• Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    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…

  • Home Automation,  Mac OS X

    Running SSH on 1st Revision AppleTVs

    Sometimes it can be really useful to have an SSH connection into your AppleTV. If I need to explain why then you probably won’t want to do it. Unless of course, you’re just after getting something like Boxee running, which we’ll look at as well. Before we get into doing anything to your AppleTV, when we’re done I do not know how Apple will feel about your warranty moving forward, so do this stuff at your own risk (but that’s pretty much true for many articles on this site)… So first up, let’s install SSH. To get started, plug in a jump drive you don’t mind reformatting. Then run the…

  • Mac OS X

    Send FrontRow to a 2nd Monitor

    Scenario: You’re working on one display but you want to use the second display as a media center while you’re working. Well, Front Row 2.0 can be used on a second display that is connected to your computer. Mac OS X uses a unique identifier to track each display connected to a computer. To get started you’re first going to need to figure out what the unique identifier for that second display is. In order to do so, download the displaysInfo utility. Open terminal and run the ./displaysInfo command using the directory that it was downloaded to. Look for the d2_ID field (you can also use | grep d2_ID followed…