MarcoPolo is an open-source location switcher for the Mac that I'm utterly infatuated with.
When I get to work, I have to do several things every day:
1. Mute my sound so I don't drive my office-mate batty.
2. Turn off my OS X firewall so that Parallels can correctly connect to my network shares. Otherwise, I can't access Visual Source Safe.
3. Flip my network location to work.
4. Connect to my network shares so I can work on my files in Coda.
Before finding MarcoPolo, I would manually flip my network location to work, turn off my sound, turn off my firewall, and connect to my drives.
Now, MarcoPolo can do this all for me. It sees that I've connected to my work wi-fi, and based on that connection, knows I'm at work. It pops up a notification telling me it's doing its thing, which I find reassuring.
When I go home, MarcoPolo recognizes that wi-fi network as well. It flips my location to home so that I now have a static IP address on my home network. It turns on my firewall and turns on my sound too.
MarcoPolo can do things like change my desktop wallpaper, run scripts, start up my screen-saver and more based on my location.
Furthermore, it doesn't just use my wi-fi connection to determine where I am. I can set certain rules for it based on triggers such as ethernet connections, bluetooth, bonjour and more. For now, I'm content with it tweaking my settings based on wi-fi. But, I may investigate bluetooth triggers to see if it will perform certain actions when I come near the computer with my iPhone.
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