The bash shell used in the Terminal application can be tweaked a little for better interactive experience, by saving the following lines as .intputrc in your home directory:

via Advanced readline settings for bash in Terminal – Mac OS X Hints.

The behavior of ‘bash’ is changed by more files that .bash_profile. In particular, the ‘readline’ settings are found in .inputrc – bashed my head against the wall for a while on a system that didn’t ignore case on filename completion.

inputrc

completion-ignore-case

With iTunes 9.2 and iOS 4, the iBooks 1.1 app for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch can store and view PDF files, together with EPUB files. If you want to quickly add a document or a web page to your Books collection in iTunes, all you need to do is to create an alias of iTunes and drag it to ~/Library/PDF Services. Now, when youre browsing the web or viewing documents and you decide that you want to read them later on a portable Apple device just hit Print, click the PDF button on the bottom left corner of the window and choose iTunes. iTunes will launch and receive the PDF. Next, sync your device and youre ready to go.

via Send websites and docs to iBooks – Mac OS X Hints.

Fortunately Address Book lets you set a default email address to use for each contact in the group. What’s more, this is on a per-group basis, so you can use a contact’s work email for one group and their home email for another group, for example.To do all this, choose Edit > Edit Distribution List. Click a group in the left column, then go through each email address, clicking the address you want to use for each contact the selected address is in bold:

via Mac Address Book tips: 5 more handy hints — Reality Distortion: Macs, Mac OS X, and Apple stuff.

“Cliclick” is short for “Command-Line Interface Click”. It is a a tiny shell / Terminal application that will emulate mouse clicks or series of mouse clicks including doubleclicks and control-clicks at arbitrary screen coordinates.

via Cliclick – Carsten Blüm: Mac Development.

This is such a nifty little tool. Want that shell script to do something?

Of course in the words of John Lennon – “Imagine there is no right-click”

Click on the + (plus) sign to add a new account, with these settings:

Account Type is Jabber Account

Account name is your_user@chat.facebook.com, and enter your password

Click the drop-down arrow to reveal Server options. Enter chat.facebook.com as the server name.

Enter 5222 as the port and click Done.

Click Done again, and you are good to go.

via How to use Facebook Chat with iChat – Mac OS X Hints.

In iTunes, a very useful feature is the File » Show Duplicates menu item. As expected by its name, you can use this feature to help weed out duplicates from your iTunes library. However, many people (myself included) have different versions of songs, remixes and such, which will show up as duplicates when using this feature.

The solution is to hold down the option key prior to selecting this menu item. When you do, Show Duplicates changes to Show Exact Duplicates. In this mode, iTunes shows only true duplicates, and not remixes or alternate versions.

via Show only exact duplicate tracks in iTunes – Mac OS X Hints:

Oh this is so nice. I can get rid of a few (bunch) tunes that are replicants in so many ways.

This document explains how to reset the parameter random access memory (PRAM) and nonvolatile RAM (NVRAM) on Macintosh computers.

Important: If your computer does not retain parameter RAM (PRAM) settings when it is turned off, this generally indicates that the battery needs to be changed. Refer to Macintosh Family: Batteries and Part Numbers.

via Resetting your Mac’s PRAM and NVRAM.

There are several hints on this site for unmounting a partition at login, but a better way to make this happen can be used. You need to create an entry point in your filesystem table to tell the OS not to mount that specific volume, and this is relatively easy. In Mac OS X, and under Linux and others unix systems, the volume mounting configuration file is located in /etc/fstab. This file in Mac OS X Tiger is empty in Panther, its commented, but type man fstab in Terminal to read some important information.

via Prevent a given partition from mounting at boot – Mac OS X Hints.

it removes the signature from the original message

it removes certain unnecessary empty lines

it positions the cursor below the original message, instead of above it (in other words, bottom-posting instead of top-posting)

via quotefixformac – Project Hosting on Google Code.

W00T

defaults write com.apple.dock show-expose-menus -bool no; killall Dock

All credit for this hint goes to Jeff Johnson of Lap Cat Software, who blogged about the solution. This hint is a significant update to this one, which pointed out you can use Control-click to get the old-style contextual menus. [robg adds: To undo this behavior, you can either change no to yes in the above command, or delete the key entirely with defaults delete com.apple.dock show-expose-menus; killall Dock.]

via 10.6: Display contextual menus on Dock click-and-hold – Mac OS X Hints.

