GuruBlog

i just installed a little ikea lamp on my wife's desk. no problem so far, the only thing that's really wierd is that the switch of the lamp is next to the power supply. to use it she would have to crawl under the desk and use the switch :-( - NSF

therefore i installed a sis-pm silvershield from gembird (which has 4 sockets that are switchabel via usb) and sispmctl and wrote a simple applescript program. now she can simply click on the script in the menu to turn the litght on/off :-)

here is a short instruction how i got sispmctl running on macos

make sure you have the developertools installed (if not - they are on the second install dvd that came with your mac)

go to http://libusb.wiki.sourceforge.net/ get the legacy release 0.1.12 (do NOT fetch 1.0 - it doesn't compile on macos X)

unpack it and compile and install with

./configure
make
sudo make install

now go to http://sispmctl.sourceforge.net/ and download the source file

again, unpack, compile and install with

./configure
make
sudo make install

now connect your silver shield PM and switch the outlets on with

sispmctl -o 1 

and turn it off again using

sispmctl -f 1

to use it from applescript call the commands using

do shell script "/usr/local/bin/sispmctl -o 1"