Give your Mac a voice-activated self-destruct sequence

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You can tell your Mac to self-destruct with this simple trick. Photo: Jacob Salmela
You can tell your Mac to self-destruct with this simple trick. Photo: Jacob Salmela

Worried that the cops might bust in your door any minute, or simply really paranoid? How cool would it be if you could initiate a self-destruction sequence for your Mac using only your voice, just like Captain Picard would use to destroy The Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation?

Well, awesomely, you can. And it’s pretty easy to do!

As pointed out by blogger Jacob Salmela, Automator actually supports dictation in the latest versions of OS X Yosemite.

All you need to do is enable Enhanced Dictation under the Dictation & Speech section of System Preferences, then create a new Automator action using Dictation Command as base, and then modify it to run a command like rm -rf / whenever you say your “self-destruct” word within ear distance of your Mac. Obviously you’d want to set your secret self-destruct code to something pretty obscure, and unlikely to come up in conversation: “Antidisestablishmentarianism” might make for a good one.

Check out Salmela’s full post at the link below to be walked through the step-by-step setup.

Source: Jacob Salmela

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