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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Since it bit me a couple of days ago: The AppleScripts to be used as Folder Actions must be stored in ~/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts or /Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts. The former is the location for Scripts available to the user of the account, the latter for all users of a machine. Don’t get fooled by the [...]
Just a quick tip: Repairing the permissions on an OS X disk can be done from the command-line as well. The only caveat, you have to know the device of the volume. Getting the right device is easy: diskutil list The device-node in question is in the column titled IDENTIFIER. The device-path to use is [...]
If you need to get the dimensions of an image-file via the command-line, let’s say in a script or an AppleScript, then there is a way to do so easily. Enter the scriptable image processing system or short sips. You didn’t know you got that installed on your OS X system alreay? Me neither. Assume, [...]
Just a quick hint for all the commandline-jockeys: The standard-encoding for new MySQL-Databases on OS X Server 10.5.X is not UTF-8 but latin1. Do not forget to specify the encoding when creating a new database, seriously. I suspect, that this depends on the language the system is installed in. The system that tricked me was [...]
OK, here it is. The TextMate DocBook-bundle (click the link to download) I’m using for production. The emphasis is on I’m using. The bundle contains the entities I need for my daily work. Means, it does not contain all entities which can be used writing books and articles in DocBook. There are no templates, since [...]