In MacOSX, there are two simple ways to make files invisible from the command line: (both methods do require the installation of Apple’s Developer Tools)
Method 1:
Make invisible:
/Developer/Tools/SetFile -a V ~/Desktop/MyDoc.txt
Make visible:
SetFile -a v ~/Desktop/MyDoc.txt
Method 2:
Make invisible:
chflags hidden ~/Desktop/MyDoc.txt
Make visible:
chflags nohidden ~/Desktop/MyDoc.txt
In Snow Leopard, Apple modified the behavior of Remote Desktop and Screen Sharing to send system level commands to a remote computer by default. This change has made working with remote computers much more difficult for me.
At long last “MacNoggin” has posted the solution over on MacOSXHints.
Quit Remote Desktop or Screen Sharing, then open Terminal and paste the following codes to toggle these hidden preferences:
defaults write com.apple.RemoteDesktop DoNotSendSystemKeys -bool YES
defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing DoNotSendSystemKeys -bool YES
If you would like to reverse, re-enter the code, but change YES to NO at the very end. And of course, you can always send these “System” commands while in fullscreen mode.
Several years ago, I settled on Chat Transcript Manager from Unsanity to archive and search through my extensive iChat log files. I conduct extensive meetings and have fully integrated IM into my workflow and Chat Transcript Manager was really well designed and easy to use.
Unfortunately, the tool was broken when Apple changed the format directory structure for the iChat log files in Leopard. It doesn’t see the new logs in which are in subdirectories. Unsanity hasn’t updated the software since the end of 2006, but luckily the fix is simply to flatten the logging directory structure.
The chats are stored here:
~/Documents/iChats/
I suggest coping the logs rather than just simply moving just in case something blows up. Don’t for get to set an actual path to your_destination.
find . -name ‘*.ichat’ | xargs -i cp {} /your_destination
After flattening, Chat Transcript Manager has no trouble indexing the files and I was able to pinpoint the conversations I wanted.
Here’s how to re-enable the Locate database in Snow Leopard (MacOS 10.6). Once this LaunchDaemon is loaded, locate services will continue to work- no need to reload.
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.locate.plist
update: Here’s the error I was getting prior to re-enabling: (so that search engines can find the tip)
WARNING: The locate database (/var/db/locate.database) does not exist.
Note to self:
A few ways to count files in a directory under UNIX:
ls | wc -l
For recursive:
find . -print | wc -l
Using filename matching:
find . -name \*.jpg -print | wc -l
Erica Sadun has posted a simple, nerdy method for checking the availability of the iPhone 3.0 firmware. The idea is to grab the XML returned from the iTunes iPhone software check.
curl -s -L http://phobos.apple.com/version |\
grep -i restore |\
grep ‘_3.’ | open -f
To understand the output, you need to know which model you’re looking for.
iPhone- 1,1
iPhone 3G- 1,2
iPhone 3G S- 2,1
iPod Touch- 1,1
iPod Touch 2G- 2,1
When I see this- I know I’m golden:
iPhone1,2_3.0_7A341_Restore.ipsw
[via TUAW]
Well-known industry trender, Netcraft, has recently observed a spike in popularity of the Lynx web browser- particularly since the recent Pwn2Own competition.
Apparently growing concern over vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari are driving users to the hardcore Lynx browser.
“Lynx has not once suffered a buffer overflow in its image processing, and indeed has suffered no security vulnerabilities at all in the last 2 years.”
More details (and laughs) on my favorite April fools story of the day over at Netcraft in “Deluge of Browser Security Issues Drives Mass Migration.”
The LaunchAgent file “com.google.keystone.agent.plist” is used to activate the Google Updater on each boot and every 2 hours while logged in. The file is located here:
~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.agent.plist
Pretty sneaky to slip it in as a LaunchAgent without notifying the end-user, but hey- it gets the job done. I’d guess that Keystone was the internal code name for the product.
Today, I noticed that my Transmit favorites were not properly syncing across computers. Upon closer inspection, one machine did not have the “Transmit Favorites” entry in the MobileMe PrefPane.
I fixed this by unregistering, then re-registering the sync client using the following two commands.
~/Library/Application\ Support/Transmit/TransmitSync.app/Contents/MacOS/TransmitSync—unregisterClient
~/Library/Application\ Support/Transmit/TransmitSync.app/Contents/MacOS/TransmitSync—registerClient
While researching how to get the Firefly Media Server working on iPhone firmware 2.1, I found the answer (yet again) on RupertGee’s iBlog. This time, he’s included resources for controlling the server with BossPrefs.