If you want to set the volume below the minimum volume control level, but still have it audible, do the following. Turn the volume down to 0 bars (absolutely down) manually, but don't hit the Mute key. Then press the Mute key, which OS X will interpret as "unmute" as the volume is set to zero, and voila. The sound should still be going, but very quietly.
[robg adds: This seems to work as described on my Mac Pro with external speakers. The on-screen sound icon shows zero dots on the sound scale, yet there's definitely audible music coming from the speakers. If I then hit the Mute key, the sound completely vanishes.]
I set up an old Apple IIc as a terminal for my Mac mini; you can read the full details of the project in this post. The basic steps involved are as follows:
Connect the Apple II serial cable to a Serial-USB Adaptor
$ cd /dev
$ ls tty.*
tty.KeySerial1
Load terminal emulation software on Apple IIc
Use screen to connect and run getty
$ screen /dev/ttys.KeySerial1
Ctrl-A, Shift-: and then exec ::: /usr/libexec/getty std.1200
Ideally one should configure getty to run via ttys, yet something (USB controller?) hangs on the two different Mac Minis I've tried this on, mucking things up. However, a benifit of using screen is the ability to cut-and-paste between machines.
[robg adds: Definitely not your normal OS X hint, and there are obviously many easier solutions. Still, putting an old Apple ][ to work like this is pretty cool.]
I frequently record Keynote presentations I give using my Mac (using ProfCast). Typically I use a wireless lapel mic and have my sound preferences pane set to record from Line In. However, on occasion I forget to turn on my mic, or the battery is dead, and so I get nothing but silence. In these instances, I'd like to be able to use my PowerBook's internal mic as a backup, so I set about finding a method using AppleScript to accomplish this.
I eventually got something working with the help of a freeware program called AudioLeak that monitors the RMS sound level of the selected input source. Together with a little GUI scripting, I can have my Mac try to connect to Line In, but switch to the internal mic if the line is dead. Here's the final script.
I have this script embedded in a droplet, so that I drag a Keynote file onto the droplet and it runs this script along with some other stuff I want to do just before starting a presentation (i.e. check monitor resolution, hide all other apps, etc), and then launch the file in Keynote. Alternatively, you could have this script run periodically using iCal or cron or an idle handler.
In addition to AudioLeak, you'll need to have GUI scripting enabled (in System Preferences » Universal Access).
The web, as it currently stands, is basically an unmanaged environment. But that might change with Safari for Windows and future versions of Firefox. Calibrating your monitor will be more and more important if this turns out to be true. So I thought I might share something that I've learned from calibrating current large LCDs.
Eyeballs are no replacement for hardware calibration, but they are free and readily available, as is Apple's ColorSync Display Calibrator. The problem is that monitors have come a long way in recent years, but Apple's software is essentially a port from OS 8 and haven't changed much since. The Apple logo and grey background were fine for 800x600 and 1024x768 days, but look pretty small on 1920x1200.
If you change the resolution to 640x480 before calibrating, you get two advantages: One, the Display Calibrator takes the entire screen; two, the image gets blurry and you don't have to squint as much in order to blend the Apple logo with the background. I found that changing the resolution led to a much better result. Just remember to choose Hide Others from the Apple menu before changing the resolution, or else you'll end up with lots of tiny windows everywhere when you get back to your native resolution.
I've used a simple collection of apps called ScreenShotApps (30-Mar-2005 zip file on that site) and Spark to create hot keys for different types of screenshots -- PICT, PDF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, and TIFF are all a keyboard shortcut away.
After expanding the ScreenShotApps bundle, store the bundled mini-programs on your hard drive, then use Spark to assign each to a keyboard shortcut. I've chosen to use Shift-Command and the number keys. So Shift-Command-1 gets a full screen PICT, -3 is a PDF, -5 is a JPEG, etc. I use -2, -4, and -6 for selected region screenshots in those same formats. As with the built-in screenshot tool, you can add the Space Bar for object capture, or Control to capture to clipboard.
I've explained this all in more detail in this PDF.
[robg adds: taketo's native language is not English, so I've rewritten the above hint based on my understanding of the process from his original submission. I have not done any work on the PDF, however, but it's still quite easy to follow along. The ScreenShotApps site is very slow to load, but it will eventually show up. I haven't tested this myself on 10.4; it worked for the author on 10.3.]
