OS X Layout for German Umlauts on US Keyboard

Jan — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 22:04:24 +0000

I’m using a US-keyboard since the German layout hides the important characters needed by programmers all the time behind impossible three-finger gestures.

To be able to quickly enter umlauts on the US keyboard, I’ve been using the USGerman layout found here. In Snow Leopard, this layout bundle causes a horrible bug in the keychain, essentially preventing you from doing anything that requires your password.

To work around that, I created a new layout bundle from scratch using Ukelele. It works just as well and doesn’t crash the keychain.

You can find it on my github page: http://github.com/janv/usgerman/

Wake up your display with Adium and Applescript

Jan — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:17:59 +0000

I had a problem with Adium: After 3 minutes of inactivity, my monitor goes to sleep. With the laptops volume turned low I would not notice any incoming messages whenever I was playing a game or anything that made some level of noise.

Back when I used windows, Miranda woke up my display when it received a message. That was an option I missed from Adium. The solution to this was pretty simple though. Adium provides the possibility to execute an Applescript on events. So I wrote a litte script to wake up my display and bound that to the “Message received (initial)” event. The script? Not very impressive:

tell application "System Events" to key code 59

But it works! :)

(Key Code 59 is the CTRL key, so you don’t accidentally trigger anything by firing it)

Jan Varwig » mac os x

OS X Layout for German Umlauts on US Keyboard

Wake up your display with Adium and Applescript