Learn some stuff! For Free! There are so many resources available for learning these days that it’s hard to keep track of it all, or to find the things that are actually worth doing. So I decided to make a list of some of my favorites: Code Academy: Using Code Academy, you can learn a little JavaScript, HTML/CSS, jQuery, Ruby, Python and PHP. There are also projects for the web and integrating with APIs so you can hook into YouTube and Twitter. Duolingo.com: Learn a real language, like Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese or French at this site, which has digestible chunks of lessons that you can use to get ready…
-
-
MacIT Presentation
I enjoy going to MacIT so much. Paul Kent ran a great little conference in Monterrey one year and I am so glad that I started going to Macworld around that time. I missed it last year while trying to trim back on the travel and am pretty stoked I got to get there again this year. Special thanks to everyone I saw and was able to hang out with. Considering there isn’t a single person I didn’t want to hang out with, sorry if I didn’t see you or get to spend any time. Thanks to Duncan and Kevin White for making time to do the podcasts (hopefully the…
-
Scripting Azure On A Mac
Microsoft Azure is Microsoft’s cloud services. Azure can host virtual machines and act as a location to store files. However, Azure can do much more as well, providing an Active Directory instance, provide SQL database access, work with hosted Visual Studio, host web sites or provide BizTalk services. All of these can be managed at https://manage.windowsazure.com. You can also manage Windows Azure from the command line on Linux, Windows or Mac. To download command line tools, visit http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/downloads/#cmd-line-tools. Once downloaded, run the package installer. When the package is finished installing, visit /usr/local/bin where you’ll find the azure binary. Once installed, you’ll need to configure your account from the windowsazure.com site to…
-
Control the Weather Using Curl
Wait, did I say control, I meant query… Sorry to disappoint! I am a home automation nerd. Recently I’ve noticed that as it gets closer to warmer or cooler extremes that it takes longer for my hvac system to bring my house to the temperature I want. I’ve also noticed that NEST claims to automatically learn these factors. Not to be outdone by the Griswolds, I decided to look at building this into my system. I had been experimenting with using the weather.com site to pull this data but then someone pointed out that NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) actually publishes this information on their site. I was…
-
Units
Go figure, there’s a command that can convert some units to other units. The units command is able to take a number of one type of units and then convert them to another. For example, to convert a mile to feet: units "1 mile" feet Or to convert 2 hours to seconds: units "2 hours" seconds For a full listing of the formats supported, check out /usr/share/misc/units.lib.
-
Debugging Twitter
I was recently working on a new project developing against Twitter using their JSON interface. Turns out that the Twitter app has an awesome little feature to assist with such a task, a Console. To see the menu for the Console, enable the Develop menu, by putting a true boolean ShowDevelopMenu key into the com.twitter.twitter-mac.plist: defaults write com.twitter.twitter-mac ShowDevelopMenu -bool true Once enabled, use the Develop menu to open Console. Here, you can select various buttons and see the GET, POST, PUT or DELETE sent. as well as the entities sent. To disable the Develop menu: defaults write com.twitter.twitter-mac ShowDevelopMenu -bool false
-
Powershell Goodies From Vexasoft
There are a number of features that make mass deployment of Mac OS X pretty easy. Some of these would be great to have in Windows. These range from systemconfiguration to networksetup and the ability to look at packages that have been installed and review their bills of material. Well, the good people at Vexasoft have built a number of Powershell libraries that, while they aren’t named as such, do a number of the features that these commands do, just for Windows clients via Powershell. And the best part is, a number of them are free. Let’s look at what some of these commands do: First, there are the cmdlets…
-
Automatically assign admin rights in OS X based on Active Directory group membership
Thanks to Tedd Kidd for the following article, on automatically managing administrative privileges based on Active Directory groups! This is a quick and easy way to assign any user to the local admin group in OS X based on their group membership in your Active Directory. This should also work with Open Directory or eDirectory groups if your workstations are bound to those directory services. You’ll need to include this code in the workstation login script so that it runs as root but uses the $@ variable to determine the user that is logging in. #!/bin/bash # Set group name to check against groupname=”domain admins” if [ “`/usr/bin/dsmemberutil checkmembership -U…
-
Talking A Look Under Apple Configurator's Hood
Apple Configurator has now been in my grubby hands long enough for me to start looking at it a little deeper than I did in the introductory article I did awhile back. Architecturally, Apple Configurator keeps its data in ~/Library/Application Support/com.apple.configurator. Here, you’ll find a directory called IPSWs, another called Resources, file called AppleConfigurator.storedata and another called Users.storedata. The IPSWs directory is where operating system versions, per model of iOS are stored. These look something like iPad2,1_5.1_9B176_Restore.ipsw, which is iOS 5.1 for a standard iPad 2. iPad 1, the retina display iPad, as well as each iPod Touch and iPhone 4 each have their own entry as well. The IPSWs…
-
Scripting in Google ChromeOS
I recently got my hands on one of those Google ChromeBooks (Cr-48). Interesting to have an operating system that is just a web browser. But, as anyone likely reading this article already knows, the graphical interface is the web browser and the operating system is still Linux. But what version? Well, let’s go on a journey together. First, you need ChromeOS. If you’ve got a ChromeBook this is a pretty easy thing to get. If not, check http://getchrome.eu/download.php for a USB or optical download that can be run live (or even in a virtual machine). Or, if you know that you’re going to be using a virtual machine, consider a pre-built…