Mac Geekery

My new MacBook Pro needs to go in for warranty service. I made two full backups to external drives using SuperDuper. Unfortunately, system software for an Intel machine won’t boot on an older PowerPC PowerBook. Is there any way to make a universally bootable system? Not being able to take a drive and boot it on multiple machine architectures seems to me to be a huge oversight by Apple.

Yes.

I’ve bought a MacBook and I would like to run a 7 or 35 pass erase on my old iMac so I can pass it on to a family member without worrying about my data being left on the hard drive, and obviously the Disk Utility won’t let me erase the disk which has the OS running on it. What’s the best way to acheive this?

If you want to keep the current installation, boot to the install media and then use the Erase Free Space feature to wipe the space that is currently unoccupied by files. If you don’t care and want to reinstall, then from the install media go to the Utilities menu and pick Disk Utility and do it there before installing a clean copy of the OS for the new recipient.

I can use the netstat command in terminal to see who is connected to my mac over the network, But is there a way (maybe a termianl command) to boot them off without switching personal file sharing off.

Mac OS X Server has this functionality in Server Admin, but I cannot find any information on how it accomplishes this. My guess is a private IPC protocol of a kind, but there’s no documentation on the topic and, thus, no answer.

Is there a way to open a user-created mailbox without going through all the levels above it in the side bar? I would like to be able to access my mailboxes through, for example, the Mailbox -> Go To menu.

Nope, sorry. In many ways Mail is a great email client. In many others, it’s pure suck. Welcome to the suck. Many other mail clients in history have had similar optimizations, but Mail does not. You can’t even control the selection with standard AppleScript commands so you’d have to resort to GUI Scripting which is such a disgusting hack I don’t normally consider it worth mentioning, but if you want this then that’s the route to take. Godspeed.

I live in a house with 3 other roommates. They are all using AT&T for Internet, I’m on Comcast. Naturally, we have seperate networks as well. One of them wants to start using my printer, which is connected to an Airport Express. What’s the best way for me to share said printer, without letting her on my network, and not using a USB Cable? I’m not afraid of tinkering with the network, as my firewall/router is a computer running pfsense.

So without letting someone see your printer over the network or directly connect the printer, you want someone to be able to use it. Umm … no?

There are two solutions that come to mind, and both rather suck. If you have an AirPort Base Station, hook up the printer to that and toggle to setting to let folks print to it from the Internet. If you do this, I’d not keep a stock of paper in it until someone needs to print …

The second is to setup an AppleScript attached to a folder in your Public folder so that it prints anything dropped inside it. Then get a DynDNS address and set your router to forward AFP/SMB to your computer so that your roomies can AFP/SMB to yourname.dyndns.org and then drop a file in to be printed. You’ll have to live with programs randomly starting on your computer, however.

Really … just link the networks.

How does the Energy Saver Schedule preference pane save its recurring wake and shutdown at the same time? If I use pmset from the command line, setting a repeat for wakeorpoweron wipes out my shutdown repeat, and viceversa. Is there a bit of commandline-fu that would let me set both repeating actions?

It’s rather crappy, really. You can have one wake or power on event and one sleep or shutdown event. The so-called “repeating” actions are done by the software itself on wake/power on by resetting the timer for the next event. So, if you wanted something more complicated, then it’s time to write a script that’s polled by cron every minute or so and runs pmset with the relevent options for that time of day. Remember, missed cron events are not run when the computer is back, so you really would need to run it often to ensure it was set properly.

Hi, is there any way to tell the Power Adapter source to NOT charge the battery that’s inside my Macbook? I do this to keep my battery charge around 50% which is better for battery storage than 100%, since I use the power adapter almost everywhere I go. I still keep the battery inside the Macbook simply for those times when I can plug out the adapter, pick it up for while and then plug it in somewhere else. Is there any way to do what I want short of taking battery in and out with a coin every time?!

The 50% thing is a myth for Li-ion. Moreover, the battery is being constantly used when inside the computer (it runs off the battery and trickle-charges it) so it’s moot anyway. And, no, you can’t tell it to not charge; the PMU/SMU/SMC on the MLB is doing it with little software intervention.

If I push on the right hand corner of the White Ibook 700 mhz, the screen goes dead, when I pushon it again, it comes back. Any thoughts

You and a million other white iBook users have a graphics problem. It’s probably the infamous issue with the GPU coming unseated. You need service to replace the MLB. Sadly, the freebie program Apple had to repair this has expired, so you’re going to be out approximately $300 to get Apple to do it. I had this happen regularly on all the iBooks I owned — including their replacements — until they replaced it with a G4. Some experienced it with the G4, even.

I often have problems ejecting disks after opening and closing a file or two. Closing the file doesn’t seem to “free” the disk as far as the OS is concerned—I still get the “disk is in use” message. This particularly happens when I open an html document in Safari. I know I could just quit Safari, but I’d rather not lose all my open windows, etc. Is there any way to override the “disk is in use” protection and eject the disk anyways?

$ sudo umount -f /Volumes/NameOfDisk

Be careful…

Is there a way via the terminal to set an ACD Monitor’s luminance using numeric values (e.g. 120)?

No.

Is there a way to get the computer to stay on when woken from sleep if it is set to “require password to wake from sleep?”

Nope.

Is there any sort of “session saver’ program (or otherwise), not for a web browser, but for everything? Is there some wonderful utility out there that I just couldn’t find yet?

Yes.

Is there a way to set how idle the machine has to be to enter sleep mode? It seems sometimes having certain programs running (a lightweight bandwidth monitor for example), keeps it from entering sleep mode. Can I set (if idle level < x).. go to sleep? Thanks!

Nope.

Can you please write a good installation tutorial for Asterisk on Os X.

No.

how do i get passed a password to set another one

Enter the first password.

Hi at my school we have user accounts which are very limited, i cant change any system preferences. Also I cant access other peoples accounts. is their a way I could hack the school system

Yes.

Is there any way to keep my 24 inch Intel-based iMac’s inbuilt speakers outputting audio while the headphone/line-out jack is also being used to feed to an amp?

No.

Is it possible to have different volume levels for different applications, say I want to have all of my applications except for iTunes muted?

Audio Hijack Pro can trap the audio from one program and send it somewhere. You might be able to mess with it enough to do what you want.

This isn’t a question, but I don’t want to get an account and I couldn’t find another way to respond…

Second line of links at the top: contact.

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