IM BORED! what cool things can I do with my macbook?

Hi Frozen,

I'm new to the world of MAC also and love playing with the voice-command mode. I say "MAC launch Safari"...and it does. It can do many voice commands that I haven't tried as of yet.

There are two choices of using the feature once you activate the option. One is to press the "esc" key first to activate the feature. The second, and the one I use, is to have it on all the time. Then you just say the computer name (which you give it) followed by the verbal command. The computer gets confused if there are ambient sounds in the room.

My "MAC" can tell me the time, do some knock-knock jokes, open Safari and iPhoto. You can program it to close applications and many other things as well but I haven't tried those yet.

Have fun,
Carlos Marques

Install Virtue Desktops from www.macupdate.com. Besides being useful in organizing applications, you can enable motion sensor switching in the Virtue Preferences, and change desktops by lightly tapping the edge of your macbook.

Hey could you tell m how to do that voice thingies how do you activate them?

Play around with iWeb. Get yourself a 60 day trial offer of .Mac and make yourself a webpage. I also started playing around with apps I haven't used before such as Pages and Keynote and the iLife apps like Garageband and iPhoto. They are easy to use. If you have an Apple store near you, go to a workshop where they can teach you how to get more out of your Mac. Just explore your mac and all the apps that are in it.

Thom

Hi ilikemyself,

Apple Support helped me activate "Speakable Commands." There are instructions on page 552 in "The Missing Manual - Tiger Edition." There are two categories: reading text aloud, using a synthesized voice; and taking commands from your voice.

The on/off switch is the Speech pane of System Preferences. I'm NOT an expert and hope one of the genius' here will give good detailed instructions.

Here are a few of the several commands available listed in the manual:

Close this window
Empty the trash
Switch to Safari
Quit all applications
Open the Speech Commands window or Show me what to say
What day is it?
Tell me a joke

The technician suggested using "Mac" as the voice command name. But it seems funny to me now as I selected a female voice for my responses, lol. I may change it to "Computer" to be more Star Trek, lol.

It's a fun feature but by no means flawless. I just asked it to open Mac Word and a Summary screen appeared showing the name of my Internet connectors name.

It's more about fun than function and I love it!

Regards,
Carlos Marques

Play with the Sudden Motion Sensor 😉

Well... you can have a chat with your Mac's psych-therapist.I think you do it like this:

Type in terminal

emacs <enter>
Hit Escape then press x.
There will be a M-x at the bottom.
Type doctor and hit enter.

You can also put tetris instead of doctor to play tetris or solitaire to play solitaire, and pong for pong.

You could also make your Mac talk with the 'say' command in the terminal. just type in

Say

and the words you wish your mac to repeat.
eg. 'say poo'

have fun screwin' around.

you can get http://www.speckproducts.com/13mac-seethru.html its a cool case that changes the color of your macbook

and since u have final cut http://www.worldtechdevices.com/finalcutpro.htm would make your keyboard look nicer ;p