The key to cloning parental controls with ARD is niutil, the command line utility for netinfo. This works for Tiger (and probably Panther), but will not work in Leopard as Apple has finally banished netinfo from Leopard.

Read on for the how-to...

You may have read the title to this hint and thought "Huh? How can that possibly work? How does the system know which command to run when you type the shortcut? And why would you want to do this?" A bit more explanation is required to see the benefit of this hint: it's for use with menu items whose names change after they've been selected.

In this case, I wanted an easier way to toggle the display of smileys off and on in iChat (because iChat replaces =$ with a "dollar sign smiley face," meaning that pasted code often looks quite odd). Disabling smileys is done with View » Messages » Hide Smileys. Easy enough to assign that to Control-S, for example, in the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences panel. But once you've hidden smileys, that menu item becomes Show Smileys, and the keyboard shortcut vanishes. On a lark, I tried assigning Show Smileys the same Control-S shortcut... I was fully expecting OS X to tell me that I couldn't assign Control-S again, as it had already been assigned to another function in iChat. But no such error message appeared, as you can see in the image above. This works perfectly -- Control-S toggles smileys both off and then back on again.

This should work in any application that has menu items whose names change based on the status of the feature they control. However, I've only tested it in iChat -- and only on 10.5, so I'm not sure if this works in 10.4, too.

Following up on the Numbers chart on the Dashboard hint, the same method can be applied to any data that you can take a picture of: [robg adds: The main difference between this hint and the Keynote hint is that this image will be static -- it will obviously only reflect what you took a screenshot of. In the Keynote hint, if you modify the chart in Keynote, then the web clip image will change when you save the file (as long as you have the chart as the active slide when saving).]

I don't know why this works, but it does seem to work like magic: When you have an application hang, try launching Activity Monitor. When I do this, especially with hangs in Photoshop, within seconds, the application resumes. Sometimes I've waited and waited, as long as maybe 10 minutes or more, for an application to come out of the "beach ball" mode on its own. Then, after launching Activity Monitor, I would hear the hard drive churn, and the application would become responsive again.

This works on both my Mac Pro (Intel) and my PowerBook G4 at home. I have no clue why it works. I know it doesn't seem to make sense, why an application that monitors processes would have any effect on them. But it works like a charm many times. Of course, there are times when it doesn't work either, but it's worth a shot.

[robg adds: This is the first I've heard of Activity Monitor releasing an app from beach ball land through the simple act of running it. If anyone else has had similar experiences, please share.]

I just noticed purely by accident that after invoking Exposé's All Windows mode, I can roll the scroll ball on the Mighty Mouse and the selection 'cursor' (the one showing which window will become active) moves about the available windows in a predictable, if not intuitive, manner.

The settings in the Desktop & Screen Saver System Preferences panel are among several that don't stick when you move an OS X startup drive to a Mac that you've never connected the drive to before. These settings are at ~/Library » Preferences » ByHost » com.apple.screensaver.0011aa2233cc.plist, where 0011aa2233cc is the Ethernet ID of the Mac's primary Ethernet port (en0), also known as the MAC (Media Access Control) address, which is a number unique to each Mac.

The ByHost folder will gather a collection of plists for other preference panes, applications, etc., all with names containing the Ethernet ID specific to every Mac it's seen. One purpose for this is to allow you to have your user folder stored on a network, letting you have different preferences for each Mac that accesses that home folder. However, this makes it inconvenient when you have a utility drive that you connect to any number of Macs that those Macs haven't seen before. For instance, you'll see that the screen saver kicks in after the default 15 minutes of idle time after you start up the drive on the next Mac, regardless of what setting you chose when the drive was connected to the last Mac you used it with.

I've always wanted to have a fully encrypted memory stick which when plugged in, OS X would automatically ask me for a password before mounting it. As far as I know (and from what tests I carried out), it's not possible to create an encrypted disk image and overwrite the entire device with it.

My solution involves placing a hidden encrypted disk image on a device, hiding the volume itself so it doesn't show up in the desktop, and applying a Folder Action to the /Volumes folder which takes care of mounting the encrypted image when the device is plugged in, and unmounting the device when the encrypted image is ejected.

No Terminal access necessary: an AppleScript droplet for preparing the device, the Folder Action AppleScript, and an AppleScript for restoring the device are provided here.

The scripts are tested in 10.5.1, but they really should work in Tiger as well. Only known issue: if you hit Cancel when asked for the password to mount the encrypted image, you will have to unmount the device through Disk Utility, as it's not accessible via the Finder. However, it's not hard to create a 'cleanup' AppleScript that does this.

[robg adds: Typically, I'd host these scripts on macosxhints as well. In this case, however, due to their complexity and the chance of their changing in the future, I'm leaving them linked via the external site. I haven't tested these scripts. One other solution to do this came up just yesterday -- TrueCrypt is a free program that's now available for OS X. Using TrueCrypt, you can apparently encrypt an entire USB memory stick, for instance. I haven't tested it, however (I believe it uses MacFUSE to do some of its magic).]

I accidentally found this bug today. I was in TextEdit and hit my F11 (Exposé - Show Desktop) key by mistake when I was reaching for the Delete key. So I hit the F11 key again to bring back my work, and found out that if you hit the F11 key and then hit any qwerty keys (including the Delete key) it will affect any document, or even text input areas in a web browser.

I tested this in TextEdit, Safari, Adium, and Word on 10.5 and 10.4. So if you use F11, be careful not to press any qwerty keys while in that mode.

Those who manage large installed bases of Macs need to maintain one or more local administrative accounts on the machines, for remote administration, maintenance or troubleshooting. But, it can be undesirable to list an obvious administrator account in the Loginwindow; that same account hangs in the Fast User Switching menu, and in the Accounts Preference Pane. What to do?

Much experimentation, and some lucky finds on the Internet, have turned up the configuration to hide a user account on 10.5, and in later versions of 10.4.

In early versions of Tiger, it was easy to hide an administrator account. As per this hint, adding the array HiddenUsersList to com.apple.loginwindow with the account or accounts to be hidden was enough. But, with Leopard, this is no longer sufficient. Accounts can be hidden well enough using a HiddenUsersList entry, but the login window and Fast User Switching menu will contain an entry for "Other...," advertising the fact that one or more hidden user accounts is lingering on the system. How to get around this?

Recently I re-intalled Tiger from scratch on my old iBook G3. I let Apple's Software Update download all the relevant updates, and after the necessary restarts, I tried to mount a disk image. To my surprise, both the Finder and the Disk utility came up with an error (0xe00002c9) and refused to mount the disk image. I tried other disk images with the same result.

After some googling and searching in the Apple support forums, I came up with the following remedy: you need to manually download and install the latest Security Update (009 as of this writing) and then restart (naturally). I can only guess that this is an issue of a corrupt download from Software Update, since this security update was already installed automatically.

[robg adds: You can find the Security Update on Apple's Support Downloads page. This doesn't seem to be a universal problem (or else there would have been a major uproar about it), but there are quite a few matches to a Google query on the error code -- so hopefully this fix helps someone else out of a jam.]