• Yes, I do look small in that photo. That’s because I’m only 16 (and the photo has been resized).
• In regard to #1, I know more than you might expect about computing*.
• I write from my house which is tucked away in the South-East corner of England, so expect posts which seem to have been written in the middle of the night.
• This is my first proper move into the world of tech writing, so I dare say you’ve never heard of me before.
• I first switched in 2007 with the receipt of my 20″ iMac, which I still have today.
• If you visited me, you’d find the iMac, a late-2008 MacBook, two iPhone 3GSs and two iPod touches (2nd generation).

I’m joining TheAppleBlog as the newest How-To and tutorial writer. Look out for my series of ‘Quick Tips’ which will hopefully teach you something useful in a short amount of time. I’m open to feedback, argument, insult etc. in the comments area of my posts, so chatter away.

If you have trouble sleeping at night, try reading my stream of dullness that is @jobbogamer on Twitter.

* Contrary to popular belief, not all teenagers sit on MSN and Facebook all day long.

Here at TheAppleBlog, there’s been plenty of instruction and discussion about using Smart Folders, Playlists, Albums and so on, as well as Automator and Folder Actions and other products like Hazel — all of which serve to make your Mac work a little harder to simplify your life a bit.

Hopefully we’ve led many of you in the right direction in using these great bits of technology. If you’re willing to follow us down the rabbit hole again, I’d love to show you how to use your Mac and a product called Indigo to start making your home work for you as well. It’s home automation time!

A Brief History

Some of you probably remember — from a long time ago — those wall plugs with the big timer dials on them. You could plug the living room lamp into it, and auto-magically it would turn on at 8PM for you. Since then, a standard (probably limited largely to tinkerers and geek types) called X10 became available. It allowed for communications to occur over the power lines within homes, to control lights and appliances via some programmable unit.

That technology hasn’t changed a great deal (to my knowledge that is), but other products and technologies have come along that work along with X10, and it’s this combination that has made home automation much more accessible (and interesting) for the masses.

Whetting Your Appetite

Needless to say, we’ve come an awful long way from lighting that lamp at a given time each day. One of the more main stream examples come toward the end of the calendar year, when the Alpha Geeks start showing off their holiday lights, controlled by computer. In fact, a couple years ago here in Denver, there was a guy who claimed you could control his lights via his webpage. It turned out to be a hoax at the time, but the technology is definitely there, as you’ll see below.

But people are doing awesome — and, gasp!, practical — things with home automation.

• Turning on certain lights in the house when the car pulls into the garage
• Announcing when the mail has arrived
• Readying the blinds and lights for a proper movie-watching experience (via a single switch)
• Security monitoring
• Conserving energy by automatically turning off unused lighting
• And the list goes on.

Hardware

Besides your Mac (an older G4 would do the trick of you don’t want to use your MacBook) to run the software, you’re going to need some basics to get started. First, there’s the device that allows your Mac to interface with the Insteon/X10 modules you install in your home. This is called the Insteon PowerLinc Modem USB. You’ll also want a couple of Insteon Access Points, which enable mesh communications of commands sent to different devices within your automated home. That’s it! Those are the basics to tap into the power (pun intended) to automate the stuff in your house.

You’ll need to add some controllable modules so there’s actually something to control, otherwise, what’s the point? You can start on the cheap side, with the wall-wart type of products, and later move into the replacement outlets and switches if you really get the bug. On the starter side, you have the LampLinc Dimmer and the ApplianceLinc (which is an on/off current, rather than the dimming style). You can get all of these modules (plus Indigo Server Lite) in the Starter Package for about $250. It’s not the cheapest hobby in town, but what is? (Hypothetical question…)

Software

Indigo Server is the brains of the operation. With it running on your Mac and plugged into the PowerLinc Modem, you can control nearly anything connected to your home. Indigo, depending on the version you get, can key off of such things as timers, time of day (adjustable by season), ambient light, remote control, and so forth. Also, you can setup zones in your home, or “control groups” which can cause several things to happen from one trigger. Indigo is also scriptable using AppleScript, so the sky is truly the limit if you really want to get crazy. Oh, and there’s also Indigo Touch, which gives you the ability to control your home remotely from your iPhone. So you forgot to turn off the furnace before fleeing the cold for a warmer destination? No worries, just bring it up on your iPhone from the Fiji Islands and make it so.

