Jim’s Junk Drawer

OS X has an alternate, and I think better, menu format for dock folders. With the alternate menus you have bigger icons, a cleaner look, better scrolling for long lists, and you can click into nested folders right in the menu.

To enable the alternate view, open Terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.dock use-new-list-stack -boolean YES; killall Dock

If you find you don’t like these changes, type the command again, replacing YES with NO.

Source: maclife.com

For a recent DVD project I needed to create multiple language subtitles. Basically this involves getting a transcript of the audio track in English, laying it in as subtitles, then exporting the English subtitle track out to a timecode formatted text file to the translation company can translate phrase by phrase. You would think exporting a subtitle track would be built into a professional DVD authoring program, but it’s missing from Apples DVD Studio Pro. Not only is it missing, but finding a utility to help with this was frustratingly difficult.

If you’re faced with a similar challenge, the program you want is Subtitle Xtractor. It’s a great program that does the job perfectly, and is donationware to boot.

Here’s the ultimate simple, free labeling software for lightscribe. Lightscribe takes forever to burn labels, but that is more than made up for by not fiddling with adhesive labels or finicky inkjet disc printers. Get a Lightscribe drive, chuck the $35 graphics-focused program it comes packaged with, and get this from the Lightscribe manufacturer’s site:

Lightscribe Simple Labeler

It prints one line of text on the top, one on the bottom, that’s it.

Free, and does what you want with way less crap than Roxio Toast. To save DVDs to ISO images (which you can then use as virtual masters for duplicating) choose the Save As CD/DVD Image option. It will produce a .cdr file. The file extensions can be confusing: .cdr (Burn plus some other Mac programs), .toast (Roxio Toast), and .iso (the rest of the world) are all identical — the files produced are bit-identical to each other.  So you can change the resulting file extension from .cdr to .iso if you want. The resulting file can be used as a disc master on virtually any burning program, Mac, Windows, or Unix.

Burn

For some reason my Mac Mini running OS X Leopard tends to drop its VNC server. Here’s how to turn it back on via the terminal:

sudo sh -c “/bin/echo -n enabled > /Library/Preferences/com.apple.ScreenSharing.launchd”

I think this will also work for Tiger, not sure about previous versions.

Try drutil from the terminal:
drutil list
drutil tray eject 1

Or try enabling the eject menu found in System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras (just double click it and it will be in your menubar)

A few years ago I purchased a backup program called Impression from Babel Software, written by Steve Elliot. He had sold the program and development rights to another company, ineedyoursoftware.com, which appears to have gone out of business. So never trust your backups to a company which doesn’t have some kind of code escrow and fiduciary accountability. Anyhoo, here’s how to restore from an impression backup:
1) Manually copy each file tree to a hard drive, recreating the file structure
2) For files which have been split in the archiving process:
- join the pax files using this command: cat file1.pax.part_a file1.pax.part_b file1.pax.part_c > outputfile.pax
- unarchive the pax file: pax -r -f outputfile.pax
3) Pax will recreate the file hierarchy of the original file in the directory you expanded to. So look for a folder in the current directory called Volumes (the top of the original file tree) and your file will be nested in there. Just restore it to the original location.

Alternately use hfspax, available here.

Use these instructions, which were included in the Impression backup:

The ‘Archive.imps’ folder is an OS X package that contains each file that was archived in ‘(hfs)pax’ format, as well as a catalog containing information about the files. The archived files are contained within a directory structure that mirrors the original one from which the files came.

To list extended information on files from an archive:
hfspax -v -f /path/to/archived_file.pax

To restore files from a (hfs)pax archive to a location of your choosing:
cd /directory/of/your/choice && hfspax -r -f /path/to/archived_file.pax

To restore files from a (hfs)pax archive to their default location without overwriting existing files:
cd / && hfspax -r -f /path/to/archived_file.pax -k

To restore files from a (hfs)pax archive to their default location without overwriting existing files while preserving all file permissions (useful if running the command with su or sudo access):
cd / && hfspax -r -f -pe /path/to/archived_file.pax -k

To restore files from a (hfs)pax archive to their default location (and overwrite any files in place!):
cd / && hfspax -r -f /path/to/archived_file.pax

To take a file split across two disks and restore it (.part_a and .part_b files), use the following commands to address the issue:
cd /directory/of/your/choice
cat path/to/archived_file.part_a path/to/archived_file.part_b | hfspax -r -v

To check a freshly restored file’s integrity, use the following command to generate a checksum and then compare it to the one recorded (if present) in the archive content list at the time of the backup:
md5 -q /path/to/file.name

Was getting an error about Windows running out of swap space. Found the issues was the compacted disc image didn’t have enough headroom for Windows to expand the swap space, and it was set at 50mb. The cure was to go into the memory settings in XP and set it for a fixed swap space. Good results for Parallels set to give the recommended 424 mb of RAM, and Windows set to a fixed swap space of 848mb. Snappy performance and no more error messages.

From a posting on MacUpdates.com:
defaults read com.apple.mail UserHeaders

This will return “The domain/default pair of (com.apple.mail, UserHeaders) does not exist” if you have none set)

defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders ‘{“Reply-To” = “theemail@goes.here”; }’

or

defaults write com.apple.mail UserHeaders ‘{“Reply-To” = “theemail@goes.here”; “Bcc” = “another@address.here”; }’

You can add as many headers as you like in this format. And finally,

defaults delete com.apple.mail UserHeaders

To get back to the default. Note that this doesn’t give you an input box in Mail.app – Should it do?

sudo softwareupdate -i -a