Nov 02 2009

Child safety locks are designed to keep adults out

Published by Dougal at 2:45 pm under Computing, Family

Mac users may (not) want to try this:

  • Press and hold the ctrl-alt-cmd keys (the three left-most keys on the bottom row)
  • Then repeatedly tap the full stop key

You may stop when your display looks a bit stupid. To reverse the process hold down the three modifiers and tap the comma key instead.

Now, tell me how you would manage all that by accident. Twice. And not notice that you were doing it either time until it was already done.

Once you’ve managed that, try dragging Mail.app from /Applications onto your desktop and doing a system update in a multi-user system. It is possible (though how, I am still unsure) to update the copy on your desktop while leaving an old copy elsewhere which other users will still try to use. The old version will cease to work if the OS update leaves it incompatible with the rest of the system.

All this is possible! All this can be yours!

6 Responses to “Child safety locks are designed to keep adults out”

  1. # Kenon 02 Nov 2009 at 8:51 pm

    some people’s talents are amazing. This clearly takes a lot of effort, but hey wasn’t it fun?

    (question: If you rattle the ctrl-alt-cmd comma combo enough, how do you know when you have got back to where you started? I didn’t count on the way out and didn’t bring any breadcrumbs or string.)

  2. # Robert Slowleyon 02 Nov 2009 at 9:16 pm

    I keep pressing something just as I login which changes the keyboard to want to print arabic characters. This means I can’t then do anything other than reboot the machine to get things back to normal (I can’t figure out how to change it back with the mouse pointer). :S

  3. # Kenon 02 Nov 2009 at 9:17 pm

    Clearly the talents of mankind are legion!

  4. # Dougalon 02 Nov 2009 at 10:32 pm

    Ken, the actual controls are in the Accessibility option in the usual system prefs location. On the version I was using far left is called “normal” and far right is “high contrast” or something. The number of steps between one end and the other is only about a dozen I think, though it may be different for newer versions.

    Rob, you should be ashamed. I expect better from you! :-)

  5. # Kenon 02 Nov 2009 at 10:36 pm

    mm, it looked like I was back to normal, but you never can tell. Maybe I should try some arabic characters?

  6. # Coinneachon 05 Nov 2009 at 10:17 am

    I should like tp try this, but am not sure how it can be done…

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