• Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    Mac OS X: Alex.SpeechVoice

    July 5, 2007

    Have you noticed how big Mac OS X has gotten?  Wonder why?  Well, for the most part Apple does a good job with compression and file management.  But things like iDVD, Garage Band, etc are taking their toll.  Then there are printer drivers and fonts.  And then there is this gem: Alex.SpeechVoice.  In the /System/Library/Speech/Voices/Alex.SpeechVoice/Contents/Resources is a file called PCMWave.  This file is 692MB.  If you don’t plan on using the Alex voice then trash it to reduce the size of your image considerably.

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  • Mac OS X

    Mac OS X: Disk Inventory X

    July 1, 2007

    For those that would like to see a graphical inventory of the files on your system there is Disk Inventory X.  Cool little app, although you could do something similar using the command line.  But this is a nice little GUI app that shows disk usage statistics in a tree map.   http://www.derlien.com/

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

    Mac OS X: Showing Invisible Files

    June 20, 2007

    I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal Have you ever been looking for some files an you just can’t find them. Well, maybe they’re hidden. If you need to see hidden files, use the following command:defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -boolean true killall Finder The problem with seeing hidden files is that you see a lot of stuff that you really probably don’t want to see. So to get back to a state where you don’t have to see all of the invisible files, use the following command: defaults delete com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles killall Finder

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  • Mac OS X

    Mac OS X: Unzip Items From the Command Line

    June 10, 2007

    Unzip items from the command line.  For example, if you wanted to unzip a file called myfile.zip you can use the following command: unzip myfile.zip Or if you wanted to unzip all the zipped files in a directory you could cd to said directory and run this command: unzip *.zip

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  • Mac OS X

    Mac OS X: Monitor Bandwidth with SurplusMeter

    June 8, 2007

    You can monitor bandwidth utilization with SurplusMeter, a free download from skoobysoft (source code also available).  This can be helpful if you are monitoring traffic on a computer behind some form of metered ISP connection. http://freespace.virgin.net/jeremy.dronfield/skoobysoft/utilities/utilities.html

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  • Mac OS X

    Mac OS X: Bootpicker

    June 1, 2007

    Bootpicker is software that allows users to choose which OS installation to boot at startup.  Although it was developed by Mike Bombich, BootPicker is now available at http://www.apple.com/education/it/bootpicker/ .

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

    Mac OS X: Loading and Unloading with launchd

    May 29, 2007

    In Mac OS X you can use cron to schedule tasks but you can also use launchd.  To use launchd to load or unload an agent where you’ve setup a task use the launchctl command.  Here we will use launchctl to manually start a process given that we defined a plist called /Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.OpenProgram.plist (where program is maybe the name of some program you want to fire up): launchctl load Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.OpenProgram.plist Your application should fire up now.  Do not quit it for ten seconds. Wait about 15, then quit it. Notice it start up again. This is because it is a launchAgent and will restart any time it is closed.  Now…

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