For the longest time, I was sending my laptop to “hibernation” mode every night. Why? Not because I particularly mind the minute power consumption it might have while sleeping, but because it would randomly wake up during the course of the night. My “zombie laptop” would particularly annoy me because it’d log back into my messaging service in my absence (thus prompting people to think I am awake at 3 a.m.), get unnecessarily warm (due to its being closed), and when I opened it back up, it’d not switch its monitor back on (due to a feature that OS X calls “clamshell mode”).

Today, I had enough, and after a little more googling, I stumbled across a comment in a macosxhints article mentioning Bluetooth settings: Apparently, there’s a setting for letting bluetooth devices power your Mac up from sleep. As I have a bluetooth-based wireless Mac keyboard, I tried out switching that setting off — and long story short, it seems to have worked.

If you have the same problem, uncheck the following box in System Settings / Bluetooth / Advanced Settings to give it a shot:

Happy zombie-Mac killing!

While stumbling across the net, I found this, The New Yorker’s Thanksgiving cover from 2006:

The illustration feels a little sad, though I am not sure what I am sadder about: That they can watch football and I don’t Or that digital distractions take away from the traditional family gathering called Thanksgiving.

(via YayEveryDay)

Just recently, my colleague oremj published a bookmarklet making “assign this bug to me” a one-click operation in bugzilla.

Obviously, bookmarklets are fun and games, but Jetpacks are even more awesome, so I went ahead and wrote one that adds an “assign to me” button next to the assignee field:

You can find and install the jetpack through my jetpacks page on github.

Just in time for the recent 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, boston.com’s Big Picture has a great collection of photos — both contemporary and recent — that show what the Wall once looked like, and how it looks now. This is great!

Today, I was watching an .avi file that neither allowed me to forward/rewind nor did it say the right total length of the video. At least, it played fine.

Time to fix the AVI index metadata.

Sadly, none of the tools from the “transcode” package whose names so conveniently start with “avi…” (avifix, or aviindex, for example) was able to help. But over here, I found the right command for mencoder (part of the MPlayer package, I think) that will take your audio and video stream, leave it untouched, and rewrite a new, but correctly indexed, file:

mencoder -idx input.avi -ovc copy -oac copy -o output.avi

Hope this helps!

In a New York Times article about the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago, they add a schema of a typical section of the German-German border, showing that the “Wall” was not really only a wall, but rather an elaborate combination of measures to keep people from fleeing their own country. Pretty impressive and sad at the same time.

This photo is not photoshopped:

The Mozilla Italia team projected a Firefox wordmark onto Rome’s most famous landmark — and on many other places all over the city. Make sure to check out the picture in its full glory over on flickr.

Picture CC by-sa licensed by nois3lab on flickr.

In response to the birthdays I mentioned in my last post, Google has two topical logos today.

The American site, google.com, honors Sesame Street:

… while google.de remembers the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Quite the contrast.