The best way I've found to access files on a HFS+ formatted drive when running windows is the HFSExplorer by catacombae. It is small, no installation needed, and easy to use. Select files to extract, select target, go.
One downside is it's read only, and you need Java installed on your machine. Therefore don't forget to download JRE (look for the button "download JRE" and select your platform (eg. Windows).
I had to remove a complicated file from an external hard drive. When I tried to delete it via Finder / Trash, it said, unable to remove, file in use. Nevertheless it was possible to unmount the volume without errors, which means none of the current processes actually used that file.
No big deal I thought, let's just force delete it. And use the superuser command just in case it's an access rights problem:
$ sudo rm -f /Volumes/sams186/App.dmg
But this time it did not help: unable to remove. So I found that the resource fork could prevent files from being deleted. The resource fork is a file system structure which allows the system to store additional information to a file that does not belong to the file itself, but isn't a file system attribute either.
Open parenthesis:
File system attributes are properties of a file such as file name, block address, file size, etc. The number of file system attributes available and the constraints who apply vary from one file system format to another, which means HFS+ does not store exactly the same information as FAT32 or EXT3.
In the long listing of a directory, the existence of a resource fork is indicated with an @ after the access rights:
$ ls -al /Volumes/sams186/
-rw-r--r--@ 1 damian damian 224395264 16 Nov 2006 App.dmg
To show more information about the resource forks in the folder listing, use the @ parameter:
$ ls -al@ /Volumes/sams186/
-rw-r--r--@ 1 damian damian 224395264 16 Nov 2006 App.dmg
com.apple.FinderInfo 32
To display the content of a resource fork:
$ xattr -l /Volumes/sams186/App.dmg
And finally, to delete a part of a resource fork:
$ xattr -d "com.apple.FinderInfo" /Volumes/sams186/App.dmg
Having removed that FinderInfo resource fork, the file could be removed without any problems.
The problem why Windows on a Mac was a pain in the ass is roughly the following:
That was the dilemma... lose the flexibility to remove the Win partition easily, or don't be able to access your data. Until google published Mac FUSE which stands for File-system in USEr space. If you have some knowledge about the architecture of an operating system: this is a driver (running in kernel mode) allowing to use file system implementations in user mode, as the name suggests. But the really interesting feature is its implementation of a Linux file system API, making Linux file system adaptations ready to use on a mac. Amongst other [rethorical pause] NTFS!
Which solves us the problem described above. First install MacFUSE, and then the NTFS 3G driver and enjoy hasselfree Windows!
This might apply for any website where you enter text and preview it afterwards. I experienced a browser crash when writing the preceding blog entry. And as if a browser crash wasn't annoying enogh, I discovered I didn't save my blog entry when it was finished. Instead I previewed it and headed off doing other stuff, which ended in killing browser.
Sure, as a golden rule, always copy your text before you submit any form, since any website is suspect to lose your content. But I was young and foolish and didn't do that, and even the built-in autosave mechanism of Movable Type didn't save anything helpful.
But my luck was, I did preview it. The fact of previewing it made it possible to find it in the browsers' cache. I opened the terminal and entered the following:
grep <keyword> -r ~/Library/Caches/Firefox/
whereas <keyword> is to be substituted with a word that is for sure in your text but not very common. The same could be applied to Safari, which cache is accessible under ~/Library/Caches/Safari/. The output of the grep command is the filename followed by the line in which the keyword was found. If you found the right file, you can view the contents of the file with the command cat <path/to/file>.
© Perian ProjectWhat I was not aware of... I installed Perian some time ago, and it sat in my System Preferences, quietly doing its job. So, all of the behaviour described in the previous post apply only if you have Perian installed. Thanx to caillou for the hint.
Nevertheless MicroDVD (.sub) formatted subtitles will not work in Quicktime even if it's QT on Perian.
Perian is a great tool every Mac user should install. It doesn't change the way Quicktime looks, behaves, no warnings, no hassle with updates, completely transparent. But it allows you to watch a number of formats which are not supported by QT out of the box.
Summary: no troubles, only benefits - get it!
Did you already notice how Quicktime sometimes displays subtitles, and sometimes not? Yesterday I enlightened another mistery of Apple software. The information given hereafter may only apply to Quicktime 7.4.5 (QT), older (or future) versions may behave different.
