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At work I connect my laptop to the network using old-school cat5 cables because there is no wireless available. However, at home I use wireless. Every morning when I get to work I open my MacBook Pro and go to the System Preferences -> Sharing -> Internet to start sharing the internet using AirPort because I like to scrobble the morning’s tracks from my iPod Touch before I open iTunes and tuck into the rest of the day’s music. It’s just part of my morning routine.

This only has to happen because when I get home again and I want to upload some of the day’s photos to Flickr^[1] I have to turn internet sharing off so I can connect to my home wireless. This is a process I’ve streamlined (using Quicksilver) down to seven keystrokes and six mouse clicks (starting internet sharing) or seven keystrokes and two clicks (stopping it again). But it was still too much. In fact, I found it a total pain. For a while now I’ve been looking for a solution to make things faster. Today I finally cobbled one together using tips from few different places, and here’s how to do it.

To get the process down to nine keystrokes (plus your system password) for starting and ten keystrokes for stopping internet sharing we’re going to use three of Apple’s goodies^[2]:

1. AppleScript
2. Shell scripting
3. Quicksilver

Let’s get started.

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1. Or any number of other evening type tasks. [↩]
2. You might think that sounds like more, rather than less. But for me, one mouse click is about equal to ten keystrokes (possibly more) and crucially there is now no mouse involved. [↩]