The latest version of Parallels Desktop apparently has the sleazy feature of displaying ads, even though you've paid for the software. Simone Magnelli tweeted a defaults command that you can use to turn them off:
Now I don't use Parallels - I use VMware Fusion - and I'm glad I don't. I haven't tested this, so if someone could confirm that it works, and post in the comments, I'd appreciate it.
In Lion Safari, you'd see an RSS button whenever you landed on a web site that had an RSS feed. This was a great way to quickly subscribe to that feed: just click the button and your newsreader would open and you could add the feed as a subscription.
Safari in Mountain Lion does not have that button, but developer Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software has created a Subscribe to Feed Safari Extension. As Jalkut describes it, this extension "adds a handy button to the toolbar that, when a page offers RSS or Atom feeds, can be clicked to easily open the feed:// link, which should automatically open your favorite news reader."
Jalkut says that it's a beta, but it seems to work just fine in my tests.
You can easily pause the Notification Center in one click. Press the Option key while clicking on the Notification icon in the right end of the menu bar. This will pause the display of notifications until the next day. To reactivate Notification Center, you can Option-click the same icon again, or you can display notifications at the right of the screen by clicking on the Notification Center icon, then toggle the Show Alerts and Banners switch from Off to On.
Before OS X Mountain Lion, you could drag an icon out of the dock and and it would disappear when you let go of it. This also used to work with the Finder's sidebar entries, but Apple has removed both of these in Mountain Lion.
With Mountain Lion's Finder sidebar, you have to right-click an entry and choose Remove from Sidebar from the contextual menu.
It might appear that this is now the only way of removing icons from Mountain Lion's dock, too. But I discovered that if you drag an icon out of the dock, then hold it anywhere for a second, the first frame of the "poof" animation appears next to the cursor. When you release the mouse button, the icon will disappear.
This is a nice touch to prevent users from accidentally removing icons from the dock.
[kirkmc adds: This irked me when I finally installed the Mountain Lion GM on my main Mac. I didn't come across this drag-and-hold-a-second thing, and it's good to know. The Finder sidebar bit is annoying, and maybe the same trick will eventually work there.]
This is definitely hint-worthy. One of the really great features that I missed in Lion is back in Mountain Lion. Originally described in this hint, you can set keyboard shortcuts for outgoing e-mail accounts.
Go to the Keyboard pane of System Preferences, then click on Application Shortcuts. Click on the + icon, and choose Mail from the Application menu. Then, enter the exact name of your account as it appears in the From popup menu when you create a new message. It will look like this:
First_name Last_name <my_email@my_host>
Make sure to include the angle brackets, and put a space before the first one. Choose a shortcut -- I chose Command-Option-Control and a letter for each account -- then click Add.
To use this, create a new message in Mail. If the default account isn't the one you want, just press your shortcut to set the message to go from a different account. You can set shortcuts for all you accounts, or merely one or two, if you have a lot.
We ran a hint last month about opening the current Safari page in Chrome, but Padraic Renaghan came up with a nice AppleScript that he uses to open the page in Chrome via a LaunchBar action.
property theURL : ""
tell application "Safari"
set theURL to URL of current tab of window 1
end tell
if appIsRunning("Google Chrome") then
tell application "Google Chrome"
if (count of (every window where visible is true)) is greater than 0 then
-- running with a visible window, ready for new tab
else
-- running but no visible window, so create one
make new window
end if
end tell
else
tell application "Google Chrome"
-- chrome app not running, so start it
do shell script "open -a \"Google Chrome\""
end tell
end if
-- now that we have made sure chrome is running and has a visible
-- window create a new tab in that window
-- and activate it to bring to the front
tell application "Google Chrome"
tell front window
make new tab with properties {URL:theURL}
end tell
activate
end tell
on appIsRunning(appName)
tell application "System Events" to (name of processes) contains appName
end appIsRunning
property theURL : ""
tell application "Safari"
set theURL to URL of current tab of window 1
end tell
if appIsRunning("Google Chrome") then
tell application "Google Chrome"
make new window
set URL of active tab of window 0 to theURL
activate
end tell
else
tell application "Google Chrome"
do shell script "open -a \"Google Chrome\""
set URL of active tab of window 0 to theURL
activate
end tell
end if
on appIsRunning(appName)
tell application "System Events" to (name of processes) contains appName
end appIsRunning
With the former, you save the script with any name you want, and type an abbreviation in LaunchBar to activate it. With the second script, you set a TextExpander abbreviation to run the script, and just type the abbreviation. Both of these scripts could be used in other applications: other launchers like LaunchBar, and other snippet expanders like TextExpander, as long as they support AppleScripts. Both are nice ways to quickly open a Safari page in Chrome.
OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is due to be released any day now (perhaps tomorrow, according to some rumors). So it's time for the obligatory new OS poll. When will you be installing Mountain Lion? Will you install it at all? Feel free to comment, as usual, with reasons for or against.
