Author Archives: Erik

OS X: Go to (certain) Pref-Panes fast

Did you know that there is a shortcut to open certain panes in System Preferences in OS X?
If you want to open the Sound-Pane in System Preferences then try this key combination:
⌥ – any of the keycaps to modify the volume on your Mac
The same goes for the Monitors-Pane:
⌥ – keycap to increase or decrease [...]

Diwali?

Today is the festival Diwali, translated “a row of lamps”. Just in case you need to know.
Get the whole story on Wikipedia or from the BBC.

Tip: Launching Dashboard via AppleScript

Just a short tip: Your Dashboard in OS X contains up to the minute information about things that are of interest to you, right? I use a script to launch iTunes and Mail in the morning while making coffee, the other thing I launch every morning is the Dashboard to get an overview of things [...]

OS X: Daylight Savings Time switch and launchd

The end of the Daylight Time is near, this year, the switch takes place on November 2nd, to be precise. Usually no biggie, but Europe switched back last weekend and I switched a couple of jobs from cron to launchd, as prescribed by Apple, during the year on servers located in Europe.
cron, the one available [...]

Why the ‘Morning Banana Diet’ could actually work

The Net is bubbling with the phrase Morning Banana Diet at the moment. Some think it’s a viral hoax, some are trying really hard to make it work. Here is my take from the lab (hence the name, you know):
First things first, though. This is my take on the subject, read gut-feeling and experience. I’m [...]

OS X Server: Reset diradmin’s Password

The admin-password does not work with the diradmin-account? First things first:

Don’t panic!
There might be a way out of this.

What happened?
The passwords for the administrative account on OS X Server, I’m talking about the one created during installation, and the diradmin-account are the same, right? Are you sure? They probably are, if you didn’t change one [...]

Just a Quick Reminder: ISPs, Check the RBLs!

A couple of minutes ago a friend told me, that one of his friends could not send mails via his SMTP-server. (Quick explanation: this friend of mine hosts a server on his premises and allowed a couple of his friends to use it for sending and receiving e-mail.) I checked the logs and lo and [...]

Joost’s Wordpress-Bundle for TextMate gets the fun back into theme-hacking

I told you about Joost’s great Wordpress-Bundle for TextMate in the post A Wordpress-Bundle for TextMate and I stand by the title of this post. It really brings back the fun in hacking Wordpress-themes.
I found one deprecated call (in two incarnations): listcats expands to list_cats, but the beauty in using the Bundle is, I just [...]

A Wordpress-Bundle for TextMate

I just found a Wordpress-Bundle for my favorite editor, TextMate. Download it from the Website of SEO-/Wordpress-wizzard extraordinaire Joost de Valk.
I’m going to test it later today.

OS X: Capturing Packets

Being kind of “Solaris-infested” at times (a.k.a. old habits die hard), I had a hard time capturing network-packets on OS X the other day. Not the capturing in itself, but remembering to use tcpdump instead of snoop. The command I was looking for was
sudo tcpdump host [ip-address]
It lists the packets as they go by, regardless [...]