Jaharmi’s Irreality renewable hyperlinks with 0% transfat since 1999

Ever had trouble locating that httpd.conf file? Spotlight is of no help there. I've just released a free app called FindAnyFile that can help with this, as it can find any file on local Mac discs. It doesn't rely on a database like the locate command and Spotlight do, but instead uses the Mac OS operations for searching an entire disk on demand. Furthermore, it can run as root user (provided you know the admin password), allowing it find really any file existing on the disk.

If you end up with 100s of hits, you'll appreciate the new Folder View which shows you a hierarchical list of the folders in which the found items appear. Finally, you can save your searches and reopen them later again for convenience.

[robg adds: I tested this, and it worked quite well for finding those deeply-buried files that are ignored by Spotlight, or not found due to an out-of-date locate database. ...

A friend of mine does a radio show that interests me. Unfortunately, being a late night show (midnight) and interstate, for me to listen to this live would require me being awake at 4am or so. Due to record label copyright permissions, this show is not available as a podcast download -- it's only available for live or delayed streaming. Undeterred, I wanted to automatically grab the stream and make it available on my iPhone for listening when it suited me, while out and about.

This particular stream is served with the Real Time Streaming Protocol, which means all we really need is the LIVE555 openRTSP command line program. With that installed, it's as simple as calling openRTSP with the stream URL:openRTSP -4 -a -t -d 3900 rtsp://streaming.server.com.au:80/streaming.ser...

There are several applications which I use zoomed so I can have the maximum available space to work. Sometimes I even hide the toolbar, but this causes the window to resize too, reducing its size. But if you zoom the window again, the toolbar now can be shown and hidden without changing the size of the window.

BTW, although I guess this is common for previous versions, I'm working on 10.5.6.

After much frustration, I realized that the shell command pbcopy was destroying non-ASCII characters in an AppleScript that I was trying to write. Although pbcopy is an extremely convenient way to take the standard input and place it on the clipboard, I also needed access to accented characters.

Luckily, I found this blog post that explained everything. The important part was a comment there that explained how to set a default encoding by adding the following line to my .profile file:export __CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING=0x1F5:0x8000100:0x8000100While this fixed the problem while working in the Terminal, it did not fix the problem within AppleScript. I did find that I could add the aforementioned export command inside the do shell script, and everything seemed to work as expected. An example is shown below ...

I live in Arizona and I occasionally get robocalls from one of the radio stations nearby that hosts a show by Alice Cooper. In the robocalls, Alice Cooper reads the message. To safely ignore these calls, I took the calling number and added it to my contacts. Now I know when I can ignore that number (and it does look kind of cool to see that Alice Cooper just called).

For general spammy calls, I've started using the 800Notes site to find out who called me. I also add the calling number to a contact called Scam Artist. Not sure how many numbers a contact will hold, but seems to work quite well as I get the same four or five numbers calling all the time.

Not quite as great as a telemarketing service/scam filter, but at least you know right away that you can ignore the call.

[robg adds: This previous hint explained another way to ignore repeated cal...

If you are lucky enough to be test driving ZFS on you Mac, you might find this useful. The latest ZFS build from Macosforge.com has a problem where ejecting a ZFS-formatted USB disk and unplugging it will crash Leopard.

However, I wrote an Automator action [286KB download] that will sudo and run a ZFS export on all mounted ZFS filesystems, so you can safely unplug your USB drive with ZFS on it.

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one.]

Certain applications have a very annoying (to me) feature -- they bounce their Dock icons. I keep my Dock hidden, mainly because I don't use it all that much, and I find the bouncing icons quite annoying. Some programs allow you to control Dock bouncing via their preferences (iChat comes to mind), but for others, control of the bouncing is out of the users' hands.