For subtitles there are various formats and flavours. For digital movies, these are mostly plain text files with a file type .srt or .sub, usually associated with VLC. (Get a more complete overview on wikipedia)
Apparently QT understands only the SubRip dialect of subtitles, file type .srt. To view the file contents drag it onto the TextEdit icon in the Dock or use your favourite text editor.
"Amores Perros" in QT1
00:00:37,920 --> 00:00:40,800
Love's a bitch
In order to associate the movie and the subtitle file, QT needs the subtitle file to begin with the movie name, i.e. film_name.avi will be matched with film_name_subtitles-whatever.srt. Unfortunately there seems to be no way to disable the subtitles once the movie is opened, except for closing the file, rename the subtitle file, and reopen the movie.
Now sometimes QT won't show the subtitles even if a .srt file is present and correctly named. Then it is possible that the file is in the also very popular MicroDVD format, which usually ends in .sub, but sometimes erroneously is named .srt.
{1271}{1343}Love's a bitch
To convert a format into another, there is a very handy Java application named Jubler which lets you open the subtitles in whatever format, edit, and export to whatever format you like. Enjoy!
Oh, and Jubler might ask you for the framerate (fps) of the respective movie. This is necessary since some formats are frames-dependent, and some are time-dependent. Open your movie in QT, press [CMD-i], and read the FPS indication.
Web resources: subtitles download site, deutsche untertitel platform, subtitles generator app
Update: This only works if Perian is installed. Check the next post for more information.
©purefiction.net Safari keyword expansion can be pretty frustrating. I usually have an plugin to fasten search on the web, I type "w Firefox" and the browser expands it to "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox". The use is supposed to be analoguous to the behaviour I described in Firefox autocomplete some time ago, hence the title of this post.
But, these plugins often get out-dated. Either they don't work with the new Safari version, or I update the underlying SIMBL package and break the compatibility, or both of them.
Up to now, I've had 3 plugins:
Finally, my search has an end. Now I'm using:
And it works! Now I'm not sure if I should dare that Safari to v3.1.1 which is waiting. Never change a running system!
Update 22.05.08: Finally I dared to update to Safari 3.1.1, and I am glad to say, it works, even Pithhelmet!
My MacBook Pro finally runs with Leopard. Though the update ran quite seamlessly, some nuisances remain:
But there are also positive changes to note:
More to follow...
Speaking of backups... Yesterday my Mac mini suddenly showed an empty background and didn't react to any keyboard commands. Once rebooting it always hang after the command
kernel[0]: IOBluetoothHCIController::start Idle Timer
So now I'll give a chronical of how I tried to fix it.
Apparantly the file system is okay now, but the files have been corrupted. So I re-install the system, choosing the option "Archive & install", which is actually not the best option. I should have chosen the standard "Upgrade" which would have kept my user settings the way they were. Like this I had to do some fiddeling with the old user account until it was ready to use.
© Apple Inc.Today, without any reason an application popped up, I've never seen it before, and it tells me, there are "currently no conflicts to resolve." The one and only button of the window quits the application, and as sudden as it has come up, it has vanished again.
Ooookayy?!? Quite startled from that intermezzo I google for this app, and find an entry in the Apple Mac OS X 10.4 Help describing the app:
Aha. Not that I'm really relieved to know that anything anywhere in my system is sync'ing without my knowlege... and additionally lanches the Conflict Resolver for no reason. Hope that no security issue will be published these days!
Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Heute machte ich Bekanntschaft mit einem neuen Programm in OS X: dem Sync-Abgleich. Das Programm hilft, wenn Versionskonflikte bei einem Synchronisationsprozess auftreten. Dabei war ich gar nicht am synchronisieren ... seeeeehr interessant! Nicht dass ich es beruhigend fände, wenn mein System irgendwo irgendetwas synchronisiert, und dann zu allem Überfluss noch den Sync-Abgleich startet, nur um mir mitzuteilen, dass es "zurzeit keine zu lösende Probleme" gibt. Hoffentlich kommt nicht in den nächsten Tagen eine Sicherheitslück mit der Beschreibung!