I can honestly say that this stuff is addicting. My own uses are still modest, but suit my needs. One of the things I love about home automation — if you read the Perceptive Automation boards — is how some people seem to approach their home automation problems like MacGyver. So if the geek-factor of controlling your home isn’t enough, you can enjoy the problem solving exercise as your home automation-fu grows stronger (and more complicated).

You can find all the information you need to get started at Perceptive Automation and the Mac Home Store websites. And, if you’re already eye-balls deep into this home automation thing, share with us what you’re working on!

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You get a new Mac and even though you know you should, you don’t want to start over from scratch and reload the whole system. To make matters worse, you have Boot Camp installed and really don’t want to start over on the Windows side. So, here’s how you can image both OS’s to a new machine using free tools.

You need to download the Carbon Copy Cloner and Winclone software packages. CCC was created by Mike Bombich and has been used for years to clone Mac machines. It is the standard tool for this job. Winclone is made by Twocanoes Software and this is what we will use to image the Windows Boot Camp partition.

Let’s Get Started

Lets start off with Winclone first. After you install the app and run it for the first time, it will tell you it needs to download and install NTFSProgs. Click the download button and install NTFSProgs by following the wizard. The NTFSProgs software allows Winclone to properly read NTFS formatted partitions.

Now run Winclone again and select your Boot Camp partition in the Source dropdown. You can write some notes in the Item Description field if you’d like. When you’re ready, click the Image… button.

It will prompt you for a name and location to save the image to.

Now we wait for Winclone to do its work. When it’s completed, this dialog box will appear. You can now quit Winclone.

Carbon Copy Cloner is a little different in that it can image from your old machine to your new one using a Firewire or network connection. For this tutorial we’ll use the Firewire method. Setup your new machine and connect a Firewire cable between the two Macs. On the new Mac, hit the power button and hold down the “T” key on the keyboard until you see the Firewire symbol on the screen. This boots it into Target Disk Mode where it will act as if it’s just an external Firewire hard drive. On your old Mac we need to launch Carbon Copy Cloner. Your Source Disk drive is your local drive and the Target Disk is the Firewire drive. Click the Clone button and off we go.

After CCC is finished, reboot the new Mac and it should be identical to the original. From here on out, we are done with the old machine. When we imaged the Mac partition, we also brought along the Winclone image with it so now we can restore that image on our new Mac. Launch the Boot Camp Assistant in the utilities folder to create a new Windows partition.

Launch Winclone and click on the Restore tab. Click the Select Image button and browse to your Windows image. Mine was in the Documents folder.

Restore it to your newly created Boot Camp partition.

You know have a new Mac that’s a complete clone of your old one, Boot Camp and all. Windows will probably complain, as it always does, about drivers. Just insert your OS X DVD while in Windows and let it re-install the Boot Camp drivers for you. Of course, starting over from scratch is cleaner but sometimes you just don’t have the time. Proper cloning offers a reasonably quick solution.

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Thinking others might be feeling the same way I quickly threw together this Google Quick Search Box plug-in (ZIP, 742kb) that will let you send searches to reference sources for HTML, CSS, JQuery, PHP, MySQL, Python, and WordPress. You can start the query by entering text directly into QSB or by selecting text within Espresso itself, or any other application for that matter.

It seems like a simple feature hardly worth mentioning but I’ve found that having the option to quickly check up on the details of a particular function, element, declaration, etc. is an essential part of the way I work. In Coda you can add your own reference books directly into the application associating each one with a particular code type, e.g. php, css, javascript.

While in the code editor you can then select some text and choose “Look Up in Reference Books” from the contextual menu which will execute a search at the associated reference source using the text as the query. Unfortunately, one of the drawbacks to this approach is that you can’t quickly send queries to more than one source for a given code type. Nevertheless, over time I’ve really become dependent on being able to run these quick lookups.

I figured the best way to close this gap in Espresso was by building a QSB plug-in. To install the plug-in just add the codex.hgs file into your ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Quick Search Box/PlugIns directory. Once installed you will need to restart QSB in order to access the new actions.

Once you have everything working, just add any text into QSB (don’t forget to prepend with a space) press “tab” to pivot to an action and select a codex to search. Typing “codex” will bring up all available sources or you can just type the name of a specific source, e.g. WordPress, JQuery, and so on. Once you have selected the codex to be searched, press return to send the query. Alternatively, you can also start by sending text to QSB from within Espresso, or whatever other editor you’re using, by selecting the appropriate bit of code and choosing “Send to Quick Search Box” from the services menu.

