified and now you won’t be bothered late at night.

In a later posting I’ll discuss how to use AppleScript and iCal to update my podcasts each morning so they are ready for me to listen to on my commute to work.

Let me know how this works for you in the comments below!

When I got my first iPod Touch Jailbreaking was just started up. The device was new and shiny yet we wanted more… jailbreaking allowed the adventureious geek to disable the built in security of the device and “root” it allowing them to login via an ssh connection and access the shell. See, I live by the idea that there is always something more to do with a device or technology then what it was really intended for. There was a lot of slick apps being added to the iPod Touch (this was before the official Apple App Store existed) and I was having fun adding new all sorts of cool stuff to the device. At the time my favorite was being able to add a wallpaper  springboard where the icons lived. Apps like Winterboard really made it so you could customize the device however you saw fit.

Later I sold my iPod Touch and got an iPhone which again I jailbroke but was very cautious in what apps I added to it. This was my primary phone and I didn’t need it rebooting in the middle of a phone call or something. When I purchased my iPhone 3G I tried my hand again at jailbreaking and had decent results but some instability problems. One day my iPhone outright died and I had to take it to the Apple Store to see about having it fixed or replaced. At the time I had “Make it mine” app installed which allowed me to have “TUCKER” displayed instead of “AT&T” as the carrier text. Luckily he couldn’t get the phone to boot so he gave me a new iPhone 3G. From that point I didn’t jailbreak my iPhone 3G but I did go home and restore from backup, it ends up that the carrier modification that Make it Mine did stays in the backup so I continued to have “TUCKER” and the carrier text even though it wasn’t jailbroken. Fast forward to 2010 and I have an iPhone 4 32gb that I’ve been itching to jailbreak due to the faster processor and more memory I had this feeling that the instability issues would be minimal on this more powerful device.

Before doing the jailbreak I mapped out my plan of attack:

• No UI customizations needed for me. I didn’t really care about modifying the aesthetics of the UI, now that iOS4 allows someone to add their own Lock Screen wallpaper and SpringBoard wallpaper I’m fine with just that.
• Find a way to get rid of the annoying popup notifications in favor of some non-intrusive notification method ala Android and WebOS.
• Disable the WiFi only restrictions that Apple (and AT&T) put in place.
• Enable the ability to create a WiFi hotspot.

Added Bonus:

• Add additional functionality to Copy and Paste action menu.

I found all the jailbreak only programs I needed to make the above happen then researched how to go about jailbreaking the iPhone 4. As of this writing iOS Version 4.1 (8B117)  is the current firmware and quite a few jailbreak apps have come out: pwnagetool, limera1n etc. I tried pwnagetool and ended up with a non activated iPhone 4, a iPod Touch if you will. I started from scratch and tried limera1n with much more success. I do hear that there may be some battery life issue with using limera1n and I’ll be looking into that in the next few days.

So, what apps did I install from Cydia?

• Action Menu
  Expands on the Cut Copy and Paste menu by adding additional features to it:
  Copy All, History, Lookup, Tweet, TinyUrl, Open Path, Search and much more
• Activator
  Activate apps via gestures, buttons and shortcuts. I’m mainly using this to activate Notified Pro so I can swipe from the top of the screen down to show my notifications.
• Cyntact
  Shows profile pictures in contact lists, if you have pictures of all your contacts it’s nice, if you use the iPhone Facebook  app enabled avatar sync and enjoy the new pictures.
• Mobile Terminal (iOS4)
  Allows me to access the shell on the iPhone
• My3G
  This app tricks applications / iOS into thinking they are connected to WiFi instead of 3G. Facetime, iTunes downloads, Podcast Downloads and high quality YouTube to name a few are all enabled when using this app.
• Notified Pro
  Notified for iPhone is a notification app it allows users to have more of an Android-style notification system. Something I’m surprised that Apple hasn’t improved on yet. 
  • Statusbar Notification
    When a new notification comes in instead of the popup being displayed (once disabled using Popup Blocker below) it displays the notification on the top status bar until clicked.
  • Popup Blocker
    Allows you to control just about every popup that you could get on an iPhone and/or iPod touch. Once installed, you can get to the app in your stock Settings application. Here you have the options to enable/disable the application, Block Away Items, turn on/off Wake On Alert (this turns on your screen when you receive an alert) and set Alerts. My favorites here are disabling the popup when the iPhone is in an active state (being used, playing a game) and disable that annoying popup when I plug my iPhone into an “unsupported dock”.
• SBSettings
  SBSettings is not like the regular iPhone app that can be launched from the home screen by tapping on its icon. To launch it, you have to swipe on iPhone’s status bar or tap the status bar using two fingers. Once SBSettings is launched, you’ll see various toggle switches that are available in the Settings app such as Wi-Fi, 3G, EDGE, Bluetooth, Brightness etc.
• MyWi
  This is an extremely powerful application that allows you to create a wifi hotspot (currently only Ad-Hoc is available, Infrastructure coming soon). This is something that is pretty popular in the Android community primarily with the Android Evo.

In later posts I’ll review each of these apps so you can see what justified me jailbreaking my device. Let me know if the comments what JB apps you use.

Quit iPhoto Open Activity Monitor (Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor.app)
In the search window at the top right, search for PTPCamera
Click on PTPCamera in the list of results to highlight it
Click on Quit Process (the red stopsign icon in the upper left of Activity Monitor)
Choose “Quit” If you don’t already see “Image Capture Extension” in the list, search for it in the search box.
Click on “Image Capture Extension” in the list of results to highlight it Choose “Quit”
Go to Macintosh HD > System > Library > Image Capture > Devices and open PTPCamera.app back up
Unplug and re-plug the iPhone 4.
iPhoto should open, if you’ve set it to do so when a camera is plugged in.
Otherwise, open it.
You should see your media available for import from the iPhone 4 when you click on the iPhone 4 in the devices list. [Forum Post]

I hate doing manual processes such as this and wrote a quick Applescript to do the above:

tell application "iPhoto"
	quit
end tell

set app_name to "Finder"
set PTPCameraRunning to (do shell script "ps ax | grep " & "PTPCamera" & " | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}'")
if PTPCameraRunning is not "" then do shell script ("killall  'PTPCamera'" & PTPCameraRunning)

set ImageCaptureExtensionRunning to (do shell script "ps ax | grep " & "Image Capture Extension'" & " | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}'")
if PTPCameraRunning is not "" then do shell script ("killall  'Image Capture Extension'" & ImageCaptureExtensionRunning)

Like with any code there is a 101 ways to do the same thing and any code I’d write I’d imagine you can write better feel free to leave a comment with your own Applescript suggestion