© 1995-2003 AppleHow to add a folder permanently to the PATH variable of your Mac OS X environment:
echo 'export PATH=/your/path/:$PATH' >> ~/.bash_profile
Notes:
/your/path/ for instance could be /usr/local/bin/.bashrc.bashrc contains instructions although not used, you may want to keep these by using mv ~/.bashrc ~/.bash_profile"$PATH" would replace $PATH with the actual content of the path variable>> is used to append the output of the preceding command to the file, thus preserving the contents of the filecat ~/.bash_profileUpdate: I forgot to mention, but you can similarly export any environment variable permanently, for instance:
echo 'export SVN_EDITOR=VIM' >> ~/.bash_profile
Eben wollte ich die CD einer Freundin auf meinem Rechner abspielen. Nach dem einschieben tauchten 2 CD-Icons im Finder auf, eine AUDIO und eine Audio-CD. iTunes, welches bei mir automatisch beim Einlegen einer Musik-CD automatisch gestartet wird, reagierte nicht mehr und musste über Sofort beenden... [CMD-ALT-ESC] abgeschossen werden, das Festplattendienstprogramm ebenfalls.
Ein Blick auf die CD-Hülle verriet den Übeltäter: "Copy Controlled", der Kopierschutz von EMI. Grund genug, die Sache mal genauer unter die Lupe zu nehmen:
Die AUDIO-Partition enthielt eine Player-Software für Windows, und für OS 9 / Classic – welches auf der Intel-Architektur nicht mehr unterstützt wird.
Die Audio-CD-Partition zeigte die auf der CD gespeicherten Stücke als AIFF-Dateien an.
Also hab ich mal die Dateien im Finder auf den Rechner kopiert. Funktioniert. Dann die CD ausgeworfen, und iTunes gestartet. Die Dateien in iTunes importiert – ohne Probleme. Erweitert > Auswahl konvertieren in AAC, und *hopp* ist die Musik in der Bibliothek.
So long, EMI, and thanks for all the fish! *
Nachtrag: Ich merke gerade, dass der Kopierschutz nicht mal zuverlässig funktioniert. Eine CD, die mit demselben System versehen war, liess sich in iTunes öffnen und sogar ohne Umwege importieren.
* Zitat der Delphine aus Douglas Adams "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" HHGTG
MP hat wieder mal einen Dauerbrenner aufgegriffen: zuwenig Platz auf der Festplatte. Also muss etwas gelöscht werden. Aber was bloss?
Das findet man mit Hilfe von GrandPerspective am besten heraus: wo sitzen die grössten Speicherfresser?!
Für die Geeks: Interessant finde ich, dass sein Screenshot und meiner (oben) nicht soviele Ähnlichkeiten aufweisen. Aber das Gewusel an kleinen Dateien am linken Rand, das findet sich bei ihm in der rechten oberen Ecke wieder, das sind /System und /Applications.
Bei mir ist die grösste Datei, die zu sehen ist, /private/var/vm/sleepimage und die hat unabänderlich die Grösse meines Rams. Die restlichen grösseren Dateien wurden fast alle wegrationalisiert.
@MP: deine Platte ist 60GB gross? Das ist auch nicht gerade luxuriös, da kanns schnell mal zu eng werden.
Recently my mom called me, complaining her mac was very slow and there was a strange black frame around some buttons, often following the mouseclicks. The symptoms so far were unknown to me, so I told her to send me a screenshot.
A google search showed, that it was due to OS X's built-in voice over feature which gives an optical feedback where the current focus is. Thus my mother should hear her mac talking, and she's not yet old enough to have bad hearing.
But even the best ears won't help, if you turned the volume down... I told her to press command-F5 and everything was back to normal. (If she would've worked on a notebook, it would've been CMD-FN-F5.)
In retrospective, I wonder why there was no info panel in the bottom right corner. On my computer it showed up automatically. Maybe I've activated it by chance in the VoiceOver Utility, tab "Display", checkbox "Show Caption Panel".
Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: wenn du mal so komischen schwarzen Rahmen in OS X begegnen solltest, die nicht verschwinden, egal in welchem Programm, so ist wohl das Vorlese-Feature ausversehen aktiviert worden. Den Spuck wird man wieder los durch Apfel-F5 drücken (bei einem Laptop Apfel-fn-F5).
Today my mac hung when it ran out of battery. Well, it not actually hung in the sense freeze, rather the applications refused to work. I could switch between apps, some worked, but some showed me the spinning beachball of death. The symptoms where just as if you leave the network without unmounting a network volume.
After a while of patient waiting, I force-quitted most of the apps, but I had to use the power switch to really finish it...
kernel[0]: SmartBatteryManager: retrying command 0x0f; retry due to absurd value _zero_
Sure, my battery showed to be empty, but still the computer worked. The sensors reported a completely empty battery: a condition under which the computer normally wouldn't work anymore. Probably the software ran into a never-meant-to-reach bit of code.
