• Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    Man Pages Made Easy

    Ever since upgrading to Lion I’ve been making a few slight changes in workflow. One such change, which I’m still on the fence about, is to switch from reading man pages in a tiled Terminal screen, to reading them in a browser window. It seems like a small thing, but I spend a lot of time switching between terminal screens or using screen to switch between sessions. Bwana allows you to read a man page from within a browser. Simply load download the Bwana app into your /Applications directory and wait a few seconds. Then open a browser window and look for a man page. For example: man:dsconfigad Now, you…

  • personal

    Minneapolis Isn't Weird Enough This Summer

    Double Danger Comics is gone. Booksmart, which I thought was the best book store in town (was in Uptown) is gone. Uncle Hugo’s moved awhile back, but they just don’t seem weird enough, with over half the store dedicated to mysteries. I find the folks at Big Brain Comics too cool for my liking. My daughter and I do like going to the Source, but we’re having a hard time finding more variety (and 3 year olds need plenty of variety!)… If anyone has any techno-weird-nerdy-geekspaz stuff then throw me a link or 20. You know, something like a retail Jinx.com (well, Jinx from 5 years ago, notsomuch this year)…

  • Mac OS X

    Lion's Versions Feature

    In Mac OS X Lion, applications can make use of a feature to auto-save and version files. This feature locks files that are inactive for editing and when the file is unlocked then starts automatically saving versions. If you have a problem with the file you can then always step back to a previous version of the file. The feature is manifested in the title bar and the file menu of applications that make use of it. When you open a file, it can be locked. Viewing the file in the Finder also shows that it is locked. Clicking on locked provides the option to unlock. Once unlocked you can…

  • Mac OS X

    Paths in Title Bars

    When I install a new system that I am personally going to be using, one of the few tweaks I make is to configure the Finder to show me paths in the title bar. This just keeps me from the occasional Command-click on the folder name and keeps me abreast of where I am. Mostly it’s helpful in list or icon view as. To enable full paths use defaults to write an _FXShowPosixPathInTitle key into com.apple.finder.plist. The key should be boolean and we’re setting it to true. After about 30 seconds new windows should show with the path in the title bar: defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES I actually…

  • iPhone,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Lion Server: Using Profile Manager's Debug Mode

    I’ve seen a lot of traffic about people troubleshooting problems with Mac OS X Server’s new Profile Manager service. One of the more useful things in troubleshooting anything (including Profile Manager in Lion) is the debug mode. It’s easy to turn on, just run the following command from any Lion Server with Profile Manager installed: sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.ProfileManager debugMode 3 You will then get more information in the logs and be well armed to troubleshoot issues that arise in Mac OS X Server 10.7’s Profile Manager.

  • Final Cut Server,  Mac OS X Server,  Xsan

    Scripting Video Changes in Lion: avconvert, pcastaction & podcast

    The avconvert command is a new addition in OS X Lion that allows administrators to quickly and easily convert video from one format to another using presets for video conversion. The presets are mostly common Apple formats tuned to specific devices. In its simplest form, avconvert uses a preset, a source and then an output to convert the source to the output using the preset to define the format to use for conversion. A useful preset is the 640×480 one. To convert this using this idea: /usr/bin/avconvert --preset Preset640x480 --source /Convert/test.mov --output Converted/test.mov While some of the presets are pretty self explanatory, I haven’t gone through them all to see…

  • Mac OS X

    Automating Image File Changes

    Ever need to automate changes to image files? Maybe a LaunchAgent that would watch a specific folder and resize png files that were dropped in there, or a little script that sanitized images as they came in to be a specific size (e.g. Poster Frames)? Well, sips is a little tool built into OS X that can help immensely with this. It will even convert that png to a jpeg or pict to png. Let’s look at using sips. First up, let’s just get the width and height of an image file: sips --getProperty pixelHeight /Shared/tmpimages/1.png sips --getProperty pixelWidth /Shared/tmpimages/1.png Or for dpi: sips --getProperty dpiHeight /Shared/tmpimages/1.png sips --getProperty dpiWidth…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    Web Site Redirection with html (Lion too)

    One of the first things many Apache administrators end up with in their bag of tricks is a piece of code for redirecting a website to another place. 301 redirects are usually better, but a basic redirection page is also very helpful in a number of situations. The following example code can be saved as an index.html page and will redirect traffic from one site to another. A common use of this is to redirect an http site to an https site. In this example, we’ll place this index page in the web directory for https://krypted.com/ on an OS X Lion server. The server runs a site for https://krypted.com/ already…

  • Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    Full Screen Terminal in Lion

    Command-Option-F will send terminal into full screen in OS X Lion (or most any other app for that matter). You can also use the double-arrow button in the top right corner of an application’s title bar to make it full screen. Command-Option-F (or switching to another app or Window that isn’t full screen) will end your full screen session. For any app, you can have one window that is full screen and others that aren’t full screen. Mission Control then shows all the full screen apps at the top of the screen and those that aren’t full screen towards the bottom. I thought I really needed multiple Terminal windows, but…

  • Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    Making and Using an Installer Disk for Lion

    When I got my MacBook Air, I thought that little USB disk was the coolest. I took it immediately to another computer, popped it in and booted. As many of you probably know, it didn’t work. I think the idea of diskless restores will take me a little while to get used to. I also think I like to have a DVD for every OS I use. Many of my customers also have policies that they have to. Now I know you can boot holding down Command-R and go into recovery mode (boot to that awesome, hidden restore partition). And I know that you’re basically running a bless command on…