Mac Geekery

CUPS is the name of the service that handles printing in Mac OS X 10.3 to 10.5. It has a lot of features that aren’t really pushed in the GUI in Mac OS X, but users are able to get at those features by using the special administrative interface at http://localhost:631/.

One of those features is classes. A class, in this context, is a group of printers that can be made to look as if it were one printer. This is great in lab settings where you have half a dozen printers of the same type as you can add them all to a class on a print server and have everyone print to that queue. Then whichever printer is free (or round-robin) will print the job. There's more »

I needed to change many iBooks from having a Preferred Network (and wanting to keep looking for that network) to automatically joining any open network and not giving a preference to that certain network.

I found that the two preference files involved were:

• /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist
• /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist

I also found that the computer name is kept in preferences.plist, so copying these two files out to all the iBooks would have resulted in a same-name-game fiasco. Soooo, my solution was to:

1. Copy /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist out to all the iBooks using Apple Remote Desktop.
2. Issue the following UNIX command as root also using Apple Remote Desktop: sed -i.backup -e ‘s/Ranked/Automatic/’ /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist

This command will search through the preferences.plist file for the word Ranked and replace it with the word Automatic.

If you move the Leopard dock to the side of the screen you get a dock with a gray background rather than the glassy surface. If you want that dock on the bottom of the screen as well, simply run the following:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock

This sets a hidden default on the Dock and then forces it to restart.

There are a plethora of hacks to change the translucent menu bar in 10.5. While I doubt the sanity of the UI designers at Apple with this release of the operating system, it is relatively easy to change this behavior without installing third party hacks. There's more »

I went to the GUI feedback session at WWDC last year and in the midst of all the yelling and screaming over the new dock and menu bar there was one guy with a wholly different mission: be able to turn off tooltips. His complaint (a valid one, I feel) is that every time he wants to sit and think about what’s on-screen, a little yellow box comes up where the mouse is, and there’s no real “safe spot” for the mouse that doesn’t do this in most applications.

So, I present a little tip I discovered shortly afterwards and appear to have not written up. I dedicate this to Tooltip Guy, wherever he is.

defaults write -g NSInitialToolTipDelay 99999

You now have 99.999 seconds to think at a given time. Replace -g with the ID of any application to change it in that application.

I was at WWDC this last year and went to a lot of sessions that were interesting, but didn’t really grab me and tell me that I absolutely had to learn the technology and use it. It was all interesting, of course, but … eh.

Then I went to a session on using Xray (now Instruments) and DTrace to debug things. Yes, things. It’s not just for developers and their programs, but also for sysadmins and their systems. After I saw what it could do, well, let’s just say I had a domain name registered and a site up before the next session (I love Drupal). That site is DTrace Scripts. There's more »

NetInfo is dead. It’s gone. It’s a part of the past. It’s like that ghost of a bad dream you have in the morning where you can’t quite remember why you’re shaken, but you just remember that you were and that it was horrible.

Leopard ate NetInfo.

In its place is a new native Directory Services store based on folders and XML property list files. Yep, a replacement for flat files that uses … flat files. Kind of. There's more »

So I’m paranoid, but not THAT paranoid.

Sometimes I feel like using “Secure Empty Trash”, but that uses ’/usr/bin/srm’ with the ’-m’ option (7 passes), which can take a while to complete. Most of the time, I only care about what might turn up with simple file recovery tools in case my drive gets stolen (as opposed to covering my tracks from say law enforcement or a foreign government) so really, a single pass should be plenty for my needs. I could always use ’srm’ directly, but the convenience the built-in tool offers in handling the Trashes on various volumes, and having a built-in menu item is nice.

It turns out the ’srm’ option used by “Secure Empty Trash” in Tiger is specified in the file: There's more »

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DesktopServicesPriv.framework/Resources/Locum

Welcome to yet another series of short answers. I’d write something larger but there are two factors preventing that:

1. The lack of time to actually write it, these days.
2. The lack of geeky questions in the queue to fuel my desire to slack off on real work and write something fun.

It’s not you, it’s both of us. It’s just not working out. However, I think with a little effort we can get this going again.

So, with that in mind, let us go forth in my effort to reduce the size of the queue in my search for something to write a long and heavy article about… There's more »