Suprisingly I found myself to be (according to google) the first person to have noticed this problem.
© 2007 Apple Inc.Als ich mit Apple Adressbuch begonnen habe, meine Kontakte zu organisieren, habe ich nicht gerechnet, irgendwann mal im Ausland zu arbeiten. Ich habe meine schweizer Nummern ohne internationale Vorwahl eingegeben - was sich als Fehler erweisen sollte: Wenn ich mich im Ausland aufhalte, kann ich keine gespeicherte Nummer anrufen, die nicht mit 00 bzw. + beginnt.
Eine Suche bei Google nach Vorwahl und Applescript führte mich zu der Seite andare.ch, auf der David Reindl bereits ein gutes Applescript vorbereitet hatte. Allerdings führt das Ding einen vorbereitenden Test aus, um Fehlbedienung zu verhindern, der mir in die Quere kam. Also habe ich es umgeschrieben, so wie ich es brauchen kann: vorwahl_aendern.zip
Es arbeitet in 2 Schritten:
Mit dieser Logik können unter der Voraussetzung, dass alle ausländischen Nummern bereits mit 00xyz oder +xyz notiert sind, fehlerfrei alle Nummern in einem Rutsch (naja, für Perfektionisten: mit zwei Loops) internationalisiert werden. Spart einen Haufen Zeit und Klickerei!
Das Skript kann natürlich auch schnell angepasst werden für Deutschland, Österreich oder sonst ein Land: Im Skripteditor die "+41" auf der 5.letzten Zeile mit der jeweiligen Landesvorwahl ersetzen. Vorausgesetzt wird jedoch, dass man ausschliesslich Nummern von einem Land ohne internationale Kennung hat.
© 2007 Apple Inc.This post is an add-on to the post about shrinking an OS X DVD from september due to a question I received.
The Problem with the disk image file is the following: it stores the data in a precise logical block. When burning the DMG file, the logical block will become the physical block. If any data resides in the last block of the disk, the hdiutil command is not able to relocate this data onto another, empty block of the disk. Or rather than not being able it is not supposed to relocate any data since the DMG format is supposed to give an exact copy of the original disk.
So what can You do if You still want to resize an OS X DVD disk image? The only way I achieved to resize the file is to delete all the files in /System/Installation/Packages, resize the file, and put the packages back on. It is not absolutely sure this works since it depends on the low level layout of the original disk, but for mine it worked.
If You are interested in further information about file systems, You may want to visit the following pages:
wikipedia.org/HFS_Plus
wikipedia.org/Inode
© 2007 Apple Inc.Why does iCal suck for professional use? You don't have week numbers!
Remedy: Use NumSemaine to generate a calendar telling you the week. My favourite settings is "Mark on the 1rst day, schedule event 07:00" as my iCal day begins at 7AM. Like this it doesn't add an all-day event which consumes too much space in my eyes.
This year, there was no confusion about week 01 since the first of January was a Monday. But next year, week 01 will start with the 4. of January according to the ISO specification:
[...] the first week of a new year is the week that has the majority of its days in the new year. Week 01 might also contain days from the previous year [...]
In the case that week 01 contains days from the previous year, you also can set the start date manually.
In the backend movable type shows the number of written post. But how can You tell? Since in the frontend there is no counter displayed, you have to use a little helper application: WordService (download).
This application shows up in any Cocoa application in the Services menu. It features (amongst other): Remove multiple spaces, sort lines, format caps and lowercase, rotate 13, and statistics. So mark all the entries in my full post list and select the statistics function in the Services menu – and here You go.
Forget-me-not is not only the name of a pretty tiny flower but also of a very useful software. I am even tempted to write "very" in italic to stress how useful it is.
It helps me be less aggressive to my Mac: About 5 minutes ago I felt a savage whish to throw something across the room. Now why, you're asking. Not that the Mac made a mistake, it was me who made the mistake. But it didn't prevent me from making the mistake to close Safari with about thousand tabs open. And for some unknown reason Taboo has not yet been compiled as universal binary.
So ForgetMeNot doesn't ask if You are sure to close Safari even with tabs, but it remembers the tabs and reopens the websites if You reopen Safari. The upside: You can even keep surfing across a Security Update with reboot. The downside: any form data (such as a blog entry) is lost if the forma hasn't been submitted.