Snow Leopard not only lets you preview comma-separated value (.csv) files , but it displays them with table formatting. Try it out.

via 10.6: Quick Look generates tables for .csv files – Mac OS X Hints.

This one goes out to all the night owls. As much as I love my iMac, I was surprised to see how little control it gave me over the screen’s brightness. I often work on my iMac late at night in an otherwise darkened room, and even at the lowest brightness setting, the iMac is really, really bright. All of the Mac laptops I’ve used have the ability to dim the screen down to completely dark, but the iMac does not.

via Monitor too bright? Put on some Shades:

A debugger is a program that facilitates debugging, which may be casually defined as the process of finding and fixing “bugs” in the object of interest: usually a piece of software, firmware, or hardware (although debugging may apply to any domain).

via hfsdebug: A Debugger for HFS Plus Volumes.

The Mac OS X world is different. For version 10.5 and later you do the following

# Create the mapping
sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Hosts/x.y.z IPAddress 127.0.0.1
# flush the cache
sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

# Delete a mapping
sudo dscl localhost -delete /Local/Default/Hosts/x.y.z
sudo dscacheutil -flushcache


My daughter’s music CD for her skating short program got badly scratched and because it was the last-but-one copy as skater you need many copies, in case you loose/forget/scratch/misplace it,  I was confronted with the task to create a new copy. Rather than starting Nero on Win-XP notebook, I have decided to learn finally how to do it on Mac. It must be simple, intuititive and much easier than on Windows. Right ? Wrong To my big surprise, there was no easy, idiot proof, very obvious way mac-ish drag and drop way how to acomplish it. It was not exactly hard either, but it actually took consulting the omniviscent Google to find it out. To save the search for the next time, I’ll write it down. Here is what you have to do:

1 Create a disk image from source CD

Insert the source CD the one you want to copy

Open the Finder, open Applications, then Utilities, and start the Disk Utility program

In Disk Utility, select File -> New -> Disk Image from Folder

The Finder will appear – select whole CD and click on the Image button

A new dialog box will appear. In the Where box, choose Desktop. In the Image Format box, choose DVD/CD master

Click Save

Now a new file will be created on your Desktop, titled the name of your CD with a “.cdr” extension. This file is a disk image of your CD. Btw, it works even if you do not select cdr format and write disk as generic Disk Image .dmg.

Now you need to burn it on new, blank CD:

2 Create new CD from a disk image

Eject your original CD from the CD drive

Return to the Disk Utility program.

You should now see the disk image of your CD on the left hand side, typically at the bottom of the list. Select the image, and then click on the Burn button

Follow the directions and insert a black CD-R disc when prompted

You can repeat step 2 as many time you need, of course . Next time I am going to use the image, of course assumed that it will be still the same music. Thanks to Spotlight magic, I am sure I will be able to find it, because I used proper, descriptive and obvious name “track 86.cdr”. Just kidding .

What do you think – why did not Apple make this process easier – as they did for many other chores ? Has it maybe anything to do with the fact that copying CD can be and quite often is used for copyright violation activities ?

via How to duplicate CD on a Mac « Miro’s World.

As with any other network service, Screen Sharing has a set of virtual “ports” which isolate network traffic for that protocol since it and web traffic and other network services are all using the same IP address and connections. These ports must be opened in all network devices for all computers involved in the screen sharing sessions. This means firewalls on the local computer, as well as any routers or hardware firewalls must also be set up to pass traffic on the following ports:

TCP: 5900 – 5902, (3389 for connecting to Windows machines)

UDP: 4500 (for Back to My Mac users)

Depending on the network devices used, these ports can either be opened completely, or forwarded to the local IP address for the desired computer, but you will have to consult the documentation for your router to see about how to change these ports. Additionally, if your router supports “UPNP” (Universal Plug & Play) or “NAT-PMP” (NAT Port Mapping Protocol), then it should work for Back to My Mac. The list of routers in this Apple Knowledgebase article are some that support Back to My Mac and other screen sharing.

via Tutorial: Screen Sharing in Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5): How it works and how it doesn’t – MacFixIt.

I really need to get around to making the firewall behave for screen sharing.

declare -f - functions+body
declare -F - functions


via macosxhints.com – 10.5: Disable searching for support articles in Help Viewer .

When using iChat with NAT routers and firewalls, certain ports must be open to allow video and audio conferencing behind a firewall. Some devices have these ports open by default, while others require configuration.

via Using iChat with a firewall or NAT router.