One of the nice things about Mac OSX is that it has the concepts of network ‘locations’. For example, I have ‘Home’, ‘Automatic’ (default) and several others like ‘Via [redacted] proxy’

Useful stuff, but it’s often desireable to do a bit more. I’d like to switch HTTP proxies, default printers, and just maybe initiate a backup when I get home… stock OSX doesn’t have a simple way to do this.

There are several programs to do this, I use and like MarcoPolo. Free, open source, scriptable, unobtrusive, quite clever.

Oh yeah, it supports Growl, too, which is a major plus for me.

Main screen:

Rules:

Actions:

I’ve been using it for a week or so, and so far the main annoyance is the delay required after waking from sleep in a new location - it may take 10-30 seconds to associate with the WiFi, derive the location and apply the rules. Annoying, but probably unavoidable.

I plan on using this more as I gain confidence in it. For example, I want it to run a backup when ‘location is home, AC power is present and IP is ‘foo’ (wired connection) and this looks do-able.

The printer changing seems problematic, perhaps because (as shown) my work printer name has spaces and a backslash in it. There’s no feedback or diagnostics that I can find on this.

Cool stuff!