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 I needed to install some software today while logged in on my cousin's account, but wasn't able to because she is not an Administrator. The Vise installer would not let me authenticate, and I didn't really want to login as myself just for an install, so I thought this would be a great time to put Automator to use. This is an extremely simple hint, but hopefully it will save you some time in the future.
First off, you need Pseudo -- it's a utility that allows you to run programs as another user, provided you have their username and password. Download Pseudo and drop it in your Applications/Utilities folder. Now open Automator and start a new workflow. You only need one action to make this work.
Select Finder from the Applications list on the left and drag the "Open Finder Items" action to the workflow area on the right. By default, it says "Open with: Default Application." Click this drop-down, choose "Other..." from the bottom of the list, and find Pseudo in your Applications/Utilities folder.
Now choose File: Save As Plug-In..." and name it "Run As..." Also, make sure "Plug-in for: Finder" is selected. Now quit Automator and go find an application you'd like to open. Control- or (right-) click the app and choose "Automator -> Run As..." from the pop-up menu. You'll now be prompted for a username and password, and your app should run with the privileges of that user. Hopefully this will helpful to some of you.
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After installing Mighty Mouse and using it with Safari, I was greatly pleased with the horizontal scrolling around pages, using the scroll ball. Unfortunately on Firefox, the horizontal scrolling moved me forwards and backwards through my current page history. So left scrolling moved me to the previous page -- in theory. The problem for me, with this behaviour, is that I could not control how many pages forward and backward I would go, and often I would scroll forwards and backwards through pages when all I wanted to do was scroll up and down.
To most it may be obvious on how to fix this behaviour, but for the rest of us, you can easily change the horizontal scroll action in Firefox, so that the scroll ball will scroll you up and down, and left and right.
Simply launch Firefox. Enter about:config as the URL and hit enter. Then scroll down the page until you come to this entry:
mouse.horizscroll.withnokey.action user set integer 2
Change it to read:
mouse.horizscroll.withnokey.action user set integer 1
To do this, simply double click on the 2, and a pop-up window will appear; enter 1 and press Return. The only drawback to this (which I have not yet figured out how to solve) is that when I scroll left and right, the directions are reversed. This is still better for me than scrolling forward and backwards through pages.
Note: By changing the number to something other than 1, you can get interesting results ... for example, 4 will change the font size when you scroll left and right.
[robg adds: There was another hint in the queue on this same issue, from an anonymous submitter. Read the rest of the article for their solution. I figured I'd just list both in one spot, since I don't have a Mighty Mouse with which to test the settings.]
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The problem with keeping both classical and non-classical music in iTunes is that we tend to organize by performer for non-classical music and composer for classical music. This has presented a constant irritation for me when browsing in iTunes, and a major problem for automatically organizing music; I want all my Beethoven together, whether it's played by the New York Philharmonic or Joe Schmoe the Piano Virtuoso.
To fix this problem, you can organize classical music by putting the composer in the artist field and the performer in the now-vacant composer field. I modified iTunes to support this new paradigm in a transparent manner, e.g. everything now says "Artist/Composer" instead of "Artist", and where it used to say "Composer", it now says "Ensemble".
This page details how to modify iTunes in this manner, and also has a link to my finished Localized.rsrc if you just want to try it out. It also provides a very solid jumping-off point for anyone who wants to change the way metadata is organized and presented in iTunes.
[robg adds: This hint requires modifying files within iTunes itself, and doing so using a hex editor. As noted there, please make sure you make a backup first if you're going to try this. I have not tested this hint myself.]
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I use PPPoE on an ADSL connection which is limited only by the modem sync speed (ie: no data rate capping by the ISP, on the downstream at least), and I wanted to optimise the MTU to get the best throughput. The consensus seems to be that the optimal MTU is 1454, based on the fact that 1492 the maximum possible, and 1454 is the highest value less than this which doesn't end up with any padding bytes in the last ATM cell. An ATM cell is the basic transfer unit over a DSL link, and they are all fixed length, padded out to this length if the packet doesn't end on a cell boundary.
I tried configuring the 1454 value using a couple of techniques mentioned on macosxhints, but they didn't seem to have much effect, at least not on the downstream packets. A little network tracing showed that Mac OS X PPPoE was still negotiating an MTU of 1492 with my ISP. So I did a little digging around and came up with the following solution...
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I found recently that I couldn't log in to the CUPS administrative web interface on OS X 10.3.9 with all the updates as of 2005 August 20. I looked on Mac OS X Hints, and found at least one hint relating to this problem, but its proposed solution appeared to be obsolete, as the lines they suggested changing in the CUPS config file were different. At the web site for the makers of CUPS software, though, I found a solution in their FAQ:
MacOS X 10.3.x broke user authentication in the web interface. The following comes from the folks at Apple:
What's happening here is OS X 10.3 (Panther) switched to a form of shadow passwords that cupsd isn't able to read. The getpwent(3) man page discusses the details:
As of Mac OS X 10.3, there are now different per-user behaviours of this function, based on the AuthenticationAuthority value stored for the queried user in DirectoryServices.
