Dad is such a space nut. Every time a space-faring object gets hurtled into space or something from space hurtling toward the Earth, he scours all the news channels to find every bit of information. I think he misses the televised manned moon missions or the televised exploding shuttle launches. I never got to see any of those live. Due to the lack of news regarding Endeavour's flight back, I decided to do a little web searching for dad. Naturally the first site I went to was NASA's, and dad's in luck, I found a live 24-hour AV feed from both Mission Control and Endeavour.


It's not much, most of the time it's boring. Just showing people milling about in Mission Control or feeds of the giant status screens, but the above picture was showing an orbital sunrise as it was happening when the shuttle was just above the northwestern side of Australia. Well, that's the first time I witnessed an orbital sunrise :) The picture below shows a better-lit Earth a few minutes later. I think it's great that NASA provides these live feeds, imagine if you were a kid with dreams of being an astronaut and you were locked onto the feeds, that's 24 hours of astronaut-pretend right there! I suddenly have the urge to say: "Houston, we have a problem..." oh, but I hope I won't hear those words on this feed.



To take these pictures I fiddled with the command + shift + 3 (or 4 or + spc bar as the case may be) screen capture shortcut, but I wasn't exactly thrilled that it was automatically being saved as a PNG file on the desktop. I looked for ways to set the preferences for this, but I couldn't find it, so I opened up Automator. The result? I made my first workflow from scratch! Hooray! And here I was thinking that I wouldn't know what to do with Automator. I'm so happy...giddy with geekiness.

I made a three-step workflow:
1. Take screenshot, main monitor only checked, save to desktop as picture
2. Change type of image, show action when run checked (so a list of possible file types appear)
3. Open images in Preview (because I'd like to see the image in actual size post screen grab)

Then it was saved as plug-in for finder for easy right-click access


There are a few things that I haven't ironed out, the workflow doesn't work when I use the keyboard shortcuts. I'm looking for an action that incorporates the keyboard shortcuts into the workflow but couldn't figure it out. The nice thing is, it works great from the right-click option which is a 2 step click process (right-click, select) as opposed to the "command + shift + 3 or 4 or + spc bar" which is a 3 - 4 keypress process. All in all, a good, fun and successful workflow for me! Hooray!

When did I turn into an Apple geek?