After lots of testing and rebooting I have found that any (primary) hard drive partitioning beyond boot camp is not really trivial.
My experiment:
After extensive testing of virtually any OS X programm and command I've found that there is one very important thing: boot from another drive. OS X doesn't allow such modification as described above on the primary hard disk. If You've once booted from an external (or secondary) drive, You can use the following command:
diskutil eraseVolume [format] newName <nonbootable>
i.e. diskutil eraseVolume "HFS+" SecondOSX disk0s3
or diskutil eraseVolume "MS-DOS FAT32" Win disk0s3
I'm not really sure whether You ought to use sudo or not, so if it won't work You know what to do. And don't try to use these commands when booting from Your primary hard disk – it might not tell You that the command didn't complete successfully, but it really won't work.
Oh, I almost forgot: I'm back online again! What a luxury to have internet at home! But, as always, You don't know what You've got until it's gone...
Ever being hassled by the alert: "This software cannot be installed on this computer."? Make it the last time:
rm "/Volumes/Mac OS X Install Disc 1/System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg/Contents/OSInstall.dist"
At the beginning of the installation, it will show the dialog that the installer will verify the hardware, but it will perform no checks anymore.
While I was already at it, I tried to copy the my favourite OS X App's (such as DiskWarrior) into the Applications/Utilities folder of the image. I modified the file
/System/Installation/CDIS/Installation\ Log.app/Contents/Resources/InstallerMenuAdditions.plist
to make those custom applications show in the menu during installation along with the Terminal and Disk Utility, but somehow this did not work. There must be some kind of protection that keep unintende applications from showing in that menu, but at least in the cleartext files I haven't found any hint.
Also I wonder if the PowerPC binary really would work, i.e. if Rosetta is present during the installation.
Actually, this is not really specific for intel DVD's but it might work for any OS X DVD:
AppleOSX_DVD.dmg and resides on the Desktop/System/Installation/Packages (You can still put folders back onto the disk image after resizing the image file).hdiutil resize -size 4.3g ~/Desktop/AppleOSX_DVD.dmg (online man page)According to well informed resources on TUAW and onmac.net this works. Now if You receive the error: hdiutil: resize request is below minimum size allowed then You have not really deleted all the directories I indicated. Check back with hdiutil resize -limits ~/Desktop/AppleOSX_DVD.dmg and find the minimum size (first number, in 512b sectors) equal the current size (second number). And don't forget to empty the trash ;)
The plan
My sister's iMac G3 needed a new installation of OS X due to a harddisk failure. The Computer was currently running, but when it hit a bad spot on the drive, it became inreactive (spinning beachball of death) for about 5min. 'Easy job' I thought, 'pretty straight forward:'
The problems
But things are not always as easy as they seem at first glance...
The solution
I took me quite a second to figure out how I can transfer the system. But here is the solution:
After all, easy job. If I'd only known from the beginning!
The symptoms:
An external firewire harddrive behaves normal right after startup. But after a short time, any attempt to access the drive will result in the "rotating wheel of death" - be it the finder, diskutility or the terminal. If I wait patiently for about 20 minutes, the functionality comes back to normal, until I want to access the damaged harddrive.
Failed remedy:
DiskWarrior, which is usually quite successfull, found the disk to be "too severely damaged for repair." What now? Give up all the data on the drive? Not before having tried all available means! (And, basically, the data is still there and accessible, at least for a moment after startup).
The home-grown remedy:
CMD-S at startup)% sh /etc/rc% ls dev (the device will have a name like disk1, the partition on it will be numbered subsequently disk1s1 and so on; usually, the partition You want is disk1s3)sudo diskutil mount disk1s3 (although You are logged in as root You still have to use sudo to make it work)% df% cp or % rsync (I suggest % sudo rsync -avPE [SRC] [DEST] since it continues the data transfer where it has left it)% sudo diskutil unmount force disk1s3 if it is not responding (this may take quite a while, so you better be patient)For me, this worked. I cannot yet tell whether it is a hardware or a software problem, but at least I got my data back.
Short description of how I backup today. Far less elegant than the coming TimeMachine feature of Leopard, not as complete, and not automated. But I hope until the release of the beast it will do.
As every average geek I have an other machine than my main computer around which is up about 24/7. This computer, in my case a Mac mini, disposes of much more HD space than my laptop (via external FireWire Rack).
