Tag: display

Lock Screen and Sleep Display with Quicksilver

Nick Momrik8 Comments

Looking for a quick way to lock your screen and put the display to sleep on Mac OS X using Quicksilver?

  1. Download Sleep Display.
  2. Extract the zip file and move SleepDisplay to your Applications folder.
  3. Run the SleepDisplay application at least once.
  4. Fire up Script Editor and enter the following code:

    do shell script "/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\\ Extras/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend"

    launch application "SleepDisplay"

  5. Save this script to a location cataloged by Quicksilver.
  6. Create a HotKey Trigger in Quicksilver to run the script. I use command-control-shift-S as my keystroke combination.

I’m running Mac OS 10.5.1 on an iMac and this works great!

Horizontal vs. Vertical Space

Nick Momrik1 Comment

I love my 50 inch LCD wide screen TV.

I love my 13 inch wide screen MacBook.

I just hooked up a 19 inch wide screen high definition display as my primary monitor at work and moved my normal 19 inch to a secondary monitor. I’m not quite sure I like the wide screen display. If I was watching movies all the time it would be awesome, but this is work and I’m using applications and browsing the web.

When it comes to browsing the web I’d rather have vertical space than horizontal real estate. There aren’t many web pages that look real great on a wide screen. Studies have shown (don’t ask me for proof) that humans prefer to read shorter lines of text. I know I read it somewhere. A couple of hours after setting things up, I’d have to agree.

I want to scroll up and down as little as possible. With a wide screen display, there is a lot more vertical scrolling. I’ve rarely ever had to scroll horizontally when browsing web sites, so I don’t like all the extra horizontal space.

Just rotate the display you say? No thanks. It looks goofy next to the normal monitor and is way too tall. If I had two wide screen displays rotated I think it would be great. But I don’t.

What do your prefer?