• Mac OS X

    Every Mac Comes With Tetris, Pong, Snake, and A Weird Version Of Solitaire

    August 20, 2015

    Emacs (not eMacs) is an open source project, bundled with every version of OS X. And it can’t be altered. I wrote about the Cookies recipe that Richard Stallman bundled with Emacs long ago. He also has some somewhat sexist dating tips and a bunch of other weird rantings that he bundled in there. But perhaps the best contribution is the games that Emacs comes with. These include doctor, dunnet (which would have been a great MMPORG), pong, snake, solitaire, tetris and the ever-so-popular gomoku. These games are located in the /usr/share/emacs/22.1/lisp/play directory. But you don’t access the games directly. Instead, you use the emacs command. To get started, fire…

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  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    My Own List of Common Apple Ports

    August 17, 2015

    I’ve been underwhelmed (if that’s a word) by the list of common ports used on the Apple platform recently, so I started my own. It’s available at https://krypted.com//guides/common-apple-ports/ if you’re interested. It’s also under the Tools menu of the site. And yes, I’m aware that I can cat /etc/services; this includes some rudimentary notes.

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

    Challenges Sending Code Through Messages

    August 16, 2015

    Recently, I had a bit of a problem with some code I was sending back and forth through Messages. This was caused by smart quotes, which replace single and double quotation marks with directional quotation marks. This can cause a lot of problems. To disable smart quotes: defaults write com.apple.messageshelper.MessageController SOInputLineSettings -dict-add "automaticQuoteSubstitutionEnabled" -bool false

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  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    Bash History Fun

    August 14, 2015

    We tend to use a lot of commands in the Terminal app. That is, after all, what it’s there fore. And there’s a nice history of what we do. There are also a number of ways to view and manage the bash history. The simplest of which is the history command, which will show the previous commands run. Here, we’ll simply run it: history Keep in mind that this shows the history based on context, so if you sudo bash, you’ll potentially see a different history. You can also use the bash built-in fc command, which has the additional awesomeness of being able to edit and re-run commands from the…

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

    Scripting Volume Control in OS X

    August 6, 2015

    I’ve always found the easiest way to script the volume of an OS X computer (and when I say volume I mean sound level, not a logical volume created from partitioning a hard drive – but I have articles for scripting those as well) is using the osascript command to invoke an Applescript command that sets the volume to zero. To put some syntax around this: osascript -e "set volume 0"

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  • Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    Disable the What’s New/First Run Prompts in Office 2016

    August 4, 2015

    Office 2016 shuffled a few minor things around, as it usually does. And while preparing our users to enjoy their Office 2016 experience, admins would like to suppress those dialogs. To do so, we’ll need to write the kSubUIAppCompletedFirstRunSetup1507 key as boolean and true into each of the /Library/Preferences files for Office in OS X (e.g. com.microsoft.Word.plist). Here’s a quick scriptable that will take care of that for ya’: defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Word kSubUIAppCompletedFirstRunSetup1507 -bool true defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Outlook kSubUIAppCompletedFirstRunSetup1507 -bool true defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.PowerPoint kSubUIAppCompletedFirstRunSetup1507 -bool true defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Excel kSubUIAppCompletedFirstRunSetup1507 -bool true defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Word kSubUIAppCompletedFirstRunSetup1507 -bool true Update on October 29, 2015: A user may have already received…

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