Mac Geekery - Get your geek on.

Cleaning Out the Queue

Adam Knight — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Can i install my Leopard OS onto my PC?

Yes. The current solution is to use a piece of software called simply “PC-EFI” that emulates a Mac firmware environment. There’s some instructions out there already for how to get this done.

Hello, I am looking for information regarding how to boot a iBook,G4, with linux on a USB flash drive…

You cannot boot a G4 iBook from a USB drive of any kind — only FireWire or internal drives.

On my iBook G4 14’ when I run openSUSE 10.3 I noticed (for some time now) the white led blinks when the hard drive is accessed. There's more »

Apple Removes iPhone SDK NDA

Adam Knight — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:34:54 +0000

Well, it’s about damned time.

I’ve been wanting to write up some iPhone dev pieces for a while but pushed the idea aside because of the SDK NDA issue. Well, Apple’s finally come to their senses and removed the NDA so that developers can actually form a community now.

This is one of two major issues that have made developers uncertain about writing for the iPhone platform, what with Android coming very soon now. The other issue, which Apple has yet to deal with, is the rejection of applications based on unreleased criteria. There's more »

Connect an iGo Power Supply to a MagSafe Connector

baylward — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Background

The introduction of the MagSafe connector for MacBooks and MacBook Pros was NOT good news for users of iGo or Kensington airline/car/boat power supplies. Neither manufacturer has yet come out with a MagSafe tip, for reasons probably related to Apple’s patent.

This hint describes a simple method of using an iGo power supply with a MacBook. Some simple soldering is required, and following these instructions will obviously invalidate your warranty for both the power supply and your MacBook. The author takes no responsibility whatsoever for any damage caused!

If you already have an iGo (mine came with tip 4 included), this hint will set you back £2.08.

The principle is very simple: Insert an in-line plug and socket into the cable of the original Mac power supply. There's more »

Dealing with Overlapped Extents

Adam Knight — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:31:52 +0000

Ever get that lovely “overlapped extent allocation” or “missing extent” error when checking your drive in Disk Utility? Notice how it never gets repaired when you repair the disk? There’s a reason: it’s technically irreparable.

The extents that the error is referring to are the file fragments on your drive. There’s a special catalog file called the extents B-tree (this is also sometimes referred to as the extents or extents overflow file) that holds all of the information on which files have which fragments on the disk. Each fragment is an extent. When you have a missing extent then you have a record that states that there are a certain number of extents for a file, but the known extents are too few for that file. There's more »

Disabling Data Detectors in Mail

Adam Knight — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 06:20:39 +0000

Oh, hi there.

Adam Knight — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 03:46:47 +0000

Would you believe I forgot my password? Yeah, didn’t think so.

MacGeekery isn’t dead, it’s just, sadly, not a priority of mine at the moment. The day job is taking up increasingly more of my time and my wife and I are expecting our first child in the next couple of weeks (which means I’ve been playing proto-daddy for the past nine months). In short: I ran out of time.

I haven’t run out of information, though. I’ve had to make Mac OS X do a fair share of crazy stuff in the past year or so that I need to write up and document (which is, actually, how I started this site many years ago). Hopefully life will work with me rather than against me here.

If you have something you’d like to contribute, we’d love to have it and put it up. Remember that if you have an AdSense code that you get a portion of the ad shows for anything you post on your account that’s accepted (add your code in your profile page). So it’s not just to keep the site going, it’s a nice way to get some additional hits on your account as well.

I do expect well-written pieces, though. I’ve rejected quite a few for being too short, too obvious, or too poorly-written to really fit in here. Read some back tips and see if you can get a feel for it.

Meanwhile, I’ll be shooting for one tip a week. I can’t promise unique tips (I’ve been out of it for almost a year) but I can promise a unique write-up and perspective.

Use CUPS Classes to Elegantly Handle Different Locations

Adam Knight — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 05:53:41 +0000

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 »

Changing Airport Settings En Masse

schwankl — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 21:50:56 +0000

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:

Copy /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist out to all the iBooks using Apple Remote Desktop.
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.

Breaking the Glass in the Dock

Adam Knight — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 18:33:42 +0000

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's more »

Getting Rid of the Translucent Menu Bar

unixgeek — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 16:13:30 +0000

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 »