mac geekery

As others have noted, there’s nothing all that new about Time Machine other than its UI. UNIX admins have been doing similar incremental backups for ages immemorial. Well, OS X is a UNIX, isn’t it? So it should follow that we can get the same bang-for-buck in Tiger (and possibly prior versions, too). For this, rsync and cpio are our friends today. Adam Knight did most of the footwork here; I just hacked it up into OS X-compatibility.There's more »

I have waaaay too many chat buddies to leave offline contacts visible in my Adium buddylist, but I tend to IM a few of my Jabber buddies frequently even when they’re offline. In Adium, you can create new chat, select the service, and start typing in the UID of the contact, but that’s a small chore.

The dictionary for Adium’s AppleScript support is sparse and confusing, though I’m sure it makes perfect sense for seasoned AppleScript vets. I had to trowel around on Adium’s Trac site to figure it out. Documented here, for you pleasure, is how to create a new chat via AppleScript.There's more »

As an admin, sometimes you want to tweak the dock a bit when you can’t sit at the Mac or VNC in to it. Luckily, the Dock is governed by a plist that’s a bit cryptic, but is otherwise fairly easy to tweak. I used this quite a bit, back in the day, but when a friend asked me for it recently, I had to dig around quite a bit to find the darn thing.There's more »

For a variety of reasons, the Boot Camp Assistant sometimes fails to let you do the things you want to do. It doesn’t work, for instance, if your drive is already partitioned. Many early adopters partitioned their drives before Boot Camp, hoping for an eventual dual boot solution either from Apple or elsewhere. In my case, I used Boot Camp to repartition my hard drive, then used that partition to install another copy of OS X for a test. Unfortunately, Boot Camp Assistant refused to reclaim that partition when I was done. That’s 20GB down the drain!

GPT Mangling for Dummies

Apple includes a utility called gpt for mangling with the GPT headers on your drive. Unfortunately, this specific utility requires you to unmount all volumes on a disk before it will work, but that’s not a huge barrier. Reboot to your OS X Install CD or to another Tiger volume and use Disk Utility to unmount (but not eject) all volumes on the disk in question.There's more »

I’m a huge fan of .Mac for one – and exactly one – reason: Backup. Hang around me enough and I’ll make sure you’re using .Mac Backup before too long. But this isn’t about selling you on it, this is about making .Mac Backup even more useful by hacking up QuickPicks. QuickPicks are pre-rolled backup plans that snag specific types of files or data files that are integral to a specific purpose. Examples include QuickPicks that scrounge your home directory for all Word documents or that backup your iPhoto Library. Apple bundles a small smattering of QuickPicks with .Mac Backup and many apps install handy QuickPicks of their own, but it turns out we can make QuickPicks ourselves with a little effort.

While OS X is rather heavily laden with XML all over the place, Apple chose to make the QuickPicks definition file a ‘strings’ file, but that’s not the end of the world since it’s still an easily read and modified text file. If you “Show Package Contents” on any of the standard QuickPicks in /Library/Application Support/Backup/QuickPicks/, you’ll find buried therein a file named the deceptively named DefinitionPlist.strings file – after all, it’s not really a plist. But that’s Apple for you.There's more »

Always on the hunt for a better way to protect our precious iPods from being thrown off balconies and, sometimes, looking for excuses to do so, we came across the InvisibleSHIELD from ShieldZone. ShieldZone has, from time to time, posted videos of sales presentations where they’ve dropped two iPods into a box of keys taken off a crowd of customers. One is protected by an InvisibleSHIELD, the other is not. After damned-near destroying the box and returning the keys to their owners, the iPods are inspected. The InvisibleSHIELD-protected iPod is shown to be in Mint Condition, but the unprotected one comes out nearly unusable. The old ad-man in me sees these videos and thinks of 19th century snake-oil salesmen. That all changed when I applied the shields to my iPod and RAZR. Even so, a day into the test, after leaving the devices in my pocket with loose change, keys, and each other, I was still skeptical. At some point, I would think, the veneer would peel back showing some ugly underside.There's more »

And now the mail server is behaving. To those that got bounces, I’m sorry, I messed up. Try again. Thanks. -AK

We’ve all heard by now about the reports of Apple laying off the Apple Discussion Hosts. Skeptical at first, I asked around, and got multiple confirmations that they have, indeed, been given the pink slip.

