Phil Hunter » Mac

Samba and OS X permission solution

phil — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 20:21:54 +0000

To avoid permission problems when accessing a SAMBA file share from OS X add the following to the [global] section of your samba configuration /etc/samba/smb.conf

unix extensions = no

Where to find the iPhone software update

phil — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:26:05 +0000

If you are like me and want the ability to return to a previous version of the iPhone OS then you’ll need to start taking back-ups of the downloaded OS images.

When you click to Update your iPhone in iTunes and select Download with the intention to install later, you’ll be able to take a copy of the downloaded file before you install.

Once downloaded, this can be located under your User folder /Library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates

OS X Eject button

phil — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 09:40:58 +0000

A small collection of keyboard shortcuts that breath new life into the Eject button in OS X.

Screen to sleep
ctrl + shift + eject

Computer to sleep
option + cmd + eject

Computer restart
ctrl + cmd + eject

Computer shutdown
ctrl + option + cmd + eject

Using Windows Clip Art on a Mac

phil — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:20:38 +0000

Having recently convinced my wife that she needed to make the switch to Mac OS X I was horrified to find that the Mac would not open WMF files. Over the years I have accumulated a large collection of clip art files in the WMF (Windows Metafile) file format and didn’t really want to start again.

I found the quickest way to resolve this was to convert all of my existing WMF file into the PICT file format. Using one of my Linux servers I ran the following shell command against my picture library:

find /home/user/clipart/ *.WMF -print0 | while IFS= read -rd $'\0' f; do echo "[$f]"; convert "$f" "$f.pict"; rm -f "$f"; done

This creates a list of files who’s file-name ends with WMF. We then loop through each of these file-names converting each and saving it with a .pict file extension. The IFS= read -rd parameters are absolutely necessary should your WMF files contain spaces.

Create an ISO image (.iso) on Mac OS X

phil — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 12:50:46 +0000

1. Insert the CD or DVD you would like to create an ISO image from

2. In a Terminal window execute the drutil status command in order to determine the device path to your CD/DVD drive. For example:
$ drutil status
Vendor Product Rev
OPTIARC DVD RW AD-5630A 1AHM

Type: DVD-RW Name: /dev/disk1
Sessions: 1 Tracks: 1
Write Speeds: 1x, 2x
Overwritable: 510:38:38 blocks: 2297888 / 4.71GB / 4.38GiB
Space Free: 00:00:00 blocks: 0 / 0.00MB / 0.00MiB
Space Used: 68:00:64 blocks: 306064 / 626.82MB / 597.78MiB
Writability: erasable, overwritable
Book Type: DVD-RW (v2)
Media ID: CMCW02

3. Assuming your Mac automatically mounts the disc and puts an icon on the desktop, you will need to unmount the disk before we proceed. To to this run the following command again the terminal window:
$ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1
Unmount of all volumes on disk1 was successful

4. Now to create your ISO file simply use the following command substituting the value of your disk device path and the filename you want to use for your ISO file.:
$ dd if=/dev/disk1 of=file.iso bs=20485