There are many ways to show and hide the various hidden files and folders in Mac OS X. This one is an update to an older Automator workflow method. The previous method was to create a plug-in in Automator; now a pair of Services are used, so this hint only applies to Snow Leopard. Refer to the previous hint for usage in either Leopard or Tiger.

I used to backup my home folder to a CD-RW or a DVD-RW by dragging it to the new CD icon in OS X 10.4 without a hitch. However, after the upgrade to OS X 10.6 the burning always failed with the message 'could not open the data fork of <unable to get file path> (-43).' resulting in an unusable disc.

The offending file turned out to be ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.sideebarlists.plist. It appears that the Finder modifies this file while burning the disc. The solution was simple: lock the file (check the lock check-box in the Get Info window obtained by right-clicking the file and selecting Get Info) before burning.

There might be some side effects to locking this file (such as being unable to modify the sidebar) so you could unlock the after burning the disc.

This is clearly an OS X 10.6 issue: I have reproduced the problem by doing a clean install on an external drive and booting from that fresh install and burning the freshly created user home folder located on that drive.

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one.]

In Spaces you can reach an overview mode by pressing the F8 key, giving you an overview of your spaces. However, it is hard to see the individual windows within this mode, as they may be tiny.

The solution is to hover over a window and press the space bar; it will focus on the window and expand it to full size for easy reading. You can click on the window to expand it normally at this point. This also works in Exposé with a single space.

[crarko adds: I tested this in Snow Leopard, and it works as described. It has been pointed out that this does not work in 10.5.]

Here's a little OS X service to filter selected text (from any application) through a shell command.

This can be handy for performing quick operations, like replacing text with regular expressions, sorting lists or swapping fields around.

There are a number of settings in QuickTime X which are not exposed in the Preference panel or the QuickTime Player app. These are two QuickTime-related CLI tools included in Snow Leopard that you may be interested in for exploring these settings, and adjusting their values:

qtdefaults -- lets you set and reset many of the items formerly found in the QuickTime Preference panel.

mediastreamsegmenter -- talks to IP-based encoder boxes used for HTTP Live Streaming.

Read the man pages for these tools for a description of the settings they can affect and how to use them.

There is also an excellent set of AppleScripts for managing hidden preferences in QuickTime X. The ReadMe file on the disk image documents what the scripts do, suggests a few other commands, and states how to restore things to default condition. Thanks to Sal Soghoian of Apple for pointing out the existance of the scripts.

[crarko adds: I tested some , but not all, of the AppleScripts, and they work as described.]

In Snow Leopard it's rather easy to have multiple Time Machine backups with different settings. You can simply write a script to change the preference files for the two (or more) different drives.

Up until now, my Time Machine has always been backing up on different drives without even turning it off or on again to let it accept the new preferences.

I use a minimal AppleScript to sleep my computer after nn minutes of playing music through iTunes. After upgrading to 10.6, my older solutions (tell application "Finder" to sleep or tell application "System Events" to sleep) were ineffectual, so I searched for another solution, and came up with this:

do shell script "pmset sleepnow"

This seems like the only way to enter sleep mode after the password-required activation of display sleep (or the screensaver). Note that I've only tried this from an administrator account, where it works fine.

This week, I tried to mount a volume from my Linux server. I had ssh access, so I decided to use sshfs to mount it. THe Out-of-box solution was not working, so here is a complete guide.

First of all, you need to configure remote Linux server to support sftp and sshfs:

1. Install Fuse; there is a good installation manual.
2. Make sure you have the fuse kernel module compiled as a module; it is important: zcat /proc/config.gz|grep FUSE. If you see #CONFIG_FUSE_FS is not set, then you'll need to do this:

   $ cd /usr/src/linux
   $ make menuconfig
   File systems ---> Filesystem in Userspace support --> <M>
   $ make && make modules_install
   $ update-modules
   $ /etc/init.d/fuse start

Try it locally first; sshfs your_login@localhost: /mnt/test. If all works fine, then go to your Mac.

As you may know, finding hidden defau1ts write preference hacks is much tougher in Snow Leopard than it was in previous OS X releases. That's why there are only 15 such hints here (versus 43 for 10.5). To help fix this situation, a while back I put out a call on Twitter for macosxhints' readers to dig deep within 10.6 to help me find new hidden defau1ts write commands. While the response wasn't exactly overwhelming in size, a few readers did manage to find some hidden gems. Read on to see what's been uncovered....

Snow Leopard has a built-in grammar checker (in Cocoa and other certain apps) that will place green dotted lines under any possible grammatical errors it detects. (You may have to enable this first, in the program's Edit » Spelling and Grammar » Check Grammar With Spelling menu.) However, accessing the corrections panel using Control-Click » Spelling and Grammar » Show Spelling and Grammar has always seemed cumbersome.

Now I've discovered that simply hovering the mouse over the underlined word pops up a tool tip description of the error.

[robg adds: The first option in the contextual menu will be the replacement suggestion, but the Spelling and Grammar box will typically have more information. Given you probably want to make the suggested change anyway, I prefer the contextual menu, so I can see and replace; the tool tip merely shows the correction, but you can't do anything with it.]