If you have a screen saver and it needs diskarbitrationd to function and you stop diskarbitrationd then the System Preference Pane for Desktop & Screen Saver will simply die when you click on it. Lovely.
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Deploy Final Cut Pro Fast
One of the challenges that we face when building a large Xsan for video environments where we also need to deploy Final Cut is to install Final Cut Pro or Final Cut Studio on all the clients. It can mean a lot of switching out of optical media and kill productivity if you aren’t careful. This is why we started looking to the Xsan to provide some of the speed to the installation process that it will later provide to the clients. First off, extract the installers or create an image of the disk(s). If you extract the disk then you will need to mount it and then start the…
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Shoutbox
Let’s see how this turns out. I added a shoutbox along the sidebar of the site. Hope it doesn’t get abused like most things do. We shall see… Anyway, let me know what you think…
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318 Open Sources mergeSafBookmarks
Originally Posted to the 318 TechJournal: 318 has open sourced our mergeSafBookmarks python script. This tool can read in a pair of property lists and merge them into a single resultant bookmarks file for Safari. This takes a lot of the work out of pushing bookmarks to existing users as part of your deployment. You can find it here: http://mergebookmarks.sourceforge.net Note: The script also looks at existing bookmarks and doesn’t merge in duplicates.
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Finder: I Just Can't Quit You
defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem -bool YESYou You can get a Quit menu for the Finder by editing the com.apple.finder.plist, which we can do here using the defaults command: defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem -bool YES Now you can run a command to kill the Finder: killall Finder Then when it comes back to life you should see the new menu item.
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Changing Screen Scaling
You can get a bit more real estate out of smaller screens in Mac OS X. The AppleDisplayScaleFactor can be used to scale down new windows that are opened. For example, they would be 70% of their original size using the following command: defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor 0.7 You can tinker around with different scales and if you find one you like then you can set it permanently by adding it to the NSGlobalDomain: defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor 0.7 The default screen scale factor is 1.0 (.7 just makes things smaller), so in order to get the screen scaling back to normal just run the command substituting a 1.0 for…
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Lots of new stuff: Command Line Wiki Integration
The Mac Commands page and the PowerShell Commands page are both now wikis and users with accounts on this site can edit them. Additionally I added a number of new pages worth of commands, FTP Commands, Windows Commands, Final Cut Server Commands, Amazon S3 Commands, Podcast Producer Commands and Xsan Commands; both of which are wikis as well.
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ASR Setup Tool Open Sourced
Originally Posted to the 318 TechJournal 318 has decided to open source our ASR Setup Tool, which can now be found at http://asrsetup.sourceforge.net. The ASR Setup Tool is built as a wrapper for the asr command line suite from Apple. The description from SourceForge: Developed by 318 Inc., ASR Setup Tool is an application for setting up Apple Software Restore (“ASR”). In the context of the ASR Setup Tool, ASR is used for setting up a multicast stream that can then be leveraged for imaging Mac OS X computers. We hope you enjoy!
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Sending Command Keys Through ARD
You can send Command keys (aka – Open Apple and Closed Apple) through Apple Remote Desktop (ARD), or not send the Command keys through ARD. Your call: defaults write com.apple.RemoteDesktop DoNotSendSystemKeys 1 P.S. – Of course these are short, I’m on the road. Sorry for brevity but typing posts on the iPhone is not all it’s cracked up to be…
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Programmatically Changing the Mac OS X Browser
I am starting to get a lot questions on how to change the default browser for Mac OS X. I don’t know if it’s in preparation for summer imaging or if it’s because people clicked the button to reset their default browser to Chrome and then realized that, while fast, it just isn’t Safari. Either way, the default browser is stored in the com.apple.LaunchServices.plist, inside the LSHandlers array. Now, changing this with a defaults command would involve copying all the information into said command and then dumping it back in after changing all entries of com.apple.safari to the information for the browser you actually want to use. If you do…