Hola kids! It was a full weekend which I might talk about later but for now suffice to say that: 1. I didn’t get the proposal that I needed to get done, um, done and 2. I managed to muck up my insides such that for two days the simple act of passing flatus has become like a box of really bad chocolates (you never know what you’re going to get, but there’s a good chance you don’t want it).
This post is to share a nerdish tip with them as might find it useful. I use the nifty freeware app Aurora as my alarm clock. Every morning around 5:00 am, Tj and I are gently awakened to the soft and sweet sounds of my wake up playlist (aside: those of you who follow my Last.fm and iLike profiles, that’s why you see the same handful of songs at the top of my charts over and over again. Anyone knows how to keep that one playlist from being reported, please let me know). It’s a wonderful thing, let me tell you. Ever so much nicer than that dream where I fall asleep on the curb and wake up to find out I’m naked and the garbage truck is backing up over me.
The one problem I have with Aurora (and believe me I feel huge guilt about complaining about a free app) is that one of the things it does in order to do it’s magic is that it will turn off password protection for waking from sleep and the screensaver. It has to do that in order to be able to call iTunes at 5:00. This becomes a problem when a certain person, oh, let’s call him The Boy, decides that he wants to use Vera to look at trains, or maps, or pretty girls feet. Normally he wouldn’t be able to do any of these things because he doesn’t know my password but, thanks to Aurora, he can play on Vera pretty much anytime I forget to turn the password back on. For multiple reasons, this will not do.
Fortunately Aurora has the supplemental cool ability to open applications on a schedule which got me thinking: “surely there must be a way to turn on the password to wake requirement with an Automator action.” As it turns out, I was wrong, there is not. But what I did find is this page on scripting system preferences, complete with a script that, with minimal editing, does exactly what I want it to do. My edited script looks like this:
tell application “System Events”
tell security preferences
set properties to {require password to wake:true}
end tell
end tell
To use, paste the above into Script Editor and save as an Application (I called my Sec Script). Open Aurora and create a new alarm event with “Playlist” set to “No Playlist” and “Launch” set to open your new script. I set mine to go off five minutes after my Wake Up playlist goes off, since once Aurora does it’s thing, it doesn’t really do anything else for me—I have it set up so the playlist just plays until it ends. If you’ve set up Aurora to automatically stop playback after a certain number of minutes you may need to take that into consideration when you set your event time.
Things to keep in mind: Since Aurora will disable the screensaver password every time it needs to, your event to re-enable it will need to occur after and with the same frequency that your alarm event occurs. Also, it seems that the Security pref pane doesn’t refresh in real time; I found that with the pref pane open, running the script would not apparently do anything (i.e. the checkbox remains unchecked) but if I closed the pane and reopened it, the box would be checked.
I don’t claim to be a coder or scripter or anything of the sort. In fact, if an easily edited example script hadn’t been available I wouldn’t have figured this out. Just a disclaimer to show that I’m not really as geeky as some of you think I am.
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