Category Archives: OS X

Lion’s grey sidebar is a Jedi mind trick

And a poor attempt at a Jedi mind trick at that. With the now grey and lifeless sidbar in Lion Apple is trying to visually say: “these aren’t the files or folders you’re looking for”. It’s as if they want … Continue reading

Posted in Apple, Bugs, Industry, OS X | 5 Comments

Make Safari find substring matches by default

So, I thought I’d tip ol’ Pierre at betalogue to an apparent bug that Safari doesn’t find substrings, only words that begin with the search string! But then his astute readers pointed out that Safari 5.1 has changed the behaviour … Continue reading

Posted in Apple, OS X, Scripting | 2 Comments

Restore previous Safari version from .SafariArchive.tar.gz

Did that new Safari update break something? Want your old version back? Simple. Thanks to Apple’s prescient yet secretive engineers, there’s a way. Let me show you. When Safari does an upgrade it saves the previous version in this location: … Continue reading

Posted in Apple, OS X, Scripting, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

myXProtectStatus

myXProtectStatus – A drop down status menulet for XProtect, showing date, version, and threats protected against. Written in bash, and wrapped with Platypus, it is informational only, so don’t ask me to add some menu item to do something, it just reports. … Continue reading

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Advanced Safe Downloads List Tips and Tricks

So I submitted a hint for getting info about the Safe Downloads protection list, then I made a widget, now delving deeper into Safe Downloads list and the command line Let’s look at the BOM for the update: /Library/Preferences/com.apple.ReportMessages.domains /Library/Preferences/com.apple.ReportMessages.v2.domains /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/XProtect.plist /System/Library/CoreServices/MRTAgent.app /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.mrt.uiagent.plist … Continue reading

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Safe Downloads List Info Widget

UPDATE: The AUTOUPDATE code only works as root and so is not useful in the Dashboard environment! This has been removed from the widget. So I slapped together a widget for the Safe Downloads commands I post at OSXHints: Safe … Continue reading

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Finder’s Nasty Inherited ACL Bug (aka Error -41)

Finder’s Inherited ACL handling is broken Support for inherited ACLs on folders is still in disarray in 10.6.7 (and has been since 10.6.5), there have been a few reports here and there, some mentioning Error -41, other saying it was AFP, … Continue reading

Posted in Apple, Bugs, OS X | 25 Comments

More App Store tips for admins

Continuing the tech ramble about how to keep the App Store from your users… So, I figured out the two ways the App Store icon is added to the dock: 1. Existing users on an upgraded system are affected by … Continue reading

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App Store tips and tricks for sysadmins

App Store Tips, Tricks, and Hacks for the SysAdmin App Store, oh, App Store, like all Apple products you are made first for consumers and in time maybe you will be ready for corporate deployment, but for now, here’s some … Continue reading

Posted in Apple, OS X, Scripting, Security | 9 Comments

Tearing apart OpinionSpy

Updated: I’ve linked text files of string dumps to the binaries thoughout the article, I suppose not everyone wants to install and run the code to find out themselves! Another OS X malware media darling is out there, but it’s … Continue reading

Posted in Apple, OS X, Scripting, Security | 6 Comments