For those that have had the pleasure of working with certain Windows-based laptops, there may be one particularly crazy-making design choice: the radio-disable switch. To paraphrase Seinfeld, what’s up with that? It’s a ‘feature’ (ahem) not utilized often enough to remind folks they have it, nor explained properly to the customer by the manufacturer. And it can drive IT support personnel nuts, as almost nobody in their right mind turns off wireless access voluntarily… yet it still happens from time to time, causing both sides to be confused for quite some time until they employ Occam’s Razor. And there are various locations it might be on the laptops, too, depending on the vendor and model.
Even on the shinier side of the aisle, sometimes the ‘service order’ as its called on Macs isn’t as we’d like it, especially in the age of USB or Thunderbolt ethernet adapters. Therefore an Apple laptop might look over a wireless network even when a live ethernet cable is plugged in. For myself, in the past I had relied on the order of icons in the top right of the menu bar, using keyboard shortcuts to navigate to the (formerly Airport) Wi-Fi icon to turn wireless off when I got to my desk, and on when leaving.
An item appeared on the Hacker News recently which led me to revisiting my process, sourcing the same illustrious individual who compiled a list of ‘defaults write’ commands which was then dubbed “OSX for Hackers” on news.ycombinator.com (Hacker News). Feeding off the work of another gentleman from back before Lion, they purported to have found a dead-simple way to run scripts that look like application bundles. The comments on that announcement post are littered with folks looking for help, leading one MagerValp to chime in on the Hacker News with “please use Platypus instead, it’ll save you a lot of trouble”
Not one to ignore the word of Per, I looked into Platypus, which did exactly what I needed: I wrapped up two shell scripts that used networksetup, one to turn the power off and one to turn it on.
Now I can launch the ‘apps’ from Spotlight and control airport power, even without my laptop being fitted with an insanity-causing, havoc-wrecking hardware switch.