Thanks to a simple Terminal command, however, you can permanently prevent Dock bouncing by any application. In Terminal, enter these two commands:$ defaults write com.apple.dock no-bouncing -bool TRUE$ killall DockWhen the Dock restarts, you won't see any icon bouncing again, ever. An ideal solution would be a per-application setting, because there may be apps for which you want a bouncing Dock icon. Lacking that, though, I'll take the no bouncing solution. To reverse this, just repeat the command, replacing TRUE with FALSE, and then kill the Dock again.

For a...

Mac OS X Hints will be closed for the new year's holiday tomorrow and Friday, returning Monday with the usual hints -- I'll be at Macworld Expo next week, checking out the latest in tech toys along with the rest of the mob. If you're going to be at the show, feel free to stop by and introduce yourself, as I love meeting readers and contributors. I've posted my currently-known schedule in the 'read more' part of this message.

For entertainment during our down time, please contribute to our latest poll about how much (or little) you use the Places section of the Finder's sidebar. Thanks to Perceval for the poll suggestion. My Expo schedule, at least as I know it now...

Tue Jan 6:
12:30pm - 1:30pm -- Podcast in the Macworld booth on the show floor
2:30pm - 3:30pm -- Podcast in the Macworld boot ...

Working on a long, complex Word document recently, with several layers of tracked changes, I was preparing the document for final distribution. While trying to clear all the tracked changes, I noticed that after accepting all changes, there still remained one that displayed each time I opened the document. Whenever I accepted it, saved the document and closed it, it would return to haunt me the next time I opened the document. The change was to the document's table of contents, located on page three, but the change "bubble" showed up at the very top of page one. Clearly something was amiss with the document, something that tends to happen with Word documents that have been through the blender a few times.

I tried a number of techniques to resolve the problem, such as accepting the change in each possible method (by clicking the bubble, from the reviewing pane, and from the reviewing toolbar), by saving the document as a new file, and by deleting the change and re-doing the ...

I Googled and looked everywhere when I tried fixing this issue, but couldn't find the fix (possible I didn't word it correctly). Eventually, I came up with the solution on my own, so I'm sharing here in case this affects others.

A coworker and I both had the same issue: While logging in, or just typing our password for admin rights to install or change settings, the authentication would hang up (sometimes for minutes). After almost giving up, I looked in the Accounts System Preferences panel, and noticed I was the only admin -- but I was listed as admin, managed.

Since I knew this wasn't correct, I created a test account with admin privileges and logged out and logged into the test account. I then opened Accounts System Preferences panel, and unchecked admin and then unchecked parental controls for my main account. After I changed the account back to admin, I logged out...

I have used this many times when applications freeze, and neither the Home button nor the Lock button have any effect.

If this happens, try double-tapping the Home button to invoke the Home button shortcut. My double-tap shortcut is for the iPod, but this also works with Phone favorites. By starting the Phone app, or the iPod app, the iPhone kills the hung application.

If you have a jailbroken iPhone, and want to save the Shazam tagged songs list, you have to connect to your iPhone via ssh, then go to this path: /private » var » mobile » Applications » long_string_of_characters » Documents. Replace long_string_of_characters with your phone's unique string, then download the file clarusx6.sqlite.

Next, download sqlitebrowser for OS X, open the file you just downloaded from your iPhone, and the game is done.

[robg adds: I believe the 'sqlitebrowser' referred to above is this program, but I'm not positive.]

I hate switching off the power on a hung system. As a last resort before doing that, when logging out or even Force Quit won't work, I've had some success with this method. Invoke Spotlight with Command-Space. Even if you don't see the search box appear, keep following these steps. Type Terminal and hit Return. With a bit of luck, you'll see a Terminal window open.

Log into Terminal as an administrator, for example: ssh admin@mycomputername.local (replace admin with the short name of an administrator account, and mycomputername.local with your computer's Bonjour name (see the Sharing preference pane).

Enter the admin password when prompted. If you get a message that the system can't verify the identity of the computer and asking you if you want to proceed, type yes. Once logged in, you can try any Terminal command and see if it works. Usually, I just type sudo reboot and enter the admin password when prompted.
...

