Mac Geekery

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 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 »

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 »

It’s a question we get every now and again that simply doesn’t have an easy answer: “How do I add items to the Login Items from the Terminal?”

Well, that’s hard, and mainly because the defaults command is limited in that it cannot nest collections and the folks that made the plist for loginwindow decided on an array of dictionaries, thus tossing that command out the window as a solution.

==$ defaults write foo test -array-add -dict Hide 1 Path /Applications/TextEdit.appThere's more »

For those of you that didn’t know (and it’s an honest omission of knowledge) Apple’s Installer and Software Update tools have CLI tools that do their dirty work for them, and you can use them to remotely administer your machine (or do so more directly than the GUI lets you).

The Installer’s CLI command is, shockingly, installer. The basic syntax is:

$ installer -pkg GoshIHopeItsNotATrojan.pkg -target /

You can also have a little fun with it with its myriad options.

Software Update is similarly called softwareupdate and you can get a list of suggested updates with:

$ softwareupdate -l

Or install all pending updates with:There's more »

$ sudo softwareupdate -i -a

Apple slipped this one in right under my nose. As of Mac OS X 10.4.6, we have SACKs! That is to say, the primary thing I lamented MOSX lacking in my Mac OS X Network Tuning Guide has been remedied, and is enabled by default. So, here’s the lowdown on how to tune a post-10.4.6 install of Mac OS X.

Editing These Settings

All of the following are sysctl settings, so there are two ways to edit them.There's more »

1. Instantly. Run: sudo sysctl -w setting.name=newvalue to set the setting. A reboot will reset it. Use this to tune it.