Apple Discussions

Apple Discussions is both a tremendous resource and a tremendous headache for AppleCare Reps and Mac Geniuses. The boards contain significant nuggets of wisdom that cannot be found elsewhere and, thus, are invaluable to any Mac user. When stumped by a customer, Apple Discussions would be my first stop while trying to find the solution. On the flip side, the signal to noise ratio in Discussions was simply horrible, as many users are there simply to create noise for their own pet peeve issues, and astroturfing and sock puppeting runs rampant. When a customer approaches me and their first words are “I was reading on Apple Discussions…”, the result is never a satisfactory experience for me or the customer, as they are often in to complain about a problem they don’t even have, or are trying to use three posts on Discussions as utter proof that everyone is having the problem.There's more »

Tim Gaden over at Hawk Wings posted today about Mail.app phoning home in yet another misunderstanding about what “phoning home” means.

Before we begin, let’s talk a bit about phoning home, because there’s a bit of confusion about what phoning home means, and when we should care about phoning home, and when we shouldn’t. Check out the Wikipedia entry if you have any doubts.

Phoning home is usually surreptitious communication between applications or hardware installed at end-user sites and their manufacturers or developers. This could be for purposes of access control, such as transmitting an authorisation key. It could also be for marketing purposes, such as the “Sony Rootkit”, which transmits a hash of the currently playing CD back to Sony, or a digital video recorder (DVR) reporting on viewing habits.
“Wikipedia: Phoning home”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_Home

Point is, we get hot and bothered about phoning home when it is part of some draconian authorization scheme or collection of marketing data. Mail.app’s behavior is none of this and a quick look through features of OS X and its stock apps would have found the answer.

It’s Not Always Happening

First off, I gave this a shot myself. I ran tcpdump for several hours but did not see a single connection back to any Apple.com or Mac.com servers. From a security context, if Apple were doing anything nefarious, they would probably always do it, whereas this would seem to be some ‘feature’ of .Mac (given the hostname). So, if it’s not happening on my machine here, nor on any of the others that I’ve tested in the office, what is it?

When It Is Happening?

When you make a new message in Mail.app, it searches .Mac for email certificates to validate, sign, and encrypt your emails. I babysat the tcpdump session while doing routine Mail.app chores, and found it only posts these queries when you create a new message, immediately after hitting “Compose” and before you have a chance to do much of anything else.

Let’s look back at the rollout of Tiger and .Mac 3.0. Apple unveiled (with little fanfare, actually) their own public certificate server and built in to Tiger the ability for applications of all types to query the server.[1]

Put simply, Mail.app isn’t the culprit, and the culprit isn’t anything nefarious at all. Mail.app is using the .Mac SDK to query for public keys and you can disable this behavior in the application responsible for managing your certificates: Keychain Access.

In Keychain Access, go to preferences and disable “Search .Mac for Certificates.”There's more »

There’s been a fair amount of chatter about OS X 10.4.7 adding “phone home” capabilities to Dashboard. When we talk about “phoning home,” we’re usually talking about a secret process that transmits information back to a central location, possibly putting personal information at risk. fetchadvisory, though, does nothing of the sort.There's more »

What with all the hubbub about the thermal paste application on the MacBook Pro, I figured I’d throw my officially-trained, Apple-Certified bits into the mix. We have two MacBook Pros in the Geekery Compound, and we’re a little tired of roasting chestnuts, if you know what I mean… There’s been conflicting reports as to whether reapplying the paste really makes much difference, but no one’s really done a bang-up, knock-down, scientific experiment on the issue.

Well, that’s about to change. Read on for our results.

We have included the raw measurements for those interested in which areas were what temperature. For each reading there is a high, low, and last recorded. These were averaged together for the final numbers.There's more »