Control Your Mac With Twitter 6
Tweets
Hey
Quite a while ago I mentioned about Controlling Your Mac With Email. In a nutshell you sent an email to yourself or a different email address. Mail picked up the email with a set of rules, then is acted on a predetermined scripts to do something on your computer. This is useful if you are away from home and you want your computer to do something. You can make this even more useful with the use of Twitter. You can use Twitter from any mobile, making the service more mobile and useful. For example you can set you computer to load up certain program while you are coming off the motorway on the way home.
Setting up this system is really simple and it copies the main steps from the email section. They are as follows:
1) Make a Twitter feed for yourself.
2) Make sure you Twitter feed work with phone.
3) Add the feed to Mail using the handy RSS button.
4) Go to Preferences > Rules > Add Rule, set up a rule which would only run if the item appears in the RSS entry.
5) Test
Simple an sweet. Some tips. RSS will only refresh every 30 minutes. So if you have any time critical items it probably wont work. Another tip is to set up a separate Twitter stream. People may not want to see you shutting down your computer or asking it to defrag your hard drive.
If you want to find out a bit more about Twitter and want to read a good book I recommend these two on Amazon, Twitter For Dummies and Twitter Means Business. Both are good books and I recommend you check them out.
Where To Next?
6 Responses to “Control Your Mac With Twitter”
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1
Using services like http://tweet.im you could probably get message to your instant messenger and trigger scripts basing on that. XMPP protocol is useful.
Comment By mf on December 19th, at 12:54 pm
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2
If I’m not mistaken, you can change the mail RSS update interval by typing defaults write com.apple.mail RSSPollTime n into the terminal. Just replace n with the number of minutes between checks. Someone tell me if this works.
Comment By David Benjamin Jones on December 20th, at 4:29 am
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3
Okay, I have just checked. IF you have Interface Builder installed, you can open up the RSSPreferences.nib stored in Mail.app
When you open it, just add menu items that say “Every n minutes.” Then, change the tag (located in the attributes inspector) to the check RSS interval.Comment By David Benjamin Jones on December 20th, at 4:52 am
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4
My antitheft uses twitter to send me alert should the macbook air is stolen. Check out http://www.bak2u.com twitter can be so useful!
Comment By Alson Chee on December 21st, at 7:01 am
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5
Wow, I just used this and it works great!
And I thought twitter was only good for chit chat boy was I wrong!
Thanks!Comment By Coryelle Kramer-Animal Communicator on December 21st, at 3:38 pm
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6
I would also like to direct your attention to Tweet My Mac. I use it occasionally and it works like a charm.
tweetmymac.comComment By Steven on July 17th, at 7:23 am