• Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    Quick And Dirty Language Management In OS X

    I bet you thought this would be the article where I showed you how to make your computer curse more. Well, language can mean much more than that. In fact, Apple has dedicated a whole binary to switching your default language in OS X, in languagesetup. This command, located at /usr/sbin/languagesetup, is capable of changing the default language used by a system to a number of different languages. There are other ways to accomplish this, but none quite so easy. To get started, note that there are two ways to run languagesetup. The first is interactively, which I mostly use to figure out what I actually want to do with…

  • personal

    Friday Part Deux

    Many devices die the day their warranty expires, but my trusty Apple Airport that carries wireless signal to my drums lasted forever. OK, not forever, But let me tell you, music notes can visibly be seen traveling through the air to get to me when I’m on those drums and that Airport is beaming Spotify or Apple Music to me. And this Airport, it just kept huffing and puffing along. For 6 years, as though to say, “I must be worth more per day of use that that craptastic Linksys the neighbor spent $40 on.” It’s a pride thing, ya’ know… Until today. And let me tell you, you gotta’…

  • personal

    The Best Thanksgiving Movies For Your Thanksgiving Holiday

    A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. A true classic. Especially here in Minnesota, where it all started. Woodstock and Snoopy save the day, you learn a simple lesson about the pilgrims. And of course, Thanksgiving dinner served up on a ping-pong table. Classic. Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Steve Martin and John Candy in their prime. Traveling across the country to get home for Thanksgiving. “Those aren’t pillows” is still a classic line from a classic movie. It is a different time. 1987. And a few of the jokes might not be as PC today as they were just before Jeremy Piven made it where it was only PC to wear flannel in…

  • Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    How Big Is My Journal And Where Is It?

    Back when I worked with Xsan a lot more than I do now, one of the things we spent a lot of time doing was working with metadata and journal data on Xsan volumes. You can also view journal data for non-Xsan volumes. The hfs.util binary is used to view journal data about volumes. In this example, we’ll look at the journal size and location the boot volume of our system: /System/Library/Filesystems/hfs.fs/Contents/Resources/hfs.util -I /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD The output shows the size of the journal and the location, as follows: /Volumes/Macintosh HD : journal size 40960 k at offset 0x1a38b000

  • Articles and Books,  Bushel

    What Office Ninjas Need To Know About IT

    Another article up on a site. This one part of a series I’m doing for Office Ninjas, a nifty little site for people who wear a lot of hats in Small Business office environments. Access it here! I really enjoy supplementing the work I do on krypted with some of these types of articles. Look for more soon!

  • Mac OS X

    hostinfo

    The hostinfo command displays information about your host; namely your kernel version, the number of processors the kernel is configured for, the number of physical processors active, the number of logical processors active, the type of those processors, which ones are active, the amount of memory available, tasks, threads, and average load. Run hosting without any arguments or options: hostinfo The output would be as follows (ymmv per system): Mach kernel version: Darwin Kernel Version 15.0.0: Wed Aug 26 19:41:34 PDT 2015; root:xnu-3247.1.106~5/RELEASE_X86_64 Kernel configured for up to 4 processors. 2 processors are physically available. 4 processors are logically available. Processor type: x86_64h (Intel x86-64h Haswell) Processors active: 0 1…

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

    Repair Permissions Using The Command Line In El Capitan

    Repair permissions was unceremoniously removed from OS X in El Capitan. This staple of the Mac gurus toolkit disappeared. There was no 21 gun salute, there was no flaming casket sent out to sea and there was no sweet, sweet wake to get drunk at. Instead, there was pain. There was pain, because when the button disappeared, the need did not. Need proof? If you haven’t yet run it, let’s check your system to verify the permissions of the standard packages: sudo /usr/libexec/repair_packages --verify --standard-pkgs --volume / In the above command, we used the repair_packages binary, which has not changed in awhile. We then feed that the –verify option and the…