Mac Geekery

You can use the groff tool to convert manual pages into PostScript, PDF, or HTML form for pretty viewing, printing, posting to a webpage, easy searching with Spotlight, or any other purpose, if you like. Manpages are stored in a simple mandoc format for which the groff formatting tool has an understanding (indeed, groff is used by man to display the page in the first place). groff also has an understanding of a wide variety of other formats to display things in, however man only uses the normal display format so only the few that look into such things would notice the fun to be had.

First, to get a manual page that looks like the version man brings up, you tell groff to use ASCII or UTF8 as the output form. To get groff to do it, however, you need to tell it the location of the actual mandoc file, which man gives you with the -w flag. There's more »

Recently I acquired a 17” iMac G4. Wanting to be able to control both it and my 15” Titanium PowerBook G4 I discovered “Synergy.” (http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/)

Synergy allows one keyboard and mouse to control multiple machines through software. (Even machines running different OSes.) A simple configuration file defines the involved systems and there spatial relationship to each other. Starting a synergy client on each machine to be controlled, and the synergy server on the host machine (the one with the keyboard and mouse) is all there is to it.

Since both the iMac and PowerBook have dedicated LCD displays, with no ability to accept input from an outside source this software solution was the best (only?) solution I could find.

After having hit a few keys I expected to work and, to my surprise, they did, here’s a list of what shortcuts you get in Mac OS X’s standard NSTextField object (which is to say, Mac OS 9 shortcuts combined with a subset of emacs shortcuts):

If you never use the Option key for writing international text, you can also drop a file in your Library to add meta-key shortcuts to mimic emacs more fully. You can, of course, hack the file to add your own shortcuts to all programs that use this kind of text field (most of them).

¹ Control-key shortcuts do not operate on next/previous items, only command/option shortcuts do.

² Technically, these are the same thing to the computer.

³ On portables, fn+Delete is forward delete.

If you find that you can’t copy and paste anymore open Activity Viewer and look for the pbs process. If you don’t find it listed you have two options:

• Relogin.
• Start it manually: /System/Library/CoreServices/pbs (it runs as you, not root)

If you can drop to SUM then you can, with some effort, reset passwords and do bad, bad, evil things. If you trust that the one file that will never go bad on your disk is your /etc/passwd file, then you can tell the system to require the root password to enter SUM. There's more »

Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks author: Brian Jepson,Ernest Rothman asin: 0596009127

Mac OS X is a hybrid of the behaviors of Mac OS 9 and its predecessors and the BSD-based Unix variants of yore. As such, the disk system was forced to handle two completely different methods of mounting disks. For those users that live in the GUI and use physical media (and mount network volumes in the Finder) all disk mounts are instant and come up just as soon as the media is ready, like Mac OS 9 did. Then for those that live in the CLI and mount remote volumes that way (or go re-partitioning their iPod) Mac OS X can use the traditional mount & unmount commands. There's more »