I was tasked with setting up a company's new printers and had to struggle with creating a default set presets that also used a PIN number login for accounting. This needed to be pushed out to the current user base, in real time, and without interrupting anyone's ability to print. Here's how I did it.
Tools:
CUPS server web interface to set the printer defaults
ARD to install the drivers
lpadmin to add the printer (We're using LPD on a Windows 2008 R2 server)
ARD to copy the cups PPDs
1. Create the default settings:
In Terminal, run this command: sudo cupsctl WebInterface=yes
In a web browser, go to: http://localhost:631/admin
A new feature in the latest update to OS X Server is a caching server. This is designed to cache files in setups with multiple users so files only need to be downloaded once from the internet (or from the Mac App Store, iTunes Store, etc.). Files are cached locally, so users can save time getting downloads.
Apple has published a technical note explaining how to configure the caching server. You can set a limit to the amount of disk space used for the cache, you can choose a location for the cache, set the number of concurrent clients accessing it and much more.
This looks like a valuable feature for any organization running OS X Server.
This recently published "File : / / /" bug (see this Macworld article for an explanation) is a huge problem and can be seriously exploited to crash Mac apps, especially Messages. If someone sends you an iMessage (from an iOS device to Messages for Mac), Messages will continually crash, rendering it completely useless.
This is a Warning - please DO NOT SEND a message with that content over iMessage. I do not suggest you test this bug. However, despite these warnings, trolling people will still send it to crash their friend's message machines.
Below are three fixes to make iMessage workable again:
FIRST (and easiest): Send 30-40 (lines of) iMessages back to the sender. The idea here is to lengthen the iMessage log so that the File : / / / message is not loaded when Messages starts up. You can either send these from an iOS device or from a Share button, such as the one in Safari. Continue trying until you can open iMessage again. Then, delete the conversation with Command+Delete.
SECOND: Remove the "chat.db" message database from ~/Library/Messages. This will remove all Messages conversations.
THIRD: Edit "chat.db" to delete the offending message. You will need to do this with an sqlite editor not subject to the crash (most that I tried do not crash). The message will be found in the "messages" table.
[kirkmc adds: This is, indeed, a serious bug, and it's quite simple to send a denial of service attack to someone using Messages. As the poster said, do not try this juts for fun. You may want to try it in other apps just to see that the crash does, indeed, occur, but at your risk and peril. It's really quite surprising that a bug of this nature got through Apple's QA...]
If you want to send an email via the Gmail iOS app containing the URL and title of a web page, you can't simply use the Share button. But you can use a bookmarklet, as posted by Federico Viticci on MacStories. Save the following bookmarklet in your browser:
Select it from your browser, and it will open the Gmail app, and create a new email with the title of the web page as the subject, and the URL in the body of the message. Note that this may not work if the Gmail app is not paused in the background.
I'm affected by a mild form of phonemic deafness: the part of my brain in charge of translating sound into words doesn't work perfectly. Therefore, understanding spoken language is more difficult for me than for the average human, even in my mother tongue (Italian). Nevertheless, I've been always fascinated by languages, and I have learned to read in a few of them.
With the advent of the DVD, movies and TV series in their original language have become available and I'm using them as a mean to improve my comprehension. Usually, I try to understand the dialogues without using subtitles, but sometimes I need to look at them (if possible, in the language of the audio track) for a while. Apple's DVD Player allows me to do so, but you need to issue a series of commands using the controller or the menus to turn them on. However, it is possible to automate this process, causing the video to scrub backwards a little, activate the chosen subtitles and start the playback again.
As a first step, you must create a new service in Automator with a single action: "Run Applescript" (located in "Utilities"). Input the following script:
tell application "DVD Player"
rewind dvd
delay 1 -- approximate rewind time in seconds
pause dvd
set subtitle to 1 -- to choose first item of available subtitles
play dvd
end tell
Select the options "Service receives no input" and "in any application".
The number after "delay" controls the amount of back-scrubbing; you may try different values to fit your taste, and "set subtitle to 1" enables the first set of available subtitles.
Save the service with an appropriate name and open the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of System Preference's Keyboard pane. Select "Services" in the leftmost section and add a keyboard shortcut that suits you for the newly created service.
You may duplicate the process above, changing "set subtitle to 1" with "set subtitle to 2", etc. to create commands that select other sets of subtitles.
