dfbills.com blog

John C. Welch posted a handy AppleScript which grabs selected addresses from Apple Remote Desktop and opens SSH sessions in the terminal for each one.  Hard to believe this isn’t built into ARD.  I’d previously used a hard coded AppleScript to open up these sessions.  Having them opened from the live scan list is very handy!

I took out the hard coded username in the SSH string and added an activate command to the terminal to bring the windows to the front.

set theSSHList to {}
tell application “Remote Desktop”
set theComputers to the selection
repeat with x in theComputers
set the end of theSSHList to Internet address of x
end repeat
end tell

tell application “Terminal”
activate
repeat with x in theSSHList
do script “ssh ” & (contents of x)
end repeat
end tell

A modified version of the GrandPerspective disk sizing utility has surfaced which understands the file structure of Time Machine backups.

With this tool, you can scan Time Machine backups and immediately discern how much space it is really using.  Also, you can look for large files taking up unnecessary space.

To actually recover space, enter Time Machine and delete the unnecessary backups of your large files using the gear menubar item’s: “Delete Backup” and “Delete All Backups Of” commands.

via Tidbits

Here’s how to expand all those pesky minimized print dialog boxes in Leopard:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences PMPrintingExpandedStateForPrint -bool TRUE

ah, that’s better.

Apple is celebrating iTunes’ 5th birthday today with a look back on all the great things that the service has brought us.

Trevor’s Bike Shed has posted a nifty script which ejects your drives before sleeping.  This should come in handy for disconnecting my Time Machine volume before going to work in the morning.

How to fix Word 2008 crash on quit.  (Office 2008 Mac)

1. Delete or move ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Normal

2. Delete or move ~/Library/Application Support/User Templates/Normal.dotm

3. Delete or move ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Word Settings (10) (Or the whole folder)

To properly set up the “Normal” template in Microsoft Office 2008 Mac, you must first know where it is.  The location has changed!

The new 2008 office location is:

~/Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/Office/User\ Templates/Normal.dotm

And the template must be saved as a “Word Macro-Enabled Template” (.dotm).

Hope this helps!

To create a Time Machine size limit in Leopard, simply issue the following command in the terminal:

Size is measured in megabytes- my example is 100GB.

A year later, this does not appear to work (even after using the integer option).  Here is the code to reverse this change:

defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine MaxSize

The accepted way to limit the size now is to create a sparse disk image.

Last fall, Starbucks announced a “Song of the Day” promo giving away more than 50 million free songs via iTunes download card.  This event coincided with the Starbucks iPhone/iTunes “Now Playing” service. 

The “Song of the Day” promo ran for more than 30 days in more than 10,000 Starbucks locations.  According to data released by Starbucks today, the promo only saw 6 million songs downloaded- an 8% redemption rate.

I don’t know about you, but I know I had a few cards that I never redeemed- it will be interesting to see how well the next venture fares.

A sweet tip for opening data from the Mac shell environment in any graphical application from MacOSXHints.

Previous to this hint, the only way I was using “open” was to open files from the command line with their related graphical app.  For instance, opening a .rtf file in TextEdit:

open mytext.rtf

Or simply piping source code to TextMate via a curl download:

curl http://dfbills.com | mate

Now, I can can load data and files into any application by adding the -f and -a flags:


curl ‘http://example.com/encodingerror.html’ | open -a ‘Hex Fiend’ -f
curl ‘http://example.com/example.html’ | open -a ‘TextMate’ -f
curl ‘http://example.com/example.png’ | open -a ‘Preview’ -f
curl ‘http://example.com/example.m4v’ | open -a ‘QuickTime Player’ -f