Little Shovels

OS X client doesn’t include useradd or groupadd utils, probably as small encouragement to spring for OS X Server. That means that if you do a colo with OS X client, you’re screwed if you need to add users. OSXUserUtils fixes that (use the -m flag to override a dir creation bug in this version).

You can run repair permissions from the command line, i.e. via cron job.

Show Desktop: The best thing about Windows, now available for the Mac (be sure to enable the menu bar option).

Lars Duening left a very detailed comment on the Drive Dock post, with his observations on the comparative user experience between Aqua and X11/KDE.

Music: Velvet Underground :: Run Run Run

5 Replies to “Little Shovels”

  1. Ludovic – true, you could use niutil to load up the NetInfo datbase manually. The useradd util I pointed to does essentially that, but masks all the steps you pointed to at opendarwin.org into a single command. Also, using niutil isn’t going to actually create a home directory for user — it just tells NetInfo where the home dir lives.

  2. Don’t forget, you can also command-option-click anywhere on the desktop to hide everything all at once, and show the desktop. :)

  3. lookmark, yup, that’s what I’ve been using, but that’s the equivalent of Hide Others for Finder. So if you have a bunch of Finder windows open, Cmd-Opt-click will leave them open, thus not revealing the destkop (although it’s usually close enough to what I want).

    Thanks.

  4. And while we’re speaking of tools: when my drive died, I was recommended the tools ‘Drive 10’ and ‘DiskWarrior’ to try and rescue my data. While both tools have their use, they are limited to working from existing disk catalogs and hence fail when confronted with a really damaged disk.

    By chance I found the tool ‘Data Rescue’ by Prosoft Engineering (http://www.prosoftengineering.com/ ) which reads every block of the disk looking for whatever might be a catalog structure, and indeed this tool helped me to recover most of my data (unfortunately not my mail).

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