As a last step, create a service with the following AppleScript:
tell application "DVD Player"
set subtitle to 0
end tell
You may have seen the news: the latest update to the Apple TV (2nd generation or later) allows you to use a Bluetooth keyboard. This makes searching for things much easier; the non-keyboard interface is slow and clunky. If you want to use a Bluetooth keyboard with your Apple TV, you can see this Apple technical document which explains how to set up a Bluetooth keyboard with an Apple TV, how to disconnect the keyboard, and how to troubleshoot common problems.
Safari displays emoji perfectly: on web pages, in tabs, and in the titlebar (if emoji are used in a page title). This makes it unique amongst the main OS X browsers: Firefox displays them in the title bar but not in tabs or on the page, while Chrome displays them in tabs but not on the page. There's a screenshot on my blog where I discuss this in more detail (the blog posting is an example that can be used to test browsers).
I played around a little with encoding settings in Firefox and Chrome but couldn't fix it. Maybe others will have more luck.
One issue I'm not clear about is what's required on the web backend to display emoji. UTF-16 encoding? Does anyone know?
[kirkmc adds: It even works here, with Geeklog. 😄]
I am not sure if it is new to iTunes 11 or not, but you can use a two-finger swipe on the trackpad while the mouse pointer is over the track progress bar in the iTunes LCD to scrub forward and backward. This is available in MplayerX for scrubbing in movies. It seems faster than pressing and holding the next button either on iTunes or on the keyboard. The same gesture also applies to the volume controller on iTunes.
Also, since mouse scrolling is passed to a window as long as the pointer is over it, even if another window in focus, you can use this reduce iTunes volume with no clicks at all. However, the iTunes mini player does not display either the seek bar or the volume controller so it can be used for either.
[kirkmc adds: We've run a hint about using the scroll wheel mouse for this, and another one about using a two-finger swipe in QuickTime Player. I don't recall if this was possible in iTunes 10. It's worth noting that the cursor has to be precisely over the progress bar or the volume slider for this to work.]
I was on the road for a bit the other day, and when I left home at noon, my iPhone's battery was about 95% full. About 4 hours later, I saw it was down to about 25%, and I wondered what it could have been doing to deplete the battery so much. I thought of the usual culprits, like brightness (it's not at the maximum), Bluetooth (it seems well behaved with iOS 6, going in standby mode when not in use), or push email. Then I looked at which apps were open. I quit them all, including Skype. An hour later, my battery had only dropped another 5%.
When I came home, I did some googling, thinking it could be Skype, or it could be another app. I came across a Skype forum post where someone said they lost 70% in four hours, just like me. There were no other apps running that would have been keeping a connection open, so it's safe to say - given the vast number of people who have commented on the relationship between Skype and poor battery life - that there is a link.
So, if you use Skype, and see bad battery life on your iPhone, try quitting the app and see if this improves things. I haven't done any scientific testing, but there seem to be enough people who have this problem to suggest that Skype may be the culprit.
If you save an attachment from an e-mail message, and later need to find exactly which message it came from but cannot remember which it was, it can be done with a little bit of work.
First, select the file in the Finder and open its Info window by pressing Command-I. In the More Info section, you should see the file's "Where from" information. This will list the sender's name and address and the subject line of the message that the file was originally attached to. You can first use this information to try searching in Mail for the message. Many times, that's all you'll need to do.
However, if that doesn't cut it for you - for example, you have multiple revisions of a file that were sent back and forth in a series of messages, and you need to determine which came from which - there is one more bit of metadata in the "Where from" information that can solve that for you.
Copy the part of the "Where from" information that looks something like this:
message:%3CCD253A37.36E7E%25sender@example.com%3E
Switch to Safari and paste that into the address field. Mail will activate and show you the message (assuming it still exists).
[kirkmc adds: Nice hint, but it doesn't always work for me. The Where from information is often truncated, and I can't copy the entire path as shown above. However, there's another way to do this: in Terminal, type mdls, press the spacebar, then drag the file to the Terminal window and press Return. This displays all the Spotlight metadata for the file. You'll find the Where from section near the bottom, and you can copy it in its entirety there, then paste it into Safari.
And I'm thinking that someone should be able to create an AppleScript that parses this information with a bit of grep, then sends it to Safari, hence making it possible to create a droplet which will do the trick. Anyone?]
