January 28th, 2008 · 5 Comments
I love Quicksilver, but the latest version crashes every once in a while. It’s not so frequent as to be really annoying, but the annoying part is that to re-launch it I have to go hunting in the Applications folder, or use Spotlight, none of which is an acceptable alternative being used to Quicksilver.
It occurred [...]
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Tags: launchd · Mac · QuickSilver · Tips & tricks
The Unix getent command does not exist in OSX. Starting from 10.5 (Leopard), the administrative databases have changed from Netinfo to DirectoryService, and the main tool for looking things in DS is dscl (see also this article at afp548.com).
For example, to query a user by UID with getent, you would run:
getent passwd <uid>
With dscl, you [...]
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Tags: Linux · Mac · Tips & tricks · unix
December 19th, 2007 · 2 Comments
To use the new Wordpress 2.3 tags system with ecto, so you can set tags using the ecto side panel, the ecto configuration has to be changed from the default. The instructions are found in the ecto support forum (these instructions apply only to ecto3 - I don’t know how to do it for ecto2, [...]
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Tags: Blogging · Mac · Tips & tricks
I have been using 1Password lately to manage both online and other passwords, and I quite like it. It integrates nicely with most browsers, and its auto-save and auto-fill features are very handy. I also like its “wallet items” feature, which allow you to save other pieces of information, such as credit card numbers, email [...]
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Tags: Mac · passwords · Software · Tips & tricks
It seems surprisingly difficult to map a keystroke to lock the screen in OSX - you can map a hot-corner to it, but if you prefer to use the keyboard, there is no official way to do it.
If you use QuickSilver (and why wouldn’t you?), you can set up a trigger (see also this tutorial) [...]
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Tags: Mac · QuickSilver · Tips & tricks
One of the very annoying things in iCal (both in MacOSX 10.4 and 10.5) is that accept/decline notifications for meeting invitations are always sent to the sender of the invitation. This can be very annoying in some cases (for example, when a company-wide invitation for a talk is sent, the sender does not really care [...]
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Tags: Mac · Software · Tips & tricks
December 10th, 2007 · 6 Comments
Small annoyance: if you are using the 2.4 version of the Logitech Control Center , Growl notifications no longer appear. The solution is to remove /Library/InputManagers/LCC Scroll Enhancer Loader, log out and back in.
[From cocoaforge - A Festivus for the Rest of Us ยป View topic - Notification doesn't appear]
Update: this also has [...]
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Tags: Mac · Tips & tricks
If you run a java program in OSX that uses the AWT library, by default the system shows a generic Java dock icon for it, even if the program does not have a GUI (e.g. it’s just using the library for image manipulation). To avoid showing the spurious dock icon, you have to set the [...]
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Tags: Java · Mac · Tips & tricks
December 6th, 2007 · 1 Comment
I love Service Scrubber, which allows me to clean up the Services menu so that it’s actually useful. But I discovered that it does not interact well with the new code signing feature in Leopard, because it modifies Safari’s Info.plist file to disable services. Once this happens, the system will refuse Safari access to keychains [...]
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Tags: Mac · Safari · Software · Tips & tricks
In examining the strings inside the Dock binary in Leopard, I found a way to add real separators to the dock, instead of adding dummy applications with empty or decorative icons, as commonly done.
This works only in Leopard (OSX 10.5):
Run the following commands from the Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add ‘{ [...]
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Tags: Mac · Tips & tricks