mac geekery

Since I use Mercurial and it doesn’t have Xcode integration, I find that I’ll have added classes or whatnot and they will not have been added to the repository and I’ll forget about them come checkin time. That’s bad.

So I thought about ways to remedy this, and after describing the issue to myself, the issue was clear. “When I add new files to the directory, it should run hg add on the files.” Well, when when we need to do something when a directory changes, we use launchd yes? Yes.

So I made a launchd item that ran a script any time my specific repository changed. Since this is just for yourself, it can go in ~/Library/LaunchAgents. The item should set the current and working directories to the repository so the context of the hg commands is proper.There's more »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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:

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

1. Issue the following UNIX command as root also using Apple Remote Desktop:

This command will search through the preferences.plist file for the word Ranked and replace it with the word Automatic.

I was having quite the problem with trying to install programs from the command line: Bash would complain I didn't have libraries installed that I most certainly did, and pkg-config was no help, since it apparently wouldn't talk to X11 or Bash at all. Nice. Those are hours of my life I'll never get back.There's more »

We may not like it, but OS X malware is on the rise. Even if you prefer the lalala-I'm-not-listening approach to security, you may want to do the decent thing and not forward such nasties from your Windows-using colleagues. Here's how to set things up.

1. Install clamav (the pre-eminent open source virus scanner).

   The easiest way to do this is download and install ClamXav. This includes a nice OS X front end for clamav and an on-access folder-watching utility.

 There's more »

I was a bit disappointed that the Nokia E70 wasn’t included in the latest updates to iSync in 10.4.9. Since the E70 is running Symbian OS similar to other Nokia S60 Eseries phones, I was using a hack I found on the Apple iSync discussion group. It worked for what I wanted to do but when I installed Mac OS X 10.4.9, the changes I made were naturally overwritten. Rather than re-do the hack I started actually thinking about it. The E70 is really nothing more than an E62 in a smaller form factor and Apple added support for the E62 in OS X 10.4.9. A idea took root.There's more »