Defeat a Kensington laptop lock

Joy. So much for leaving my laptop unattended at Borders when I want to use the restroom.

See the pathetically easy details on unlocking a Kensington laptop lock here.

Automator and shell scripts

So I was writing my first Automator workflow, and found a bug in the "Do shell script" action. I was trying to write a workflow to iterate over the selection in the finder (and any files in subfolders of the selected files) and use SetFile to change the type and creator. This seemed easy enough, except that it turns out when Automator converts a list of files to strings to hand off to the shell script action, it doesn't properly quote them.

Thanks to Mike Ashley from the Automator-users mailing list for the following code snippet that works around this:

on run {input, parameters}
 set output to {}
 repeat with i from 1 to length of input
  set x to item i of input
  set output to output & {quoted form of POSIX path of x}
 end repeat
 return output
end run

Just put a "do applescript" stage ahead of the "do shell script" stage, and put the above code in. It'll take the list of file aliases and convert them to properly quoted paths for the shell script to act on.

Fixing 10.4.1's issues with GPGMail

10.4.1 semi-breaks the GPGMail plugin. To fix it,

1. run Mail, let it disable the plugin
   
2. quit Mail
   
3. rename the Bundles-disabled back to Bundles
   
4. Open Terminal
   
5. defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1
   
6. restart Mail
   

The plugin should work again. Note that we're using 1 and not YES (like the plugin docs for 10.4.0 said).

According to the mailing list, if you follow the previous directions from the dmg, and set BundleCompatibilityVersion to 1, that triggers the new Mail in 10.4.1 to complain and disable the bundle.

Cool web service of the day

I've been tinkering with Backpack, lately. Backpack allows you to dynamically create web pages, which can contain notes, todo lists, text, images and/or files. You can embed HTML markup. Now, while this doesn't seem all that special (why not just use mediawiki?) to the hardcore geeks, what makes it cool is that it has a nice clean web interface to everything - and you can email items to your pages. This is something I'd have no problem recommending to my non-techie friends.

I'm not really doing it justice in this summary - go sign up for a freebie account (they won't host images or files for freebie accounts, and you have a limited number of pages) and try it for yourself.

This is another service from the same guys who did BaseCamp and TaDa Lists, so you know it's going to work well.

Foreign Spam

I've been seeing a lot more foreign language spam the last few months, and have created a mail rule to nuke it all before applying any of my other couple of hundred rules.

Basically, the rule is set to delete any messages when the Content-Type header contains any of the following strings:

charset="koi8-r"
charset="gb2312"
charset="GB2312"
charset="ks_c_5601-1987"
charset=iso-2022-jp
charset="iso-2022-jp"

I don't speak any of those languages, so all messages encoded in them are spam, as far as I'm concerned. If you know of more charsets to nuke, please leave a comment.

Simple automator plugin to add spotlight tags

Adam Rice has a nice howto for creating an automator plugin to add spotlight tags to a file at http://www.adamrice.org/eponymous/2005/05/add_spotlight_t.html.

DMCA update

Our congresscritters are looking at reforming the DMCA and formally legalizing circumventing copy protection as long as your use of the copy is legal. The EFF has set up a page that will allow you to fax & mail your congresscritter to support this, at http://action.eff.org/site/Advocacy?id=115.

Go let your congresscritter know you support this.

Launchd and anacron Howto

I used to run anacron on my laptop in 10.3 so that I could run the daily/weekly/monthly maintenance tasks at appropriate intervals, but without having to have the laptop awake at any specific time. Anacron allows you to specify that specific tasks run every N days, and every time it runs, it checks each job to see if it's been long enough since the last run, and runs it if appropriate. This worked out quite well - I had anacron tasks set up to run the daily script every day, the weekly every 7 days, and the monthly every 30 days. I had cron set to fire up anacron every 15 minutes, and all was well.

Until 10.4, anyway. 10.4 introduced launchd, which replaces cron, and Apple no longer started cron as part of the boot process. I had a lot of maintenance tasks that I was running with anacron via cron though, and while it was easy enough to make an old-style StartupItem to launch cron, I wanted to do the right thing.

Anyway, after experimenting with plutil and launchctl a bit, I figured out how to get launchd to run anacron every 15 minutes. It isn't all that complicated, if you're familiar with XML, but in the interest of sparing other people the hassle, I'm documenting it here.

Presuming you've used fink to install anacron, you can cause launchd to run anacron every 15 minutes by creating a file called /Library/LaunchDaemons/net.sourceforge.fink.anacron.plist with the following contents:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
 <key>Label</key>
 <string>org.debian.anacron</string>
 <key>ProgramArguments</key>
 <array>
  <string>/sw/sbin/anacron</string>
  <string>-s</string>
 </array>
 <key>RunAtLoad</key>
 <true/>
 <key>LowPriorityIO</key>
 <true/>
 <key>Nice</key>
 <integer>1</integer>
 <key>StartInterval</key>
 <integer>900</integer>
 <key>WatchPaths</key>
 <array>
  <string>/sw/etc/anacrontab</string>
 </array>
 <key>ServiceDescription</key>
 <string>anacron service</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Once you've created the file, all you need to do is use launchctl to load it, by typing sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/net.sourceforge.fink.anacron.plist in a Terminal window. Or reboot.

To change the interval, change the 900 above to whatever number of seconds you want launchd to wait between invocations.

If you don't want it automatically running as soon as you boot up in addition to every 300 seconds, delete the RunAtLoad key, and don't forget to delete the <true/> argument as well.

If you didn't use fink, change the /sw/sbin/anacron to the path you installed anacron on.

If you get an error message when you try to load the file with launchctl, you can use plutil to check the syntax by typing plutil lint org.debian.anacron.plist - if it isn't exactly correct, launchd will complain and refuse load your job.

And if you're using anacron to run the periodic tasks like I am, you can keep them from getting re-run at the regular time by doing the following commands:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.periodic-daily.plist

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.periodic-weekly.plist

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.periodic-monthly.plist

Then do sudo launchctl list to make sure they aren't showing up.

The plist file is available here.

Tiger Notes

First a few sites that will help you take advantage of the new Tiger features.

Grab some workflows for Automator at Automator World.

Get some widgets for Dashboard at Dashboard Widgets.

Minor annoyances

• Safari keeps popping up a warning when I download sit/dmg/zip files that there might be an application inside. This is fine for newbies, but I can't find a way to shut it off and it's driving me crazy.
  

More later after I've had more time to play with it.

In-depth review of Tiger

John Siracusa has another of his in-depth OS X reviews at Ars Technica.

As always, lots of good information.