Using your MacBook or MacBook Pro with the lid closed. Really.
As the prices for large, flat-screen displays continue to fall, many folks are buying one as a second display. About a year ago, I wound up with a 23″ Apple Cinema Display that I’d bought used from a friend who was moving. I installed it in my Phoenix office, with the idea that I’d use it with my laptop — then a 15″ MacBook Pro; now a 13″ MacBook Pro. I connected the display to my Mac and began using it with the laptop’s built-in display, very much as I discuss here.
I soon realized that I really didn’t use the second display because of the awkwardness of “driving” the mouse from one screen to the other. But, at the same time, It made no sense to use the smaller monitor when I could be using the larger one. When I started using a wireless keyboard and mouse with my laptop in my Phoenix office, I realized that I was ready for clamshell mode.
Clamshell mode enables you to use a PowerBook G4, MacBook, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro with the computer’s lid closed. All you need to have is an external monitor and input devices. The input devices can be wired or wireless. The computer sends all display output to the external monitor and accepts all input from those external input devices. The computer itself just does the CPU stuff.
You can even put the computer aside, out of the way. The photo here gives you an idea of how my office desktop looks with my 13″ MacBook Pro running in clamshell mode, standing in a special stand I bought to keep it out of the way on my rather shallow desk.
There are two ways to enter and exit clamshell mode, depending on whether your input devices are wired or wireless. Let’s take a look at each method.
Wired Input Devices
If you have a wired keyboard and mouse, getting set up with clamshell mode is pretty easy.
- Connect the computer to a power adapter — this won’t work on battery power — and, if necessary, turn your computer on.
- Plug in your keyboard and mouse.
- Connect your external display to your computer and turn it on.
- When the desktop appear on the external display, close the computer’s lid.
- If the computer goes to sleep — which is likely — wake it by touching any key on the keyboard.
You can now use the computer with the external keyboard, mouse, and display.
Wireless Input Devices
In my particular setup, I have a Bluetooth Apple keyboard and a wireless (but not Bluetooth) Logitech mouse. The instructions I follow are similar to the wired input devices instructions. The key is to pair any Bluetooth devices before starting clamshell mode.
- Connect the computer to a power adapter — this won’t work on battery power — and, if necessary, turn your computer on.
- Make sure Bluetooth is turned on.
- Pair and connect your computer with your keyboard and mouse and confirm that they work.
In the Advanced settings of the Bluetooth System Preferences pane, make sure the Allow Bluetooth Devices to Wake this Computer.- Connect your external display to your computer and turn it on.
- When the desktop appear on the external display, close the computer’s lid.
- If the computer goes to sleep — which is likely — wake it by touching any key on the keyboard.
In my case, because my mouse is not Bluetooth, I had to connect the mouse’s USB wireless adapter to my monitor (which has USB ports) or computer and turn the mouse on.
Watch the Video
If you’re a visual kind of person and want to see the process in action, watch this video, which I shot with my Flip camera. We’re not talking Academy Award material here, folks, but it does show you how it works — at least for me.
When You’re Finished with Clamshell Mode
Eventually, you’ll want to start using your computer the usual way, with its own built-in display. Here’s how you do it:
- Put the computer to sleep. (This step might not be necessary; it depends on the computer model and display. Experiment with your system.)
- Disconnect the display.
- Wake your computer to use it.
Need More Information?
You can find more information about using monitors and Bluetooth devices with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide.
You can find Apple’s instructions for using clamshell mode here. That document will be revised as procedures change.
One of the things I love about the most recent releases of WordPress is the automatic upgrade feature. Not only does the software tell you when a new version is available, but it offers a one-click upgrade through the use of the Upgrade Automatically button in the Upgrade WordPress administration panel. I’ve been using this feature regularly since it first appeared — after backing up my WordPress database and content files, of course — and have never had a problem.
The upgrade should now go off without a hitch — which it does, as shown here.
Blogging Basics: Comment Spam, Part III
Part III: Identifying Comment Spam
Part I: Understanding Comments and Pingbacks
Part II: When Comments Go Wrong
Part III: Identifying Comment Spam
One of the challenges of being a serious blogger is dealing with comment spam. While I believe that every blogger should install and enable comment spam prevention software — I use Akismet and Bad Behavior together on my self-hosted WordPress blog — I also go the next step and review every single comment before it’s posted. This ensures that no spam gets through the cracks and appears on my blog.
