Here’s a fun Mac OS X Dock trick to amuse others with.

1. Set your Dock’s minimize effect to “Genie” (or the hidden “Suck” choice, using TinkerTool).
2. Open Applications → Utilities → Terminal.
3. Type killall Dock but don’t hit Return just yet.
4. Open Safari and load a decent sized website, like Digg.
5. Switch back to the Terminal, keeping the Safari window in view.
6. Shift-click the yellow minimize button of the Safari window, and hit Return to execute the command while the window is busy morphing.

The Dock process will be killed, and it will disappear, leaving the Safari window with nowhere to go. The window will freeze mid-transition. The cool part is that the window is still responsive, and you can scroll around and see the content transform in real-time.

The Dock automatically relaunches, so you don’t have to worry about breaking anything. Finish minimizing the window, or do Command-W to close it.

Credit due to Marco for his recent comment on the Cool Things You Can Do on a Mac article, although this is likely the original source.

After half an hour of messing around with my Linksys WRT54G v5 hardware, I was finally able to upgrade the firmware on the device. I try to maintain a secure setup by using WPA encryption, HTTPS web-based management, and Ethernet-only administration. However, it seems that all my conscientiousness worked against me when attempting to upgrade from v1.00.6 to 1.00.9. For reasons known only to Linksys, you can’t upgrade the firmware while logged in over HTTPS. The kicker, though, is that you get no warning or indication that anything is malfunctioning — the upgrade simply doesn’t happen. A text-based progress bar is displayed for about 3 minutes, and (about one in three times) you get the following stupid error:

Upgrade are failed. Fantastic.

The solution to this is to re-enable plain HTTP administration, log in unencrypted (using http://), and then retry the upgrade.