Mac OSX Tips

Here are some short tips for OSX…

Week numbers into iCal / iPhone

If you are using iCal or an iPhone you are probably aware that you can subscribe to various calendars on the web such as national holiday events. One thing missing though is the functionality to show week numbers in the calendar.

Since I talk in week numbers with many clients I need week numbers in my calendar, so I modified a script from  MacOSXHints that will create week numbers for the current year that can be imported into iCal. What it does is that it adds an all day event for the first day of the week (Monday in Europe) that shows the current week number. 

http://www.sanneblad.se/weeknumbers.php

How to use: Go to the above web page and save it as week_numbers_2008.ics. Double click the file to import the calendar events to iCal. Choose to import the data into a new calendar so you can remove them later if Apple some day should decide to add week numbers to iCal. Done!

Finally – if you want the events in Swedish style (”Vecka 31″) you can use this link instead:
http://www.sanneblad.se/veckonummer.php
 

Remove .DS_Store files

If you like me use Path Finder instead of the built in Finder you won’t have a problem with them, but if you somehow have to use Finder and find out that it has filled your directories with the .DS_Store files you can remove them with the following command:

find . -name *.DS_Store -type f -exec rm {} \;

The above command searches recursively down for all .DS_Store files and removes them without asking.

Screenshots in OSX

  • Command-Shift-3: Take a screenshot of the screen, and save it as a file on the desktop
  • Command-Shift-4, then select an area: Take a screenshot of an area and save it as a file on the desktop
  • Command-Shift-4, then space, then click a window: Take a screenshot of a window and save it as a file on the desktop
  • Command-Control-Shift-3: Take a screenshot of the screen, and save it to the clipboard
  • Command-Control-Shift-4, then select an area: Take a screenshot of an area and save it to the clipboard
  • Command-Control-Shift-4, then space, then click a window: Take a screenshot of a window and save it to the clipboard

Leopard-specific shortcuts:

  • Space, to lock the size of the selected region and instead move it when the mouse moves
  • Shift, to resize only one edge of the selected region
  • Option, to resize the selected region with its center as the anchor point

Installing VMWare Fusion

By default, the “easy installation” of VMWare Fusion is not recommended, since it sets up a default “Administrator” account without a password that is also auto logged in during startup. Sure, I can see the benefit from this from ease-of-use, however it also means that anyone who can copy your virtual machine also gets immediate access to your caches etc.

My tip is to not use the “easy installation” and instead create your windows user as usual and assign it a proper password. If you really do want auto login (if you like me do not use Windows for anything other than accessing documents on your Mac partition), you can set it up as follows:

For Windows XP:

  • Press CTRL + R, and enter “control userpasswords2″ without quotes
  • Uncheck “Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer”
  • Type your user account password and complete the process

For Windows Vista:

  • Press CTRL + R, and enter “netplwiz” without quotes
  • Uncheck “Users must enter a username and password to use this computer” and click “Apply”
  • Type your user account password and complete the process

Please note that this password will be stored in the system registry, so DO NOT PICK THE SAME PASSWORD AS THE ONE USED IN OSX!

Finally, another tip is to disable System Restore in Windows XP/Vista. On my 32-gb disk image I had 8.6 gb free space after installing Vista + Office 2007 + Visio 2007 + VS 2008. I switched off System Restore and suddenly I had 13.0 gb free space. Much better. I don’t do any major system changes to my VM anyways…

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