Daniel Roe
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Poster: Daniel Roe @ Thu May 28, 2009 4:09 pm
So I'm cramming for my Step-1 boards and it turns out drinking, sleeping, and gambling my way though Biochemistry class my first year didn't pay off.
Luckily my study-aid, "USMLEWorld" explains it all perfectly (better than FirstAid or my textbook, for that matter). However, the program is also a total pain in the balls.
USMLEWorld uses a variety of annoying measures to keep you from saving or printing their tutorials. This means that whenever you're studying and you want to look something up, you have to go locate the test with the question on it, find that particular question, and read it all through the USMLEWorld program.
The program (the mac version, at least) does this by unbinding the screen-capture button, continuously dumping shit to your clipboard (to prevent copy/paste), and disabling the Grab utility. While attempting to use Grab, USMLEWorld threw an error stating that it was "contacting an administrator" about my misdeeds and that I should feel very ashamed about it.
It's time these people are taught not to fuck with a bored, tired, hungry, and slightly annoyed medical student.
I realized the only way it could be stopping Grab from opening was by watching the open processes and shutting down when it saw the "grab" process. One way to deal with this is rename the process, but a simpler way is to just use a different program which is also included with OS X.
First, open up Utilities/Terminal.app
Then, when you have the test question displayed EXACTLY as you want to save it, type the following into the terminal:
screencapture -iw ~/Desktop/gayasstestquestion.jpg
That will immediately change your cursor to a little camera, then just click on the USMLEWorld window. Bingo! Question saved. To crop, just open the file in Preview.app, select the area, and hit command+K.
This is a quick and dirty way around the DRM, and I have no doubt that they'll catch on to this eventually. In that instance, you could probably just rename "screencapture" or use another, better, program you get off the web. For the current incarnation however, this works great!
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