The more I push my machines, the more I disable some of the cool stuff in macOS. So this is a minor one, but you can easily disable finder animations by dropping the DisableAllAnimations key into com.apple.finder using the defaults command, as follows: defaults write com.apple.finder DisableAllAnimations -bool true; killall Finder To reverse the change: defaults write com.apple.finder DisableAllAnimations -bool true; killall Finder
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Enable The Safari Debug Menu
I can’t believe I’ve never posted this: Safari has a Debug menu. I guess I’ve mentioned the Develop menu before. But I also like to use the debug menu on my daily driver, out of the box. I’ve been enabling this thing for what seems like forever in my deployment workflows. defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeInternalDebugMenu 1 Once enabled, you’ll see a bunch of awesome debugging tools.
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Super-Simple Bash Graphs
The sparkr gem is installed by default in macOS. To use it to produce simple graphs, simply run it followed by a series of integers: sparkr 12 110 250 110 12 The result would be as follows: This is useful for a quick and dirty visualization in scripts. For example, a series of 5, 10, 200 numbers that don’t have that much range where you’re just looking for a simple pattern. Like number of lines in logs, etc. Obviously, you can pay a lot of money for graphing frameworks and very fancy-schmancy tools. This is really just for me in small scripts. Note: sparkr isn’t installed on all Mac systems.…
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Managing nvram on a Mac
A number of settings on a Mac are stored in Non-Volatile RAM, or NVRAM. NVRAM has a number of keys that contain values that define how the hardware is configured on a device that aren’t otherwise stored in the settings of an operating system. You can list all of the variables available using the -p option, as follows: nvram -p Variables in the available key pairs are managed using the nvram command as well. Each setting, which we’ll provide a list of below, can then be edited provided you have elevated privileges to do so, without any options defined. Most values are true and false and will need to be…
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Splashtop Extension Attribute for Jamf Pro
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MacAD.UK Early Bird Tickets Now Available
Early Bird Tickets Now Available MacADUK 2019 official registration starts today with the release of 50 Early Bird Tickets. Speakers and Sponsors are now nearly full and in addition to firm favourites from former events, we’ll be introducing brand new speakers and sponsors in 2019. Full passes are £597 for the two day conference, Early Birds are priced at £420 (+VAT) and are limited to the first 50 sold. Concessions are available for charities, schools and freelancers and discounts are available for multi-buy attendees. What’s on the schedule? We’ve agreed sessions covering the following topics: Cloud & Containerisation, DEP, Automation, MDM, Security, DevOps, Swift & coding, Diversity in IT, Enterprise…
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Slides from MacSysAdmin 2018
As promised, here are my slides from MacSysAdmin 2018. If you were there, hope you enjoyed it. If not, hope it makes sense! MacSysAdmin2018
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Hey, So What’s This Mac App Got Access To?
Just some one-liners you may find useful… I’ve written about codesign a few times in the past. To see a detailed description of how an app was signed: codesign -dvvvv /Applications/Firefox.app This also gives you the bundleID for further inspection of an app. But there are a number of tools you can use to check out signing and go further into entitlements and sandboxing. You can check the asctl sandbox check --bundle com.microsoft.outlook The response would be similar to /Applications/Microsoft Outlook.app: signed with App Sandbox entitlements In the above, we see that Outlook has entitlements to do some stuffs. But where do you see an indication of what it can…
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Small Applescript to Migrate Mac Calendars
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A couple one-liners for analyzing Mac app usage
Reporting on application usage is an interesting topic on the Mac. This is done automatically with a number of device management solutions. But there are things built into the OS that can help as well. mdls "/Applications/Xcode.app" -name kMDItemLastUsedDate | awk '{print $3}' Now, if you happen to also need the time, simply add ,$4 to the end of your awk print so you can see the next position, which is the time. Additionally, a simple one-liner to grab the foreground app via AppleScript is: osascript -e 'tell application "System Events"' -e 'set frontApp to name of first application process whose frontmost is true' -e 'end tell' That’s pretty much…