The basic syntax of the command I use: rsync [OPTION] SRC [USER@]HOST:DEST
How the command for my purpose looks: sudo rsync -avzPE --stats --timeout=600 --exclude-from=.excludefilelist / damian@dbirdz.dyndns.org:/Volumes/300barracuda/MacBirdPro
What the different parts mean:
sudo : makes certain system files accessible and is necessary to preserve file owner-a : archive mode (recursive; preserve symlinks, permissions, times, group, owner, devices)-v : verbose, so You see what's going on-z : compress file data, greater CPU load but less network traffic, thus mostly faster (not recommended if backup destination is on the same machine)-P : keep partially transferred files (very important, avoids redundant data transfer) and show progress during transfer-E : copy extended attributes (i.e. Mac specific resource fork)--stats : give some file transfer stats after having finished--timeout=600 : if a transfer fails, retry while 10min to finish job before giving up--exclude-from=excludefilelist : it may be clever to exclude some file from the backup. my file looks about as follows (entries preceeded by a # are ignored):#/Volumes
.vol
/dev
/Network
#/private/var/vm
/private/var/vm/sleepimage
#/Developer
/ : indicates which is the source directory, thus the whole root partitiondamian : the username on the remote machinedbirdz.dyndns.org : DNS name or IP of the remote machine/Volumes/300barracuda/MacBirdPro : path to the remote directory where the backup will be writtenIf rsync is not yet installed on Your machine, You can get it via fink or from the rsync homepage directly.
On a nightly ramble through the web I found a cool list of software essentials for advanced mac users on macworld.com.
A software gem that I'd like to share with you is GrandPerspective, and I can tell You it is really very useful. Thanks to the scan of this utility, I found out that the file /Users/damian/.psync.db eats up 8gb of my harddisk space.
E-I-G-H-T gigabites!!
I thought I was dreaming. If this ain't no (memory) leak the I'm going to distribute the presents instead of Santa Claus next Christmas!
What have we learned?
fink remove psync and sudo rm -f /usr/bin/psync)update: A friend just informed me about a very similar tool called Disk Inventory X which:
a) seems to have wider functionality than GrandPerspective (first impression)
b) is not yet universal binary (though beta available)
and c) which seemed very hungry for resources on the first try (I didn't do any extensive testing).
Although usuall installers for OS X feature a GUI installer, there is the possibility to install via the command line:
sudo installer -pkg <pathToPackage> -target <mountPoint>
in concrete this could be
sudo installer -verbose -pkg /Volumes/Mono/Mono.macos10.ppc.pkg -target /
Fortunately not interactive (at least not as far as I know) therefore very effective!
Using Firefox's shortcut bookmark access system in combination with the Autocomplete Manager plugin can be quite tricky. It took me a moment to figure out a good way of handling it.
This configures the autocomplete the way Safari handles it. But now the inline complete behaviour interferes with the shortcuts (sd, w) we are using, as it adds "http://www." in front of your shortcut. This can be avoided by: either typing very fast, which is not really realiable. Or rather beginning your shortcuts with a letter / symbol which is never first in an url – such as a hyphen.
You configure your bookmark keywords all with a hyphen in front, and it works great:
The application icon:
cp -f \
/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Resources/compass.icns \
/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/Resources/firefox.icns
Export your Bookmarks
use Safari Bookmark Exporter
Rename the application
o in the Finder/Dock shows up "Safarí": mv /Applications/Firefox.app /Applications/Safari\314\201.app
Make Firefox a nice browsing experience
Intelligent Bookmarks
Last but not least, use Firefox's clever Bookmark system for easy website access:
This enables you to type "sd" in the address bar, hit enter, and slashdot.org pops up. To access Wikipedia, you can type "w firefox", and you get the Firefox article of wikipedia "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox". To check your RSS feeds, type "f" and fizzle opens.
Update: see post firefox autocomplete for more precise information!
Ever wanted to transform a normal folder into a folder with a "Burn" button? Basically, if the folder has a burn button, it ist just folder with the (hidden) extension ".fpbf". But if you try to rename a folder in the Finder manually there will an error telling you that .fpbf ist a reserved extension and you cannot use it. Unless you get the terminal at hand: % mv my_folder new_cd.fpbf and *poof* you can burn the folder on CD's as you like.
The other day I thought about means to enhance battery life of my MacBook Pro. I'm used to the very looooong battery life of an 12" iBook, so the MBP's battery doesn't seem terrific to me. Besides the usual low brightness screen setting I disabled the second core via the Processor preference pane which is installed along with the CHUD tool from the developer tools.