This is a hint about phantom NFS shares that may linger on your system long after you stopped accessing the share, and that may cause slowdowns and errors with various disk utilities. The information here applies to Lion, and may differ in earlier and later versions.
I used to have a NAS device that I named "dns323," and which was visible in the Finder as an NFS share. (The unit used a Linux-formatted disk.) In the past few months, whenever I used the excellent Yasu system maintenance utility, it would report an error message, saying that the file "dns323" wasn't found. I eventually realized that this problem started when I stopped using that NAS device. I also noticed that Find Any File was starting very slowly; and when I used Find Any File to see if it could find any trace of "dns323," it listed the file in its results list, but said that the item had disappeared.
I eventually realized that there was a directory named "dns323" in my user folder, but that directory wasn't visible in the Finder, even if I made invisible files visible. The directory name was visible in Terminal, but if I tried to cd into it, I got a message saying "Connection refused." None of the standard Unix commands for deleting a directory had any effect; I typically got a message saying "Resource busy" when I tried.
Eventually, with the help of the experts on the forum on this site, I found that "dns323" was listed in the table of mounts that appeared in Terminal when I entered typed the df command. The dns323 item was listed as "map -static" which, as I understand from other posts, means that it's a mount that isn't actually mounted, but which the system has ready for mounting when needed.
After a lot of other effort, I finally discovered what was creating this phantom mount. There was a .plist file in this folder: /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/mounts. The .plist file contained a name that was something like 10.0.1.8%2Fmnt_a2.plist (I'm writing that from memory); the name began with the IP address that the share had when I used it.
I didn't try deleting or moving this plist file while running OS X normally, but I think (on the basis of other postings in other forums about similar files) I could have used sudo rm <filename> to delete it. Instead I booted into single-user mode and moved the file to another location where I could restore it if needed (although I didn't need it). I then booted normally again, opened Terminal and entered rmdir ~/dns323, which was successful.
After this, Find Any File started working at top speed again, and Yasu stopped reporting an error. If file utilities and directory listings seem sluggish on your system, then it may be worth looking for files that create phantom shares in the directory listed above.
Sometimes it is necessary to upload an unzipped folder to Dropbox because some PC users can have problems with opening a file zipped on a Mac. However, you can't make a public link from an unzipped folder in Dropbox.
Here's a solution for creating a link to an unzipped folder that you can send to another user so they can download the folder.
Launch the Dropbox website, from the Dropbox menu in your menu bar, or by logging in to Dropbox in your browser.
Click on the Public Folder; its contents will display in your browser window).
Select the folder for which you want the link; don't click on the folder's name, but to the right of it. The selection will turn blue.
Click the Get Link icon above the folder list. A popup window will appear.
Close the popup window by clicking the x icon in the top-right corner.
In the browser window that is open, click on the folder for which you want the link. The browser window will show the content of your folder.
Copy the link in the address bar and paste it in your e-mail.
Immediately after the pasted URL add: ?dl=1
When the recipients of your e-mail click on the link, a browser window will open and the folder will automatically download into their computer, zipped in a format that even Windows users can open.
[kirkmc adds: This does work. However, it seems like a bit of a workaround. I'd find it a lot easier to simply find a tool that zips archives so Windows users don't have problems. However, if you already have files in your Public folder, this can be a good way to give access to a folder's worth of them.]
I needed to restart a backup for one of my Macs, which had an 800 GB disk image on my Time Capsule. It turned out to be impossible to delete the disk image - in Finder, it would just not move to the Trash, even after waiting for several hours.
I was looking for advice and most of the suggestions involved reformatting the Time Capsule, but I couldn't do this, as I had other Macs being backed up there.
I looked for a way to do this from the command line. The Time Machine disk image - a sparsebundle, a special type of disk image that can increase in size as needed - is actually a package, which has "bands" inside, many smaller files that are named hexadecimally. In this case, there were thousands of them. So many, that even deleting them from the command line didn't work - commands like rmfind limitations in the lengths of lists parsed by recursion or wildcards, so a basic command like rm -f didn't work.
I ended up writing a little script, which removes the files one by one. The biggest trick here is actually the %x switch which changes $i into a hexadecimal number.
You can then either copy and save something like this as a shell script:
for i in {0..1000000}
do
rm -rv /Volumes/Your Network\ Disk/Your\ Mac.sparsebundle/bands/$(printf "%x" $i)
Done
where you replace Your\ Network\ Disk and Your\ Mac with your details.
Or, you can copy and paste this line into Terminal:
for i in {0..1000000}; do rm -rv
then add a space, then drag and drop the disk image, and then (you might need to remove one space this time) add:
/bands/$(printf "%x" $i); done
Then just watch the bands being deleted, and when the script starts deleting non-existing bands, just kill it with ctrl-X.
With no bands, the sparsebundle gets deleted immediately.
[kirkmc adds: I haven't tested this. My first thought was that this seemed like overkill, but corresponding with the submitter made me realize the extent of the problem. Here is some more information on this limitation.]
