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Comment by pygy_ | Hacker News Reader

Back in the days of Mac OS 9 (IIRC), it was possible to schedule the boot time of Macs, and have a script automatically play the CD present in the drive.

I don't remember the very details because I only used the (second hand) Mac for a few weeks, and the scheduler wasn't reliable (anymore?). But still, it was a cool trick.

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You can still set it to boot at a certain time with OS X, and if you set up auto-login and have that as a login item, it'll accomplish the same task.

This is very cool. I looked for this when I bought my MBP, but I didn't find the option. A quick google trip and I found that you do it from the Energy Saver preference pane.

Thanks for the tip.

On a tengential note: Is it possible to turn on the screen backlight programmatically?

Since OS X 10.6.3, the backlight remains off when waking up from hibernation (this is documented in [1]). The proposed solution is to delete the related plist, which resets the hibernate mode to the default settings that are useless for me. My current solution is to close back the lid for a split second in order to trigger the hibernation process, then to fiddle with the arrow keys to abort it. I'd prefer something more elegant.

1. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2384628?start=90&ts...

I don't have that problem on my MBP with 10.6.8. How are your Energy Saver preferences set up? Trashing the plist and resetting it to how you like it might work--it's possible that the plist is corrupted.

I'll try to reset the plist, then, thanks for your help.

                       Battery         Power Adapter 

    Computer sleep:    10 min          45 min
    Display sleep:     2 min           3 min
    Put HD to sleep:   Yes             Yes
    Wake up from LAN:  Yes             Yes
    Dim before sleep:  Yes             Yes
    Boot after power failure:          No

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