Then I thought it would be great if, everytime you wake the system from sleep, a little script would check if the power adapter is plugged in and set the core's activities in function of that. It doesn't seem that there is a possibility to call a script on wakeup, but I found an alternative which can be called from your favourite app-launcher:
Use this link to create the applescript document or open the Scripteditor.app and paste the code below. Just preceed as described in the previous post: save as, enter a name, Application bundle. If you want to reactivate the core again, you have to change the applescript by uncommenting the line click menu item "2" of menu 1 of pop up button 1 and commenting the other line with two hyphens.
To change the number of active cores now, I hit [cmd][space] and type "mono" to save battery or "duo" when I need more power.
tell application "System Preferences"
activate
try
set current pane to pane "Processor"
on error
display dialog "System Preferences pane \"Processor\" is not available.
You need Apple's CHUD-tools to be installed to change the number of active cores."
end try
try
tell application "System Events"
tell application process "System Preferences"
activate
tell window "Processor"
click pop up button 1
--to activate 2 cores:
--click menu item "2" of menu 1 of pop up button 1
--to activate 1 core:
click menu item "1" of menu 1 of pop up button 1
end tell
end tell
end tell
tell application "Finder"
set visible of process "System Preferences" to false
end tell
on error
tell application "System Preferences"
activate
set current pane to pane "com.apple.preference.universalaccess"
display dialog "UI element scripting is not enabled.
Check \"Enable access for assistive devices\""
end tell
end try
end tell
The last days I noticed that the MacBook Pro has a very inefficient sleep mode. If you are on the road for 4 hours not using your MBP, batter power is already below the critial 95%, and if you leave it over night, it wakes in the morning with less than 90%. This is quite annoying because every charge cycle decreases your battery capacity.
I've been looking for a way to activate hibernate on demand and found the hint "A helper script to enter SafeSleep on demand" on macosxhints.com. If you follow the discussion you see that there are other ways to do so, but the original hint works fine with me.
Use this link to create the Applescript document or open the Scripteditor.app and paste the code below:
do shell script "/usr/bin/pmset -a hibernatemode 1" password "_password_" with administrator privileges
ignoring application responses
tell application "Finder" to sleep
do shell script "(/bin/sleep 20 && /usr/bin/pmset -a hibernatemode 3) &> /dev/null &" password "_password_" with administrator privileges
end ignoring
replace _password_ with your administrator password
in the original hint it says you should add the following lines to the Info.plist file (rightclick on the application , show package contents, open contents, open the file):
<key>LSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>
I am not very sure what this is supposed to do but you might want to change it.
The number 20 tells how many seconds the computer presumably needs to go into hibernate sleep. After that the sleep mode is set back to normal sleep. If your computer goes into hibernate mode all the time you want to activate normal sleep, 20 seconds might be too short. The MBP takes rather long to go into sleep compared to PPC macs, so if you run this script on a PPC machine (with a rather small amount of RAM) you might substitute 20 with 15 or even 12.
% sudo php script.php% sudo php script.php > output.txt/Volumes/Mac OS X Install Disc 1/System/Installation/Packages/.packages/ on the first install disc:
/Volumes/Mac OS X Install Disc 2/Packages//Volumes/Mac OS X Install Disc 2/Packages/.packages): top -u to find the PID, quit top with q and type kill . For most of the processes, this will do it perfectly. But today I had a process which was using up 100% of one of my cores and will not terminate with the above method. kill -stop, the process stopped using my CPU at 100%. -stop and then -kill directly, but I haven't yet had the opportunity to test it.sudo kill -kill is actually sufficient to end a process who won't react to a 'normal' kill.
