Muffinresearch Labs by Stuart Colville

LockTight utility for Intel Macs | 4 Comments

Posted in Apple on 28th July 2006, 12:15 am by

I’ve been using Menno’s LockTight on my G4 powerbook for some time. LockTight makes locking your machine feel just like it’s part of the os that was always there. It installs as a prefpane from which you can customise the keystroke that locks your machine and that’s about all there is to it.

When you press the pre-defined keystroke a padlock icons appears on screen (in a similar fashion to the eject icon on ejecting optical media) and the screensaver activates. After this point to get back into your mac you will need to enter your password.

In trying to set-up LockTight on my work issue MacBook Pro I ran into an issue with it not running and requesting an updated version. As Menno kindly supplies the full source for his app I simply re-compiled the app to work on the macintel. So here it is if you are looking for a working copy of LockTight for your macintel you can download it here. If you just need LockTight for your G4 then please check out the current version on Menno’s site. Use of this is at your own risk etc etc…

PS: Menno if you’d prefer to make this available from your site please let me know and I’ll change this download link to point to your site instead.

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  • http://www.workingwith.me.uk/ Neil Crosby

    I might be wrong, but this sounds like it could be achieved simply by setting up your Mac to require a password when coming out of sleep or screensaver, and then setting up your screensaver to run from a hot corner. Then whenever you want to lock your mac down just throw your mouse into that corner.

    No muss, no fuss.

  • http://muffinresearch.co.uk Stuart Colville

    @Neil: That’s a fair comment Neil, however I got used to using LockTight and so I just wanted to fix it to work on my new mac and I thought whilst I was at it I could make the files available for the one or two people that might be looking for a version that worked on macintel!

    I think the reason why I like it is I am used to doing windows + L from my previous life when I was mainly running windows.

    I think there’s a lot that you could do better around locking your machine, one of my colleagues is currently writing an applescript that pauses itunes set’s adium’s status and then locks his machine. But for me I like the simplicity of LockTight ;-) .

  • http://cackhanded.net/ Mark Norman Francis

    I just use Salling Clicker and Quicksilver personally.

    I have Apple+Escape set to run the LockScreen program that comes with one of the standard bundles. Then, incase I’ve forgotten to press it and wander off, Salling Clicker has a phone event set to pause iTunes and start the screensaver when my phone drops out of range.

  • http://muffinresearch.co.uk Stuart Colville

    @Norm: That’s far too advanced!

GNU screen: open tab in current working directory|(1)

A nice trick for having screen open a new tab in the same directory as the one you’re currently in. To use it add it to your .screenrc

# Open new window in current dir.
bind c stuff "screen -X chdir \$PWD;screen^M"
bind ^c stuff "screen -X chdir \$PWD;screen^M"

Hat tip: mteckert on SuperUser.com

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When you’re using a minimal Ubuntu install if you find the ‘add-apt-repository’ command is missing (it’s useful for adding PPAs and other repositories), then simply run:

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

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