Things I've found useful

So on the day of iOS6 Apple also released the 3.4 update to Aperture and osX 10.8.2. It seems if you apply all these updates, Aperture first updates your library, and then quits every time you load it. Brilliant, gee thanks Apple. why bother with actually testing software, you wouldn’t want to dent the 100 billion you have in the bank. Anyway, apparently it is something to do with the Facebook account info held within Aperture, you can zero this out by runnning the following at the command line:

% defaults remove com.apple.Aperture AccountConfigurations

This worked for me but Aperture no longer knew about my Flickr, or Facebook accounts. At least I got my photos back. Between this and iOS6 maps, this isn’t a great week to own Apple products.

Related posts:

1. SuSE sudo weirdness
2. Using a non supported Timemachine volume
3. iSync and Sony Ericsson P900 problems

I quite often used to find myself wanting to print from my iPad, so when Apple announced AirPrint I thought things were looking good. According to the press release you would need either a HP printer or you could print to a shared printer on an existing mac. Sorted, I’ve got the latter of those, things were looking rosy.

Things took a turn for the worse when I read that they had pulled support for printing via shared printers and were only going to allow AirPrint to certain (at the moment only HP) printers.  I wanted the feature, but not enough to replace my trusty Lexmark.

Luckily there are people like this guy on the internet who took the time to figure out how it works and have since published a nice simple guide about how to setup a Linux box as a AirPrint server. Mainly thanks to Cups and some Avahi magic.

Sorted! And I’ve used it sufficiently to think spending an hour or so setting it up was worth while.

Related posts:

1. Linux PPTP server
2. Linux authentication from Active Directory
3. RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 Microsoft Active Directory Authentication

I can never remember the syntax to allow access to a directory from an IP or range of IP’s without a password but falling through to using a password from all other IP’s. The below works in a .htaccess file:

AuthName "some name"
AuthUserFile /some/htaccess.file
AuthType Basic
Order Allow,Deny
Require valid-user
Allow From 127.0.0.1
Satisfy Any

Just discovered that split (version 1.6) on Mac OS X Version 10.4.8 (PPC) does not handle files greater than 2Gb.

I’ve found two work arounds to this problem, the first is the one I typically do, but it requires darwin ports to be installed, I happen to have this installed everywhere anyway.

Darwin Ports

Simply ‘port install coreutils’:

% port search coreutils
coreutils                      sysutils/coreutils 5.97         GNU File, Shell, and Text utilities
% sudo port install coreutils
Password:
--->  Fetching coreutils
--->  Attempting to fetch coreutils-5.97.tar.bz2 from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils
--->  Verifying checksum(s) for coreutils
--->  Extracting coreutils
--->  Configuring coreutils
--->  Building coreutils with target all
--->  Staging coreutils into destroot
--->  Installing coreutils 5.97_0
--->  Activating coreutils 5.97_0
--->  Cleaning coreutils
%

Thats it, the only caveat is the new GNU split is named gsplit. So remember to type that when you want to split files over 2Gb!

Compile from source

The second method was found here. I like to keep things in my own logbook so I’ve put a copy of the instructions below

1. Download the latest NetBSD split source from here
2. Add the following somewhere near the top:

   #include
   

3. Compile with either:

   For your architecture:

   cc -Os -o split split.c
   

   Or a Universal binary:

   cc -Os -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -arch i386 -arch ppc -o split split.c
   

4. Copy the binary in place:

   $ sudo mv /usr/bin/split /usr/bin/split.apple
   $ sudo cp split /usr/bin/split
   $ sudo chmod ugo-w /usr/bin/split
   $ sudo chmod ugo+rx /usr/bin/split
   $ sudo chown root:wheel /usr/bin/split
   

To adjust the various system preferences from the command line you need the systemsetup utility which ships with OSX Server although I’ve found some versions of OS X client have it installed in /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Support. On my G5 with Tiger (10.4.8) installed I used systemsetup-tiger and on my iMac (Intel) that was missing so I used systemsetup-panther which also worked.

You can adjust all sorts of things with the tool -help shows you all the options, I wanted to adjust sleep times. Below is an example session, showing the settings before and after I had made the change

# ./systemsetup-panther -getsleep
Sleep: Computer sleeps after 10 minutes
Sleep: Display sleeps after 10 minutes
Sleep: Disk sleeps after 10 minutes
# sudo ./systemsetup-panther -setcomputersleep 60
setcomputersleep: 60
# ./systemsetup-panther -getsleep
Sleep: Computer sleeps after 60 minutes
Sleep: Display sleeps after 10 minutes
Sleep: Disk sleeps after 10 minutes

manage some of the OSX preferences settings from cmd line

There may be a better version out there, but this did the job.

If you want to sync to a time server other than the default apple provided ones you can enter the address into the box in the ‘Date & Time’ preference pane. To enter multiple servers seperate them with spaces as show in the image below. All this actually does is write the information out to /etc/ntp.conf and restarts the ntp daemon. Remember that the file will get overwritten when you access the preference pane though.

Okay suppose you are on a corporate LAN and VPN’d into some other private network. You want DNS to resolve the local intranet, but also resolve your VPN’d LAN. If you VPN’d LAN domain is internal.sollicker.com then create;

/etc/resolver/sollicker.com

and in this file;

search internal.sollicker.com sollicker.com
nameserver 172.16.100.15

Then run:

sudo kill -HUP `cat /var/run/lookupd.pid`

First, a nice css cheat sheet pdf:http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/css_cheat_sheet.pdf

And secondly a nice colour picker dashboard widget http://www.colourmod.com/