LazyWeb Request: I Need to Shut Off My Laptop’s Net Access at a Particular Time
May 9th, 2007, 13 Comments »
Our Maltese cable provider, Melita, has a fairly Draconian approach to web access and bandwidth. Their best non-business package has a download limit of 10 GB (!) per thirty-day period.
They do, however, have a very reasonable loophole. They offer unlimited downloading between 11:00pm and 7:00am, local time. That provides plenty of time for me to download TV shows (no TV here, and besides, I gather much of it is in Italian and Maltese) and synch my laptop with my large online music archive.
However, I don’t get up until about 8:15am, and want to shut down network access to my G4 PowerBook shortly before 7:00am.
My first, brute force solution–use OS X’s Energy Saver setting to shutdown the laptop at 6:45am–failed because Oboe, MP3Tunes’ synching software, wouldn’t close or stop synching when my Mac asked it to.
Does anybody have any bright ideas about how I might schedule my Mac to turn off internet access at a particular time? I’d prefer that they didn’t include writing code, because, well, I pretty much can’t (besides, you know, 10 PRINT “EAT MY SHORTS”, 20 GOTO 10″). Maybe there’s some kind of cyber-nanny software that will do it?
UPDATE: I believe Travis’s AppleScript solution worked, but I forgot to turn off the automatic shutdown. Still, clearly I managed to close all the apps and then shutdown the computer, so we have success. Thanks again for all the suggestions!