With the theory that a picture is worth a thousand words I recorded this quick video demonstrating the plug-in in action.

Now that I have quick access to all my reference books I think I’ll be switching over to Espresso full-time. I’d be interested in hearing if anyone else has recently made the switch to Espresso and if so what they’ve been missing the most.

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If you’ve got young children, chances are they’re already quite adept at using the computer. This is a new generation of wired little ones, and we’ve got our work cut out for us as we attempt to stay ahead of them.

I’ll wager that you’re more concerned with protecting your children from the sketchy dangers of the internet, but equally important is protecting your Mac from your children! Luckily, if you’ve got a Mac, OS X comes with some great Parental Controls built right into the operating system which will help you combat both of these situations.

This post should serve as a quick guide to get you started in locking down your Mac, making it safe for your kiddos to use without your direct supervision. The process is quite simple (as is standard operating procedure with all things Apple), but I realize you may be starting from one of two different scenarios.

1. Children’s Account does not yet exist
   Starting from scratch is easy. Open System Preferences (under the Apple icon) and choose Accounts. Click the “+” button to create a new account profile. The very top line is a drop down menu — from that drop down, select “Managed with Parental Controls.” Create the rest of the account as usual. As soon as you finish that screen, the new account is visible with a button at the bottom to take you to the Parental Controls Preference Pane.
2. Children’s Account already exists
   Converting a pre-existing account is just as easy to convert for use with Parental Controls. From within the Accounts Pane of System Preferences, select the account you want to change to Parental Controls. At the bottom of that profile page, all you need to do is check the box that reads “Enable Parental Controls” and then click the button to open that Preference Pane for configuration.

Alrighty, regardless of where you began (above), we should all be on the same page now – or Parental Control Preference Pane, as it were. To get started setting the controls for this account, you’ll need to select the account from the list (if there is more than one available to be managed). If when you click on it your Mac beeps at you, you’ll need to unlock these settings by clicking the padlock icon below (at which point you’ll need to enter your password). It’s probably easiest to run through each of the high level features one at a time, so let’s take a closer look.

System

The System tab is where you decide what they will be able to use and what (if any) privileges you allow them. If this account is indeed for children, the Simple Finder may be a good choice. You can also go through all of the applications installed on your machine and only put check marks next to the apps you want them to be able to use. Last, there are some items that you can give them access to administer or not with their account.

Content

Protect your little ones from inappropriate content in this tab. Limit the Dictionary to not show profane entries, for instance. The other, more important option is how they will be allowed to browse the web. There’s an unrestricted option, a best effort to determine bad websites option, and the one that I like best, where you only set the websites you want them to be able to see. This last option gives the most control, but can also require more administrative overhead — but at least you know they’re only on the pages you deem to be appropriate.

Mail & iChat

If you’ve allowed them access to the Mail application and iChat, you can limit their communications within those apps, from here. Enter the names of the users they can email and chat with in this tab. If you set a permission request email address (it would most likely be your own), that address will get a request email anytime your kid tries to email an address that you have not yet approved.

Time Limits

You get the ability to limit the amount of time they spend using the Mac (with this account at least). You can determine the number of hours by week days, as well as weekend days. There’s also the ability to set the hours of the day they are not allowed to use the computer — like Bedtimes, for instance.

Logs

Get an accounting of the websites they have visited, the websites they’ve tried that have been blocked, iChat transcripts, and applications they’ve used. There are different methods of organizing this data (like the length of time Logs are kept, and then grouped by Date or Content/Contact). These Logs are probably more important if you’ve left more control to the user, but either way, is good peace of mind. (As a side note, I think it would be great if you could have these Logs emailed to you on a periodic basis, but that’s not available…yet.)

As always, the beauty of the Mac — and more specifically in this case, OS X — is the power available in such a simple package. With a few quick settings you’ve made your child’s computer-using experience that much safer from the outside world, while also protecting your machine from random clicking that could do some real damage.

Of course, your Parental Controls may need some care and feeding, as their web browsing interests change (or as is the case in my home, new commercials advertise websites they want to try). It’s a good point to make that some changes to the Managed account can be made from within that account, if the Administrator Password (yours) is entered. But overall, some solid controls have been implemented, and allow you to track just what they’re doing and when, while using your Macintosh computer.

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