HowTo: Shutdown your Mac with a text message

Ever went on a trip and thought oh shit I forgot to turn of my Mac? Well you could turn around and go back, you could call a friend or you could just send a text message to your email address that Mail downloads and shut it down yourself. I’ve already showed you how to shutdown windows with a text message and a batch script. Now it’s time to do it Mac style. To complete this tutorial you will need the following.

1. A Mac (duh) Ive only tried this on Leopard, if you get it running on Tiger please let me know.
2. Mail which if you have a Mac you should have installed.
3. ScriptEditor also included with Mac
4. A cellular phone with sms text messaging capabilities and sms service.
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Hack Attack: automate installation of software with Install Pad

I recently tried using install pad on a computer repair project. I did the mundane routine of re-installing Windows only this time I did something a little different. I used Install Pad to install most every piece of software while I did more important things. Install pad is packed with loads of automation goodies like silent install mode, path to install options, and more. If you haven’t already checked it out you can download it here. This software is free and fits in perfectly with my Automation section.

Get out of a social nightmare with The Popularity Dialer

If you need to get out of a potentially painstaking conversation with someone or just need an excuse to get out of the house The Popularity Dialer might have the solution you need. The Popularity Dialer allows you to select one of five prerecorded calls to have sent to your phone at a specified time. The recording will play and you could place it on speaker phone to make your excuse more believable. The system allows one call per hour to be placed to a single telephone number to avoid pranksters from running a denial of service attack on your phone. You can also add your number to the do not call list to opt out from any calls from the service. The service includes a popularity call,female popularity call, affirmation call, return to the office call and a cousin in need call.

Link

Security Tip: Better passwords with a CueCat (Windows)

CueCats are barcode scanners that were given away by Digital Convergence in the late 1990s. They were designed as a way for consumers to scan barcodes from magazines and other media and be directed to a website with more information on the product or service they scanned. The scans were encrypted to prevent law suits based on the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) of 1998. However they are still useful today as a low cost barcode scanning solution with a little hardware modification and or some free software known as CatNip which bypasses the encryption. The nice thing about these devices is that they type any scan into any field and press enter which makes them perfect for passwords. In this article I am going to show you how to take your modified or unmodified CueCat and use it to login to your computer via passwords encoded into barcode format.

What you will need.

1. A CueCat USB or PS2 will work.
2. A barcode (You can use one from an existing rewards card or make your own here)
3. An account to test it on before using this as your form of authentication.

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MSN Offline messages on your cellphone

First off I would just like to appologize to my readers for my lack of fresh posts. I have been working on multiple projects. With that said here is a new tip for all you MSN messenger fans.

I have yet to try this method. It just sort of came to me the other day so i decided to write it down.

My cellphone has an email address and no I will not post it. But it looks something like this XXXXXXXXXX@email.uscc.net where the X represents the number. Now there are several different email domains for different providers and I have drummed up a list of them and provide it at the bottom of this post.

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Use Skype to check your cell phone voice mail messages

Skype has turned out to be a pretty useful tool. With more and more uses becoming evident with each day. A friend of mine Nick Saramandich recently showed me how to easily check your cellular voice mail using skype. The advantage to this method as opposed to traditional methods is the comfort factor. Listening to your messages with skype allows you to relax in your favorite chair, sofa etc. and thoroughly absorb the real content contained within the messages. The latter method just leaves your ear ringing and sweaty and leaves much to be desired on the comfort side of things.

Batch Processing Photoshop CS Actions

While the batch menu is often overlooked by many Photoshop users the batch tool is a powerfull image tool. Batch processing photos in Photoshop is easy. The most favorable method is to use the batch menu found under the file menu flyout in Adobe photoshop. From the batch menu window you can select a folder and any actions you have created to be preformed on an entire folder. The most common use for the batch menu by far is cropping images and thumbnail generation. However it can be used for other things such as watermarks and red eye reduction the choice is yours. Be carefull when working on slower machines as batch processing lots of images will slow or even lock up ram starved machines and may cause errors in your images. A good practice when working with the batch tools is to make a copy of the directory before batching it. This way if you have an unexpected power failure you wont loose any of your images.

Automate Windows and Dos tasks using AutoIt

Download AutoIt

Have you ever wanted to automate some of your more repetitive Windows or DOS tasks?
Well now you can using a freeware tool called AutoIt. AutoIt is an easy to use automation program that allows you to convert EXE files to AutoIt scripts then launch the newly converted script. The power in this application lies within it’s ability to pass parameters to the script at run time. This software could be used in conjunction with my previous How to remote shutdown windows using a text message and outlook express .

AutoIt is a simple tool that can simulate key presses, mouse movements and window commands (maximize, minimize, wait for, etc.) in order to automate any windows based task (or even windowed DOS tasks).

When AutoIt is executed, it reads a specified script file. This script file allows AutoIt to perform a number of functions, these include:
• Executing programs (Windows applications, DOS commands, etc.)
• Sending keystrokes and mouse clicks (all characters, keyboard layout independent).
• Window functions (e.g. minimizing, hiding, restoring, waiting for, activating).
• Simple text clipboard functions.
• Simple registry functions.
• Simple string and variable functions.

[TAGS] Automation, Automation Software, Macros, Windows Automation, Productivity[/TAGS]

How to remote shutdown your Windows XP machine with a text message and Outlook

OK, I did this a while back to have more control over my computer when I am not at home. Keep in mind this method will turn off a computer with an “constant” internet connection i.e.(cable,DSL).

Basically you setup a rule in outlook to look for say a keyword in the subject line of an email. Then you select run application as the action for when that keyword is found. Then all you have to do is write a simple dos batch file and use the shutdown command with the -fs parameter to ensure the shutdown is not aborted by any running applications. After that the rest is simple you simply send a sms text message from your cell phone or other source to your email address. You must have automatic send and receive tunned on for this to work.

Ok so let’s get started.

Create a file called shutdown.bat in notepad with the following code in it.


shutdown -s


Save it to your C:\ drive so the path to the shutdown batch file is something like C:\scripts\shutdown.bat (Important this is a must the path must be exact) or you can modify the rule once you import it to point to the new destination it’s your call.
Now open outlook and adjust your settings to send and receive email every minute on the minute (1 minute for testing time can be increased if a delayed shutdown is desired.) now in Outlook in the file menu click Tools and select Rules and Alerts with the Rules and Alerts dialog open click the options button on the far upper right portion of the dialog window. Choose import rules from the options dialog and browse to the file C:\sms_functions\rules\shutdown.rwz
(the file was included in the downloaded project files) and your done. Now send a text message from your cell phone to your email address and in the subject use the key phrase smsshutdown%% (or make your own! :) and send it. When the email is received and found with the smsshutdown%% in the subject Outlook runs the dos batch file containing the shutdown -f command and shuts down your computer. You could also accomplish other task’s using this method using more dos commands, php scripts, perl what ever. This will work on Linux using pine also.

I hope this will be as useful to someone else as it has been to me.

Bonus Tip
I have found that this article explaining the MS-DOS SHUTDOWN Command Syntax can answer most of your questions about the command.

Update: I recently updated the file so it works the way it should thanks to everyone who helped in the comments. If you re download the files it should work for those of you whom it did not.

More Windows Automation Tips, Tricks and Software Also see my automation category for more Windows automation tips, tricks and software.