Hold down the Option key when you click on the AirPort icon in the menu bar: You can then see the SSID, channel, security, RSSI, transmit rate, etc. The airport command is now located at /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport so this would be similar to: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport -I
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Twas the Week Before Mountain Lion
Twas the week (or so) before Mountain Lion, when all through the warehouse Not an admin was moving, not even their mouse. The images were posted to the servers with care, In hopes that Mountain Lion soon would be there. The users were nestled all snug with their pr0n of coeds, While visions of Notification Center danced in their heads. And developers with their fevorish commits and I with my quill, Had just settled our brains with a Dr. Pepper refill. When from Messages + Twitter there arose such a clatter, I sprang to my MacBook Air to see what was the matter. Away to the lab I flew like…
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A Better Way To Paste Addresses from Mail
One of my little irritations about OS X just got easier. When I’m using Mail and I copy and email address and paste it somewhere, it has the name of the contact bracing the email address wrapped with a . This is a royal pain. I am pretty sure that every single flippin’ time I’ve removed the cruft around the email address. While digging around in com.apple.mail I noticed a key for AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard that was set to True. Holy crap. Change to False and this minor irritation is gone. Viola, OS X is now even better: defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard -bool FALSE To set it back: defaults write com.apple.mail AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard…
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Man Pages
For those learning OS X or other Unixy based systems, and for those who have been using them for decades, man is one of the most important commands in our arsenal. The man command is short for manual and shows us how to use each command that has a man page, or a page that acts as an instruction manual for the command (or method). Another command, apropos, searches the whatis database for objects that match a string, or entry. For example, if you’d like to see a listing of all man pages that reference the word case, use the following command: apropos case Or use whatis in the place…
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Core Dumps in Mac OS X
Every now and then, OS X has to drop some kids off at the pool. Usually it’s some developer that didn’t build a sanity check for every-single-possible-flippin’-thing-you-might-think-to-do-to-his/her-poor-flippin’-app-OMGYFI! And then, suddenly, out of nowhere, you get crap all over the system. Actually, as expected, Apple’s dumps are pretty well sequestered in the /cores directory. Each core file has a number appended behind it. For example, core.9901. When applications crash, they can save a lot of information about the state when they crashed into these files. For example, I have seen cached passwords in there… To disable core dumps, add the following line to /etc/sysctl.conf: kern.coredump=0 After a restart core dumps will…
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Not My Face
Dear iPhoto/Faces, No, this is not me. But thanks for trying. Charles
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What Changed On My Mac?
According to Wikipedia, fsevents is an API from Apple that allows applications to register for notifications of changes to a given directory tree. This means that when something changes, an application (or daemon/agent) can see the change and take action or track what happened. For Linux, there’s a similar tool in iNotify. This time of the year, a lot of imaging and packaging is going on at schools and companies around the world. A lot of people are also moving various settings out of images and into either post-flight packages, automations or managed preferences of some sort. In OS X, it’s easy to make a change on a computer and…
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Migrating the Wiki Service in Mac OS X Server
Lion brings with it a few challenges for administrators. One such is migrating the wiki service into the new format. When doing an upgrade in place, the Wiki service is pretty straight forward to upgrade, but in many cases, due to aging hardware, wiki services are moving from an older computer to a newer computer. This can be done in one of two ways. The first is to “migrate” the data by copying the Collaboration folder onto the new system. The second is to “export” and “import” the data. I usually recommend doing a migrate where possible, so we’ll start with that method. Note: Before getting started, make sure that…
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Cryptix: Encryption Made Easy
Cryptix is a nice little app available on the App Store that allows you to encrypt and decrypt files using a variety of algorithms. However, while an easy to use encryption tool, it’s actually an even better learning tool for figuring out how various types of encryption techniques actually work. When you first open Cryptix, you’ll see a list of supported algorithms for encrypting files and passphrases. That part is simple enough, but click on the Tools icon in the toolbar. Here, you’ll see a number of features along the sidebar, including Checksum, which performs a quick checksum of files dragged on top of the green arrow and tracks hashes,…
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2,000 Posts And Going Strong
In December of 2004, in response to a request from my publisher at the time, I started this site in its current form. I kept the domain from my personal tinkeration site, which was a glorified file service, some static html pages for me to remember things (I can be a bit forgetful at times) and some .htaccess files to keep parts of the site private. I’d been using the domain for awhile, but started tinkering around with a few blogging engines and eventually settled on the one I’m using now. The total number of posts now sits a little over 2020, with a few being drafts on upcoming products…