I like to use my laptop on the beach. Not that I get out much these days, but one of the things I often do is to flip my machine into inverted, or high contrast, mode. Recently I’ve been looking for ways to not switch the whole machine over. This can be as simple as throwing the background for Word to blue, which makes me feel all kinda’ AmiPro-like, or most recently, I’m using High Contrast Mode with iTunes. High Contrast Mode switches the background for the sidebar and the library to black. This isn’t for everyone, but I like it at times (just make sure to kill the Ping…
-
-
Defaults & symbolichotkeys in Mac OS X
Front Row is awesome. Hot keys are awesome. Typos are not. While zipping along, typing my fool heart out, I tend to fat finger about enough to drop my words per minute in half at times. Occasionally, my typos will land me in an annoying spot, with some application opening: often that application is Front Row. Which led me to unmapping the hot key. But then of course, since I reimage my machines a lot, I wanted to put that into my image… Hot keys are stored in com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist, in a users ~/Library/Preferences. You could setup a system with the exact key mappings that you wish to have, use managed…
-
Optical Sharing
I recently needed to temporarily enable optical disk sharing on a couple of machines at a number of different sites (don’t ask why, long story). There were enough to where I wanted to do it sending a script. But where is this stuff stored? Snapshot says: in com.apple.NetworkBrowser.plist. Which keys? diff says: EnableODiskBrowsing and ODSSupported, both boolean. Resulting command to enable sharing out my DVD drive: defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool true defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool true Not the kind of thing I wanted to leave running, so to then disable it again: defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool NO defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool NO
-
DeployStudio From the Command Line
Recently I did a little article on importing computers into DeployStudio lists. I got an overwhelming number of email requests to go a step further and look at importing computers into DeployStudio from the command line. I’m guessing lots of people want to bolt some middleware onto their mass deployment tools (can’t say I blame ’em). The first thing to know is that DeployStudio stores most everything in standard property lists. This includes workflows, computer groups and computers. When you install DeployStudio you selected a location to place your database. For the purpose of this example, we’re going to use /DSDatabase as our location. Within this directory is a folder…
-
iTunes and Mass Activation
In order to use an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, you need to activate the devices. If you are setting up a large number of mobile devices, this can be a tedious process. When you start talking about thousands of them, it can be down-right overwhelming. However, you can reduce the number of clicks, taps and touches by telling iTunes not to synchronize devices with the iTunes Library following activation. This is done using what is called iTunes Activation Mode. Activation-mode will instruct iTunes to eject a device once it’s been activated rather than trying to synchronize music, photos and other media that may be on your system. By setting…
-
Making Every User an Admin
If you deploy a large number of computers to users who are somewhat likely to play practical jokes on each other then you will run into some interesting issues. If you are deploying one computer to every user and you want each user to be an administrator of their computer then you might be tempted to allow all users to be administrators of all computers. If you do then prepare for an infinite number of sometimes amusing practical jokes. But really, being proactive about this brings up an interesting point: how do you deploy a computer and make only the user who you want to be an administrator an administrator.…
-
Perl Control
There are a lot of versions of the popular perl scripting language out there, and depending on what version you may have written a script with you might find that using a different version than the one that comes with an OS by default can have a drastic impact on a script. In Mac OS X you can change the default version of perl that the perl and a2p command will use. Before doing so you should check the version of perl being used by default, which can be done using the perl command, followed by the -v option: perl -v By default, the OS currently uses version 5.10.0. To…
-
Debug Logging iCal
One of the tools in the iCal -> iCal Server troubleshooting toolbelt is to debug log HTTP connections. You can capture packets for port 8008 using tcpdump. In the following command, we’ll capture the packets over interface en0 for tcp port 8008 to a file called iCal.pcap: tcpdump -w iCal.pcap -i en0 tcp port 8008 We’ll then attempt to create a calendar entry in iCal or simply log into the server through iCal. CalDAV traffic will occur and then you can stop the tcpdump. In order to then read the tcpdump: tcpdump -nnr iCal.pcap Another option that can help to correlate traffic you see in the pcap from tcpdump is…
-
Defaults Research
When you are researching various property list settings for applications then you are likely to come across settings that start with kCFPreferences fairly often. When you do then you know that these are preferences for components of an application that are not necessarily unique keys to specific domains. These are constants that have been declared in the CFPreferences.h and apply as indicated here: kCFPreferencesAnyApplication: All Applications kCFPreferencesAnyHost: All Hosts kCFPreferencesAnyUser: All Users kCFPreferencesCurrentApplication: Only the current/defined application kCFPreferencesCurrentHost: Only the current/defined computer kCFPreferencesCurrentUser: Only the current/defined account
-
Dock Highlighting
You click on an icon in the dock that brings up a grid of the items in the list and then you click on one of the items in that list. But I like the way the rest of the dock operates, where I know what I’m moused over (is moused the verb of mousy?). And I sometimes click on the wrong one, which is why it’s nice to highlight one. To do so, run this command: defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilite-stack -boolean yes And then: killall Dock To go back to the way things were before: defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilite-stack -boolean no And then: killall Dock