If the queried user is still a legacy crypt password user, or now has an AuthenticationAuthority value containing ";basic;", these routines will behave in their standard BSD fashion. These functions will "shadow" the password file, e.g. allow only certain programs to have access to the encrypted password. If the process which calls them has an effective uid of 0, the encrypted password will be returned, otherwise, the password field of the returned structure will point to the string '*'.
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I used to get my Airport network's SSID using this Terminal command:
$ ioreg -n AirPortPCI -S -w 0 | fgrep -i ssid |\
sed 's#.*" = "##; s#"##'
I found this in the comments to an older hint, but it no longer seems to work in 10.4.2 (although I thought it worked in 10.4.1 and/or 10.4.0). However, this still works:
$ system_profiler SPAirPortDataType |
awk -F": " '/Current Wireless Network/{print $2}'
[robg adds: The new command worked when I tested it in 10.4.2; I had no luck with the older version, either.]
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We all know how iPhoto 5 has made keyword handling more difficult. While being a big fan of Ken Ferry's Keyword Assistant, I found another way to access a usable keyword list in iPhoto itself. This is such a simple hint that I thought for sure someone else would've already mentioned it, but a search turned up nothing.
Doing a Get Info (Command-I) in iPhoto brings up a three-tab window, and the third tab is Keywords. It's a normal, scrollable list of keywords, with checkboxes next to each keyword. I find this much better for simply adding keywords to a photo than trying to use the little window in the lower left corner.
[robg adds: This is a somewhat obvious hint, but many folks may have overlooked the Get Info functionality within iPhoto, so I felt it was worth sharing. The window is dynamic, so you can simply leave it open, and its contents will update as you select different photos. It even works with multiple photos selected. Unofortunately, the window is not resizable, so if you have more than 17 or so keywords, you'll have to scroll to reach them all ... which is why I still find myself returning to Keyword Assistant for working with keywords.]
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I have figured out how to send email hyperlink files to both Windows and Macs users at work. These files comes off a linux file server; the Windows users are using 2003 Exchange servers, and we have various Mac users. The hyperlink file in the email that you send to Mac users is different than the hyperlink file that you would send to a Windows users. In the end, however, both Windows and Mac users are able to click on a hyperlink to open a file off the server.
DISCLAIMER: Even though this works for me, it doesn't necessary mean that it will work for you. Success depends on the file server, Exchange server, ports and privileges, syntax, etc. This hint provides clues on how to set up hyperlinked file such that you may be able to send them to both Macs and Windows users via email. You will probably have to experiment a little (or a lot) to get this to work for you.
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I am a heavy-duty iTunes/iPod user, and my life revolves around a couple of Smart Playlists. The following may seem obvious to some, but I have never read about it here or elsewhere.
Suppose you have a Smart Playlist that selects a bunch of tracks to play each day. You have certain options up front for how to organize your tracks -- such as Random, by Artist, by Album, by Genre, etcetera. A problem arises if you select by anything but Random. If you sync your iPod to your computer without completely listening to your Smart Playlist, then iTunes appends new tracks to the end of the playlist. That is, the originally chosen organizing element can seem to get lost.
However, if you use the column organizers at the top and select "Artist" (for example), you can reorganize the playlist how you want it. Then control-click on the playlist name in the Source column and select Copy To Play Order from the pop-up menu. The playlist order will now 'stick' the way you want it to.
I like to listen to my iPod with all the tracks by each artist played together. And alphabetical by artist helps me to identify what I am hearing without looking at the iPod screen. But with this hint, you can have one playlist and organize it differently every day. Such as reverse alphabetical, or by genres, or whatnot. Again this might seem obvious but I really never have seen it documented. Hope it helps somebody.
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The Unix mdfind utility lets you search files using the Spotlight index from the Terminal. This is a great tool, but it doesn't quite replace find, which makes it very easy to search the current directory.
So here's a shell alias for a new spot command line tool which performs a Spotlight search only within the current directory:
alias spot='mdfind -onlyin `pwd`'
Example:
/Users/alf/Documents# spot run
/Users/alf/Documents/iStumbler/Bug Reports/istumbler-runaway-20050731.txt
/Users/alf/Documents...etc.
Add the alias to your .profile (or .bash_profile) file to automatically add it to every new shell.
[robg adds: If you're using tcsh, the format will be slightly different: alias spot 'mdfind -onlyin `pwd`'. I tested this one, and it works quite nicely.]
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