Throwing a Hammer

I found this on “accident” while doing real work. I thought it would be cool to share it as an example of physics and technology coming together to make awesomeness, or just unexpectedness.

Its from Wolfram’s Demonstration site. I have tried to imbed its CDF file (similar to PDF’s if but for Mathematica documents rather then Word documents) with its cool javascript, but alas Worpress does not like me. So the original is here or you can get the CDF from my files. Note the the CDF needs a reader program so just going to Wolfram’s page will be easier.

I would set the height, velocity, x-rotation, and y-rotation as desired. Then if you click the little “+” to the right of the throw slider you will get and extra menu bar. If you hit the play sign you will see the hammer continually being thrown. Its like a movie!

Tech Tricks

I love my tech. It is one reason I love my job. I would love for this blog to be a place where I can share some tips and tricks with the world. This is currently the first tip and trick post but hopefully more will come.

This one was found by total accident. On my mac (OS 10.8.3) I would be archiving my email (in Mail.app) with command-control-a, and randomly my window would go to about ~10% opacity. It was totally frustrating. I had to close the window and reopen it. Then finally (after over a month of this random action) I determined that I would be pressing command-control waiting to archive an email, and then two finger scrolled to read the current email. This key-action combination makes any window only ~10% opacity. To get 100% opacity again just scroll up instead of down (I have the “natural scrolling”/ipad scrolling turned off).

I then looked to see what programs worked (Chrome, Sandvox, Terminal, Reminders) and what programs did not work (Papers, Mathematica, and MATLAB). I figured out that these were the programs that worked, or did not work, with Afloat.

Afloat is a cool application that I use to keep windows on top of all other windows. The only thing that is sad is that it only works with some types of apps. But this incident led me to find out another cool feature of Afloat: changing a window’s opacities.

As an example here is Apple’s Mail.app open with Safari open behind it.

If you want to see what is on the Safari page then just perform the keyboard command (control-command-down two finger swipe) and then you can see the Safari window.

Mail is still the active window so if you were typing an email you can continue to type.

I know that this sounds a bit lame, but I expect to use it in my note taking app, nvALT, when I’m jotting stuff down but need to reference some other window. I know that the OSX is built for multitasking with different windows open, but sometimes there just is not enough room on my screen. I also might use this when I am coding or woking in terminal. Not sure when others will use it, but that is where comments come in handy.

I hope this trick is useful to someone.