A lot more freedom choosing terminal.app colors

Very quick ‘before and after’.

What you can change on terminal.app’s color menu is pretty pointless if you can’t change whatever is beeing “force”  fed into it. so here’s the trick:

Download SIMBL

Copy this plugin into ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins

Open terminal.app, go the the screen where you chose the colors and now you have a button there that reads “more”, click on it and go wild.

Before:

After:

Controlling the mic volume on skype (OS X)

Losing your mind with the automatic mic volume control on skype that you can’t switch off?

Amazingly the feature is there, just not on the interface. You’ll have to edit an XML file located at

<user folder>/Library/Application Support/Skype

Open shared.xml with your text editor of choice, find the <VoiceEng> element create a new line and  add <AGC>0</AGC> (that’s zero, not “o”) so it will look something like this:

<VoiceEng>

      <AGC>0</AGC>

      <MicBoost>

        <Built-in.20Microphone>0</Built-in.20Microphone>

      </MicBoost>

      <MicVolume>

        <Built-in.20Microphone>90</Built-in.20Microphone>

      </MicVolume>

      <SpeakerVolume>58</SpeakerVolume>

    </VoiceEng>

Save, Quit and you’re done.

AGC stands for Automatic Gain Control, and you just turned it off. So now you can open System Preferences, go to Sound then chose the Input tab set the mic volume and rest assured that it won’t move by itself wile you’re on skype.

Quick vmware player tip

I have no idea how many of you know of this, but if you want to get the free vmware player to load any OS of your choice it is possible via EasyVMX. You fill out a web form stating what OS you want to run, RAM, HD and so on (much like setting up a proper virtual computer on vmware) and it bundles all the files on a zip. Uncompress, double click on the .vmx file and there you go… a brand new operative-system-free image for your tweaking pleasure.