• Mac OS X

    Backgrounds and Screen Savers

    In Mac OS X you can set your screen saver as your background image. To do so, run the following command: /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background Once you close Terminal or hit Control-C then you will set the background back to what your initial background was. Hope you enjoy!

  • Mac OS X,  Mac Security

    Mac OS X: Invoke a Command w/ ScreenSaver

    Found this nice little tool called ScriptSaver today. Basically, when the screen saver in Mac OS X is activated and/or deactivated it will run an AppleScript. The AppleScript can call a shell script or you can write an application in AppleScript and choose it from within the script. The developer has also made some sample AppleScripts available for use with ScriptSaver. For my purpose I just wanted to kill Safari, so I used an AppleScript of: tell application "Safari" quit saving no end tell However, I could have just as easily have used

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Invoke ScreenSaver in Mac OS X with a Script

    While troubleshooting some issues with a Screen Saver that just wouldn’t fire up. Even when you told the ScreenSaver to open (timed or via Expose) it wouldn’t work. Given the security implications for the given environment having a Screen Saver invoked automatically and manually are both requirements. So I found how to open it from the shell. From the /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Versions/A/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS working directory simply do: ./ScreenSaverEngine The Screen Saver opened from the shell so I figured I would try it from an AppleScript, so isolated the application id to com.apple.ScreenSaver.Engine and launched it manually: osascript -e ‘tell application id “com.apple.ScreenSaver.Engine” to launch’ This didn’t work.  Replaced the ScreenSaver.Framework (located in /System/Library/Frameworks) with…

  • Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    Initiating Mac OS X Screensaver from CLI

    The ScreenSaverEngine.app that is located in the  /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Versions/A/Resources/ directory can be used to invoke the screen saver on Mac OS X.  So to do so from the command line you would just use the following: open /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Versions/A/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app