UNIX / BSD
Terminal Tips: Unfreeze your Mac
Look, it's nothing to be ashamed of, it happens to everyone: your Mac has frozen up and won't respond. I know, I know, for years we Mac folks used to love poking fun at Windows because it freezes up. Apple even made a commercial about it. As someone ...
Sort your crashlogs with Hazel
I've been on a bit of a Hazel kick lately. I wrote a short shell script that will sort my Crash Logs. #!/bin/sh ### Get the name of the app APP=`/bin/echo $1 | /usr/bin/sed 's#_.*##g'` ### make a directory /bin/mkdir -p "$APP" ### move ...
Use networksetup to change AirPort networks from the command line
The other night I needed to change Wi-Fi networks on a computer that I was connected to via ssh. Just about every page that I found via Google led me to try the exact same thing (type "airport -A") with one minor problem: it didn't work. Let's back ...
Rudix, a lightweight way to add new Unix utilities
Rudix offers a collection of Unix utilities which do not come with OS X by default. When setting up a new Mac I always install these Unix utilities: wget, ncftp, lynx with SSL support, and the GNU Core Utilities. I compile them manually whenever ...
msmtp, a free tool to send email from Terminal
I fully expected that my article on mailsend would lead to several "Why don't you use use XYZ instead?" replies, and it did. Suggestions included Ruby, Python, iPhone push notifications, and configuring postfix/sendmail. But one suggestion was to use ...
Use mailsend to send email from the Terminal
Update: After this article was written I learned of mstmp which I highly recommend instead of mailsend. There are times that I want my iMac to be able to email me: when certain scripts run via cron or launchd, when certain events happen (a backup ...
Top Terminal easter eggs
Yeah, the headline makes it sound like the eggs are on their deathbed. But no, easter eggs (in software jargon) are little presents or surprises that developers have slipped into an application or operating system. One excellent place to find easter ...
Terminal Tips: Generate random filenames for digital photo frame images
It's not at all unlikely that you or a relative have received a digital photo frame as some sort of gift. The concept is great, one frame on your mantle, many pictures on display. Unfortunately, Apple has yet to enter the photo frame market -- at ...
Meerkat 1.5 automatically reconnects your SSH Tunnels
Meerkat turns SSH tunnels -- a fairly obscure and complicated concept -- into a feature anyone should be able to use, and does so in a very Mac-like way. I've known about SSH tunnels for a long time, but I've never been able to get them working. The ...
Fix iPhone EXIF rotation from the command line
My iPhone is the camera that i use more than any other, but there's one thing that has consistently annoyed me about it. Apple uses an EXIF tag to rotate images. This can be a problem when you share images with others. Safari will rotate the image ...
CrossOver Games 8.0 released
Codeweavers tells us that they've released version 8 of their Crossover Games software -- I tried it out a while ago, and found that while it was a pretty good way to play their recommended games, once you went off the reservation, things got a ...
Tweets (and whatever else you want) on the desktop with GeekTool
Mat posted a while back about the magic of GeekTool -- it's an app that allows you to run Unix scripts and show logs in a good-looking pane right there on your desktop. Mac OS X Tips recently did a post about how to put your iCal events up there ...
CrossOver creates Chromium just to show they can do it
Mike Rose and I were chatting about this on the Talkcast a few weeks back -- virtualization and emulation programmers get all John Locke from Lost when you try to tell them what's not possible. And so when the guys at CrossOver heard that Google ...
Maintenance utility Cocktail 4.1.4 released
All the way since back when I started using a Mac, the program that's been most recommended to new Mac users in my experience isn't Adium, Transmit, or Quicksilver (although those are certain all terrific apps/reasons to be a Mac owner) -- Cocktail ...
Darwine 1.0
Firefox 3 was a pretty historic release this week, but I'd say that Wine 1.0 might actually beat it -- the open source non-emulator (Wine, after all, Is Not an Emulator) for Windows finally reached their first stable release. And Darwine, the OS ...
The 25-year-old BSD bug
Today in 1983, "Beat It" by Michael Jackson may have topped the charts, but a slight bug in the *dir() library was found only a few days ago by OpenBSD developer Marc Balmer (no rela -- oh, wait). OS News has the entire amusing tale of the bug in BSD ...