After experimenting with certain scripts to tile windows and reduce screen cluttering distraction, I wrote the following AppleScript and assigned it to Control-W with Quicksilver:
property maxWindowWidth : 1000
tell application "Finder"
set screenSize to bounds of window of desktop
set availScreenWidth to item 3 of screenSize
set availScreenHeight to item 4 of screenSize
end tell
tell application "System Events"
set dockProps to property list file "~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist"
set dockSide to the value of the property list item "orientation" of dockProps
set dockTileSize to the value of the property list item "tilesize" of dockProps
end tell
if dockSide is "bottom" then
set availScreenHeight to availScreenHeight - (dockTileSize + 10)
end if
set sideMargin to (availScreenWidth - maxWindowWidth) / 2
tell application "System Events"
set myFrontMost to name of first item of (processes whose frontmost is true)
end tell
if myFrontMost is "Finder" then
set myTopCorr to 22
else
set myTopCorr to 0
end if
try
tell application myFrontMost
set allWindows to (every window where visible is true)
set n to count of allWindows
set windowOffset to 0
repeat with x from 1 to n
set windowOffset to 20 * (x - 1)
tell window x
set bounds to {sideMargin + windowOffset, 30 + myTopCorr + windowOffset, (availScreenWidth - sideMargin) + windowOffset, availScreenHeight - (n + 1 - x) * 20}
end tell
set x to x + 1
if x is equal to (n + 1) then exit repeat
end repeat
end tell
end try
You can adjust the width of the resulting tiled windows by changing the value of maxWindowWidth at the top of the script.
[robg adds: If you've never moved your dock to one side of the screen or the other, the above script will fail (because the 'orientation' key won't exist in the Dock's preferences file). The fix is to move the dock to one side, then move it back, and this will work as described. I'm sure there are AppleScript solutions that could check for the key's existence before trying to extract it, but such solutions are beyond my limited AppleScript skills.]
I have been having issues with my keychains where the "XXX app has been updated. Do you want to allow the new version to access the same keychains?" dialog would keep coming up -- even after clicking Change All. No matter what I would do, the window would come back and end up hanging forever, forcing me to reboot.
After hours of frustration I found this article on unsanity.org that contained the fix. Open Terminal and type:
Although security on a Mac is debated heavily by both sides, I prefer to stay safe and use a standard account for my day-to-day uses, and an extra Administrator account for my, well, administrative uses. The thing that bugs me is that every time I log in, I see a this big login option, Administrator, and that easily tells someone that is physically stealing my notebook that he needs to crack the admin account, and not mine, to hack my system. I prefer to hide the admin account, but I don't really like to use the Terminal.
So, to the hint: from what I've seen, if you create an account named Administrator with a short name of Admin, the computer will automatically hide the account for you. However, this only works when the new Administrator account is the only administrator account in the system.
[robg adds: I tested this hint, and (somewhat to my surprise), it does work. Case matters, though -- make sure you capitalize the short name! In order to have the account auto-hidden, it does need (or so it seems at first) to be the only admin account. My first test failed, and that's because it was the second admin account on the machine. I then converted my standard admin account into a regular account, then created the new Administrator account. On my next login, the Administrator account wasn't listed in the login screen.
However, after logging in as the new admin, I then switched my standard account back to administrator and logged out. This time, the Administrator account stayed hidden. So it seems it has to be the only admin account when it's created, but after that, it will remain hidden if you add additional administrators.]
I was in a hurry trying to back up my iPhoto Library to an external Firewire 400 drive, and was disappointed to see that the Finder was going to take almost an hour to back up all 11GB of pictures I had. I went into Activity Monitor to see just how slowly the Finder was going, and found it was copying at 8MB/sec, with the Finder taking 60% of my PowerBook G4's CPU. So I canceled the copy, opened up Terminal.app, and executed the following command:
Activity Monitor showed cp using only 20% CPU, and maxing out my drives at 23MB/sec! What would have taken an eternity in the Finder took only 15 minutes, thanks to Terminal.
NOTE: If you need to copy files with resource forks, install the Developer Tools and use CpMac (in /Developer » Tools) instead of cp.
[robg adds: On a faster machine, I'm not sure there will be much difference in the speed -- I did a quick test on the Mac Pro (using a 3.22GB folder with a few thousand files spread through 160 folders), and both methods took about the same amount of time. In addition to the resource fork issue, note that cp won't copy OS X alias files; it just throws an error message during the copy.
ditto (included with OS X), however, seems to copy them just fine, and handles resource forks automatically. So I tested again with ditto instead of cp. Whereas the time gap with cp wasn't really measurable, ditto was about 15 seconds quicker than the Finder on my 3.2GB test copy. So if I were copying a huge folder, I'd probably try ditto, as it could save a few minutes of copying time.]
Yesterday my keyboard suddenly stopped working in anything except for authentication dialogs and the Dock (Command-Tab, Exposé, etc.). I think System Preferences had crashed while I was opening it, but I can't be sure. Luckily I had a second account I use for emergencies such as this, and so I switched across to it. The keyboard worked fine in this account.
I then went through the troubleshooting steps of renaming the Preferences folder in my broken account (using sudo in Terminal) and logging back in, but that didn't fix the problem. Renaming the Library folder, and even trying the same on my home directory, didn't fix the problem. Searching on Google produced only one hit in German. When "translated" with Google, the match suggested that reinstalling the latest combo updater might do the trick. Luckily it did.
I'm posting the information here so that if anyone else who doesn't speak German has the problem, the solution might be easier to find. The other error message you can see in the console.log is TSMProcessRawKeyCode failed (-192). I'd love to know what the problem was, and how it could only affect a single user account and yet not be a setting inside that user's home directory.
[robg adds: I can't test or confirm this one; comments as to the possible cause and alternative fixes are welcomed!]
