It’s reading week, and there is a maths assignment to be done, with the following brief:

Please hand in printed solutions via a computer.

This is what sits in front of me as I do just that:

Who ever heard of a WYSIWYG anyway?

My brain hurts.

Searching the Internet for information about OS X’s network location settings the other day yielded one of the coolest applications that I have seen in a long time: MarcoPolo.

Basically, the idea is that if you use a portable computer, you tend to use it in different contexts: At your desk at home, in the café down the road, in a university library, etc. Depending on your context, you do different things, have different settings and configurations, and use different resources.

This is where MarcoPolo steps in. By gathering information about your computer’s environment, it ‘guesses’ which context you are in. This infomation includes your current IP address, the devices you have connected, the computers surrounding you, the time of day, and even the ambient lighting conditions. When it knows where you are, it can do loads of things: mute your speakers, run a particular program, mount a particular volume, change your desktop background, to name a few.

For example: I only use my Mighty Mouse when I’m at home. If MarcoPolo detects it plugged in, it can be pretty sure that I’m at my house. Furthermore, if the ambient lighting conditions are high and I’m running off the battery, I’m probably in the garden. If I have a monitor and a power adaptor plugged in, I’m most likely at my desk. Then it can get to work: At home, I get it to mount my Mac Pro’s hard drives. When I’m not out and about I don’t need to be so paranoid, so I tell it to disable automatic logout. If I’m at my desk, I connect to my network over Ethernet, so AirPort can be turned off.

You can be really specific, right down to which room you occupy, what task you are performing, and at what time you are performing it.

Say I go to the library. MarcoPolo knows I’m there because I’m running on battery power, and I’m connected to the library’s wi-fi network. I can get it to mute the speakers so as not to disturb others and dim the screen to save power. I don’t want people hacking me, so I can set a firewall rule to block file sharing and remote login.

What’s more, it’s really expandable, because among the actions that can be triggered are shell script and AppleScript execution.

Are you getting it?

It’s really great, and free. You can get it here.