There are at least a few folks who are less than happy with Apple’s decision to remove the option to download and keep updates from the Software Update application in Snow Leopard. I count myself among them. Though the option may be gone from the GUI, however, it still exists in the command line version. [...]
John Gruber today opines that there is no GUI interface for the command-line tool for converting Quicktime movies into the OGG Theora format — a very handy thing to be able to do if you want to serve video to Firefox-type browsers using HTML 5′s <video> and <audio> tags. Since this is something I do [...]
Yes, you read that right. It’s time for another entry in the Script Sharing category. It’s been a damn long time since I’ve posted anything here, but I’ve actually been doing a lot of scripting, and I just realized that I had some potentially useful stuff lying around. So hopefully I’ll be able to post [...]
Recently, for some odd reason, there has been a spate of solutions to the problem of creating new files in the Finder via a contextual menu. One involves a contextual menu plugin called NuFile. Another involves installing Big Cats Scripts and linking it to an Applescript. But honestly — and I’m surprised someone else didn’t [...]
A hint on MacOSXHints yesterday discussed using tar to create backups in Mac OS X. The poster was frustrated with the OS X-bundled version of the zip command, and confused by the way the Finder creates .zip files. Indeed, the Finder does not use the zip command to create its .zip files, and indeed it [...]
Someone recently commented that my script to disable Spotlight was no longer functioning in v. 10.4.5 of Tiger. When I went to check on the functionality of the old script, I realized I’d been working on a new and improved version awhile back, and that I’d intended to post it, but completely forgot to. So [...]
Boy, there sure are a lot of cloning apps out there. The mother of them all, of course, is Mike Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner, but it’s slowly losing mindshare to more aggressively marketed apps like the affable SuperDuper!. There are others, but I don’t feel like scouring the web for them, nor do I feel [...]
MacFixit just reported about troubles the new Intel-based Macs are having with network speeds, particularly AFP connections to, of all things, other Macs. The solution, they report, is to set the delayed_ack property to 0. In order for this change to survive a reboot, however, they recommend editing /etc/rc. The problem with this is that, [...]
Two events have transpired to lead to the posting of this script: 1) I’ve been meaning to post a new script to the Scripts section of the blog for some time, and 2) MacOSXHints today had a hint about splitting and rejoining large files, and suggesting scripting this process. I just happen to have had [...]
Why do so many Mac folk need a GUI for everything? Sometimes a little script is plenty to get the job done. And using a script can be just as easy as using a GUI: it’s double-clickable; it’s instructive; and it’s drag-n-drop. It just doesn’t have pictures. But for some reason people still freak out [...]