A Popclip extension to dial a number using OS X Jabber Client

Popclip is a nice little OS X app that adds iOS style copy/paste popups on the Mac desktop ($4.99 in Mac App store regularly, but only $2.99 until Jan 31). The real beauty of Popclip is in a number of plug-in extensions that can then also be quickly applied to any selected text (some favorites of mine include open hyperlink, and create note in Evernote).

Extensions are also pretty easy to create and tied to a Mac OS X service, AppleScript, Shell Script, URL, or Keypress. We use Jabber integrated with the Cisco UC platform at work, so I thought it would be nice to be able to quickly dial a selected phone number using a Popclip extension.

To use the the Popclip extension, make sure the “Dial with Jabber” service is installed and active (the service is installed with the Address Book plug-in — from the Cisco Jabber menu choose Cisco Jabber > Preferences > General and click Install Mac Address Book Plug-in).

Jabber also needs to be configured to control an associated Cisco IP phone or as a softphone. The extension (unsigned for now - sorry) can be download from GitHub. Grab the “dialjabber.popclipext.zip” file, un-archive, and double-click on the dialjabber.popclipext icon to install the extension (Popclip has to be installed first).

Then dial-away!

Hope you find this useful.

— Klaus

Automatically convert PowerPoints to PDF in OS X with Automator

I much prefer viewing presentations (especially other’s slide decks) as PDFs since it does a much nicer job of preserving the formatting especially when opening them on an iPad. Often when I get a presentation to review I immediately open it in PowerPoint and then just save it as a PDF to a DropBox folder so that I can access it later.

One of the many hidden powerful features in Mac OS X that I haven’t played much up until now is Automator. I was happy to find that there is an easy way to automate PPT to PDF conversions using a simple Automator Workflow.

I created a new Folder Action workflow in Automator with one simple action - “Convert Format of PowerPoint Presentations” with an option of PDF as the output format. The Folder Action is applied to a “convert ppt to pdf” folder stored on the Desktop.

‘Convert PPT to PDF’ Automator workflow

Now I can simply drag a PowerPoint file to the “convert ppt to pdf” folder and a PDF copy is automatically created in the directory as well.

I think I need to play with Automator a lot more.

OS X command line tricks for SSH and serial console connections

One of the things I love about Mac OS X is having the UNIX-like command line available via Terminal. I tend to just use Terminal for ssh and console access to routers and switches and the like. I do however like to have my output automatically logged to a text file, so I created TextExpander snippets to pipe output to the "tee" command with automatically set a date-stampted filename.

For SSH the looks like:

 ssh user@11.22.33.44 | tee /Users/klaus/ssh_logs/%Y-%m-%d-%H%M%S-ssh.txt

For console via USB to serial this becomes:

 screen /dev/tty.KeySerial1 | tee /Users/klaus/ssh_logs/%Y-%m-%d-%H%M%S-console.txt

Works pretty well so far