MacProch

Threats for Mac OS X, as for any other system

proch — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:52:15 +0000

Every system has it weak point, usually located between the monitor and the chair. When a user downloads a program and executes it he’s giving to that program full access of the computer.
This is the case when you download a known program from less “official” sources (e.g. Torrent,…): it could hide inside the program a malware that steals your informations…

Even Mac crashes

proch — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:00:35 +0000

This picture is something you, Mac users, could never see in your entire life. But it happens.

This is a “kernel panic“, a tremendous crash you can only turn the computer off to continue… It’s rare and when happening should scare: maybe something is going wrong with the hardware… as most fan-boys say.

And this is the truth: even Windows often crashed because of poor hardware quality (failing motherboard, RAM etc.) and I think that if all Windows users had hi-quality hardware as Macs are, their crashes would be rare too.

But a non-crashing-windows is still boring

Moving files with a “cut and paste” in Lion

proch — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:57:02 +0000

Finally, Apple implemented an option to move a file after the Copy shortcut has been pressed: instead of regular CMD + C and CMD + V to copy & paste, try CMD + C and CMD + Option + V to copy & move.

iTunes small pop-up with song title

proch — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 09:04:19 +0000

Via this post i found a gorgeous trick. I always wanted a pop-up notification displaying the current song title (when changing track, for just a few seconds). I used a Growl plug-in in Snow Leopard, but now it’s possible to enable a similar feature in Lion just with a comman line trick via the Terminal.

defaults write com.apple.dock itunes-notifications -bool TRUE;killall Dock

Then start iTunes and try playing a track. Neat, eh? The pop-up fades away after a few seconds. To add the iTunes icon to the pop-up window, type the following into a Terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.dock notification-always-show-image -bool TRUE;killall Dock

To deactivate the pop-up at a later date, quit iTunes again, then open a Terminal window and type the following two lines:

defaults delete com.apple.dock itunes-notifications defaults delete com.apple.dock notification-always-show-image;killall Dock

QuickLook within Mission Control

proch — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 09:45:12 +0000

When you activate “Mission Control” (four fingers up, F3 key,…) you can inspect any window just moving the mouse over it until its border gets highlighted, and then hitting the space bar.

Enabling auto play on QuickTime (via Terminal)

proch — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 08:54:38 +0000

When we open a movie associated with QuickTime we’ll see it paused at the first frame. If we want QuickTime to behave as most media players, and automagically playing it we have to open the Terminal and write this command:

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGPlayMovieOnOpen 1

For other QuickTime hacks see this post.

Disabling application restore in Lion

proch — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 08:54:16 +0000

A new feature of Lion is the ability to restore your environment. When you open Pages, for instance, you’ll see all the documents you were working on, and this could be a nice thing.

For some applications you open and close often this is very annoying. For me QuickTime, Preview and VLC should not behave this way. To fix this there’s a command line trick working in a per-app basis (repplace QuickTimePlayerX with Preview or VLC as needed):

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

Highlight icon in stacks

proch — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:17:32 +0000

defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilite-stack -boolean YES
killall Dock

This trick add a mouse over highlight when using Grid Stacks..

Mac Terminal: fixing backspace behaviour within a remote “screen”

proch — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 12:38:28 +0000

Mac heart made of UNIX code… allows a somehow easier integration in Linux environments, when compared to Microsoft Windows. Yet something is not working out of the box. The fist annoyance I found was the backspace acting as a “Delete” key when using the “screen” program via SSH. Here’s the fix:

defaults write com.apple.Terminal TermCapString xterm

Source: http://atomized.org/2006/05/fixing-backspace-in-screen-in-terminal-on-os-x/

Ubuntu server, Mac client

proch — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 09:57:24 +0000

You can configure a Ubuntu machine to act as a fileserver for Mac clients, broadcasting the service via Bonjour.

http://missingreadme.wordpress.com/2010/05/08/how-to-set-up-afp-filesharing-on-ubuntu/

http://www.kremalicious.com/2008/06/ubuntu-as-mac-file-server-and-time-machine-volume/