The Group in New Folder script in the Big Cat Scripts Plug-in was my favorite Finder tool for a long time, and I was very upset when it was broken in Leopard. I have managed to hack togather something that can be activated using AmScriptsCMX(UB).

Here is my script. To use it, first nstall AmScriptsCMX(UB) and put the below script in ~/Library/Scripts. tell application "Finder" set theList to the selection if the theList is {} then beep display dialog "No files or applications are selected." buttons("Cancel") end ifend telltell application "Finder" set thename ...

My mom recently upgraded to a new MacBook, which has one of them shiny new trackpads. I'm not exactly sure why, but the "Ignore accidental trackpad input" checkbox is not shown in the trackpad preferences on her computer, but the option was somehow enabled. The result was that she would often find that clicking on the trackpad didn't do anything if she'd just been typing, because apparently clicking (even the physical button click) is considered accidental trackpad input, and was ignored.

If you're having this problem, there's an easy solution. Open a Terminal window, and type defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.ignoreTypingFilter -bool NO (then press Return) to disable the ignore accidental trackpad input setting.

There have been a number of reports that the Leopard Finder silently ignores your wish to eject disks and disk images, no matter if you click the Eject button in the Finder's sidebar, drag the disk to the Trash, or right-click and choose Eject. The only simple work around was using the hard disk utility.

I had the same problem with my MacBook Pro for the last couple of month -- and accidentally found a solution looking at the recent version of Onyx. In Onyx, you have the option to remove the Eject Disk menu item from the File menu of the Finder. It turned out that at some point in the past I had removed that item, and then forgot about doing so. Restoring the missing menu solved the above problem.

Of course, I do not know if this is of any help for other people with the same disk eject problem.

Apple Mail.app does not play the new mail alert sound in a consistent manner, and this bug has been there since the first release of 10.5. This occurs when Mail.app uses IMAP's IDLE command to discover a new message -- if that's the case, then the new mail alert is not played. The alert is only played when Mail.app uses the periodic polling to discover a new message.

Therefore, the solution is to turn off the IDLE command, and make the polling interval shorter. In Mail, open Preferences and go to Accounts » Advanced in all your mail accounts and turn off the Use IDLE command feature. Next, go to the General section of Preferences, and set Check for New Mail to Every minute -- you can set a longer interval if you want, so long as you don't set it to Manual.

Now your mail alerts should play for every incoming message, but you will see your...

If you prefer being able to focus on one application at a time, you may find this hint useful -- it sets the Dock to automatically hide every application other than the one you're switching into. So when you click on Mail, for instance, the effect is as though you activated Mail and then chose Mail -> Hide Others (or pressed Command-Option-H).

To enable this switching mode, open Terminal and type these commands:$ defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool TRUE$ killall DockFrom now on, clicking on an application in the Dock will hide all other open apps while switching to the selected application. You will not see this behavior if you use Command-Tab to switch, or click directly on another application's windows. To disable the feature, repeat the above commands, but replace TRUE with FALSE. (Alternatively, you can delete the entry entirely with defaults delete com.apple.dock single-app.) Remember to r...

No new hints today or tomorrow as I'll be spending the holiday with family and friends. Hope you and yours have a wonderful holiday season, and we'll be back as usual on Monday morning. -rob.

I am a system administrator on a small network of five servers with around 80 to 90 clients. Recently I wanted to image a group of 25 MacBooks to get them ready for staff to use. Searching the web, I found a lot of information about using SIU (System Image Utility). Based on my searching and my experiences, I'd like to offer up this "How to use SIU" how-to. Please note that this process is best done when the load on the server (from the users) is at it lowest. If done when you have users accessing the server, you will have complaints about things going slowly. So here goes...

1. Set up your client machine as you would like it. Install apps, download updates, and set up preferences for a user as you would like.
2. Once complete, restart while holding down the T key to boot the Mac into Target Disk Mode.
3. Attach a FireWire cable between your server and the client machine that has been configured. You should see the main disk of the client mount on the desktop of the se...