I also, however, review the spam caught by Akismet to make sure it really is spam. Today, on this blog, I got the usual collection of machine-generated and posted spam comments with an extra helping of comments that might appear, on the surface, to be real.
(Note: Although I originally wrote this as a stand-alone post, I realized it would make a good addition to a series I started about a year ago. So I’ve slipped it into that series as Part III.)
The Goal of Comment Spammers
To understand what a spam comment is, you need to take a look at the goal of spam commenters. The majority of comments that appear on my blogs have one or both of two goals:
Either way, the site the spammer is linking to could contain products or services they want to sell, be part of a black hat SEO project, or even install malware on visitor computers. They often have nothing to do with the post they’re commenting on. There’s no reason in the world why I’d want those links on my site. Hence, they’re spam.
Once you know the goal of these spammers, identifying what might be a legitimate comment as spam becomes easy. Here are a few examples taken right from the Edit Comments administration panel on this blog.
Empty Praise
In this first example, it appears, at first glance, that six different very friendly people commented on six different blog posts. They all have different names and different e-mail addresses and are commenting from different IP addresses. But the URL they’ve entered all starts with the same name, pointing to free blogs on multiple sites. They were all posted within 2 minutes of each other.
And when you read the actual comment content, it’s clear that it’s not real. Here’s what was entered as a comment about the post titled “AirPort Client Update 2009-01 1.0 Now Available“:
Inspirational? Opinions? Neither of these words apply to this post.
Or how about the unlikely comment on “Turning Off a Plugin’s Update Reminder“?
Not a likely comment for this post.
This isn’t the only spammer trying to fool me with complements. Look at this weird comment on my post titled “Bluetooth Adapters not the Same as Built-in Bluetooth” by someone with the unlikely name “[redacted] county limousine service”:
Huh? Move to Europe and learn languages? That’s a great way to avoid Bluetooth issues. Not.
These empty words of praise could fool someone looking for a pat on the back. Don’t let them fool you into including spam on your blog — even if their comments claim they’re going to link to you.
Questions
Another way comment spammers attempt to get attention for their spammy comments is by asking questions in the comment. What well-meaning blogger or reader can resist answering a question? Here’s a example from today’s batch of spam:
(No, the hanging character “I” is not a typo on my part. It was really part of the comment.)
Or this one:
I’ve seen so many variations on this. They often start with a complement and then ask a question that seems to deserve an answer. If the comment is approved, the blogger or a reader may answer the question in another comment, thus drawing more attention to it to make it look legitimate. Or, worse yet, the blogger or commenter may click the link created by the URL for the commenter’s name (which could look legitimate) and wind up exactly where the spammer wanted him to go.
Or sometimes they ask a question that can be answered by a link in their comment, something like “Do you know where I can find good video rentals? I’ve been using blahblah.com (with link)” The object there is to appear to offer helpful information. But is it related to the post? If it’s spam, it probably won’t be.
Links Galore!
Here’s a good example of old fashioned, link-heavy comment spam:
And one where they weren’t taking any chances; they used two standard notations to indicate links, one of which just shows up as code characters:
If you can’t identify these as comment spam, you should probably turn off the comment feature on your blog.
It’s Not a Big Deal
In this post I looked at only three kinds of spam you’re likely to get. There others. If I find good examples, I’ll cover them in another post.
I know at least one blogger who has given up on comments because of the amount of spam that comes through. This blogger is probably not using good tools to prevent and capture spam.
As I mentioned at the top of this post, I use Bad Behavior, which prevents a lot of automated spam and Akismet which captures about 90% of the spam that gets past Bad Behavior. On each of my blogs, I seldom have more than one or two spam comments mixed in with real comments to review. But the potential spam list is always long and I very seldom find a real comment there. Usually a quick glance and a click clears out all the garbage.
In the next post of this series, I’ll explain how you can configure Akismet on your WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress blog.
Learn more on Lynda.com!
If you’re a WordPress user and would like to learn more about handling spam on your WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress account, I hope you’ll check out my WordPress courses on Lynda.com. The current titles of interest are:
We’ll likely be revising one or both of those courses in the coming months, but for now, you’ll find either one very helpful for working with WordPress.com or your self-hosted WordPress site.
And keep checking in here. As a very active WordPress blogger, I’m always offering tips on this site for using WordPress. Click the WordPress category link to find some of my recent posts.