.conf.macos nor .conf.macosx nor any other options.cvs. same symptomes, compilation aborts.dlxlinux/bochs.scpt, prompts for action, but exits ASAP with the message: [MEM0 ] ROM: System BIOS image undefined.dlxlinux folder inside the Bochs-2.1.1-folder. then launch bochs with the following magic command:mdutil.mdutil [-pEs] [-i on | off] volume ... volume ist the path to the volume, i.e. /Volumes/MacHD/-i sets the indexing status-E erases the store (database)-s shows the indexing statussudo mdutil -s /Volumes/* sudo mdutil -E -i off /Volumes/ExternalDrive/.001, which will not animate the dialogs anymore but they merely pop onto your screen.2.0. with this setting, though, it is impossible to work productively. and if you perfectly liked the rather cosy speed of os x by default, then you can reset the value to .2.defaults write tips, see the blog entry useful defaults write.dddd are:if input fileof output filebs block size (default 512)count how many blocks to copydd would bedd if=/dev/disk1 of=~/file.isodd just reads from standard input and writes to standard output.dd if=/dev/disk2 of=/dev/disk3df. now before you write to a device, unmount it, else your OS might become instable. to unmount, use the diskutility of OS X or the disktool command: disktool -u disk3. the only hard thing is to trust your computer that its working, because there is no status indication. but if the drive is of a usual size, it might soon take an hour or two.dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=446 count=1dd if=/dev/disk4 of=/dev/disk3 bs=446 count=1.defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -bool YESdefaults write com.apple.itunes invertStoreLinks -bool YESdefaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1YES with NO or 1 with 0.sudo vim /etc/httpd/httpd.conf/php[enter] . . . . . . . . search for the first occurrence of the string "php"0 . . . . . . . . jump to beginning of the linex . . . . . . . . delete character under cursor (just in case: use u to undo...)n . . . . . . . . find the next occurrences of the previous search stringnn . . . . . . . . continue search0 . . . . . . . . jump ...x . . . . . . . . delete ...:wq . . . . . . . . write and quit.sudo apachectl graceful and your password. and there is your php, up and running.64gg . . . . . . . . jump to line 64gg . . . . . . . . jump to beginning of fileG . . . . . . . . jump to end of filei . . . . . . . . change to insertion mode ("textmode")[esc] . . . . . . . . end insertion modeu . . . . . . . . undo last command[ctrl]R . . . . . . . . redo last undo. . . . . . . . . repeat last commanddd . . . . . . . . delete current lineyy . . . . . . . . copy current line (yank)p . . . . . . . . paste line after cursor (put):q! . . . . . . . . quit and discard changes/Applications/iSync.app/ whereas with 1.x they where in the /System/Library/SyncServices/. the phone identifiers are stored in /Applications/iSync.app/Contents/PlugIns/, ApplePhoneConduit.syncdevice/Contents/PlugIns/, PhoneModelsSync.phoneplugin/Contents/Resources/MetaClasses.plist/System/Library/SyncServices/, MotorolaConduit.bundle/Contents/Resources/USBDevice.plistecho '. /sw/bin/init.sh' >> ~/.bash_profileecho 'export PATH=/my/path:$PATH' >> ~/.bash_profile)fink apropos mpc shows that there is only one matching package, namely mppdec. if you launch now the usual fink install routine with fink install mppdec, you will have to install "the following 7 additional packages:sudo apt-get install mppdecmppdec command did not seem too complicated, but it took me some minutes to figure out how to make it work.mppdec --aiff /Users/damian/Desktop/myMusic/*.mpc /Users/damian/Desktop/myMusictop -l 1 | grep -i "vpn" showed that the deamon cvpnd is also quit when exiting the vpn client. thus, there is no deamon permanently active. but what about a kernel extension? this was a more promising approach. locate ".kext" | grep -i "vpn" showed me where to attack.sudo sh INSTALL.sh./Developerqt
QTDIR=/Developer/qt
PATH=$QTDIR/bin:$PATH
DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=$QTDIR/lib:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH
export QTDIR PATH DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH
ln -s $QTDIR/doc/man $QTDIR/man
cd $QTDIR
./configure
/usr/bin/make
cd /path-to-your-unzipped-texmaker-source
sudo sh ./BUILD.sh/Developer/qt /usr 2 netstat will be terminated after runnning about 24h. killall, in contrast with kill you don't give a PID as argument, but a name (or also half a name). any process matching this pattern will be killed, so handle this command with care. as an additional security measure you have to have root rights to execute killall./System/Library/StartupItems and /Library/StartupItems, which contains items to be executed at system startup. /Library, instead of /System/Library./System/Library/StartupItems/CrashReporter/CrashReporter (1), there is another file which seems to be needed:~ are automatically generated by emacs which creates a backup every time you open a file.# the line which says /usr/libexec/crashreporterd and it will not launch at startup any more.netstat i makes it select the default network interface; w 60 makes it wait 60 seconds before it prints again. sudo executes the command as root user. >> appends the output to netstat.log, where i can access it easily with console.app. & at the end frees the terminal, so i can use it again for other things. sudo. $ man nice. 
