Access OS X keychain from Terminal
At everyday scripting, you often need to access sensible information like passwords. A common practice is to just write them plain text into your script, but at least on a Mac, we can do better. OS X ships with a tool called keychain. It is a central database where tools can store sensitive information like [...]
Launchbar: Dialing phone numbers with Fritz!Box Part 2
This is a follow-up article of Launchbar: Dialing phone numbers with Fritz!Box, where I explained how to use Launchbar for dialing phone numbers via FritzBox. Meanwhile, AVM has changed the login procedure and the original script no longer works. With the help of this example, it’s finally doing its job again. Special thanks go to [...]
Make Time Machine backups bootable
Time Machine is a great backup application shipped with Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard. You can either restore single files in your running OS X or do a full system restore by booting the OS X install DVD. Using the latter method, it would be nice to boot directly from your backup drive [...]
Logitech G5 Laser mouse on Mac OS X (updated)
I recently bought Logitech’s G5 Laser mouse. It’s meant to be a gamer mouse but is also great for daily work. The only problem for us OSX users is that Logitech in contrast to most of its devices doesn’t offer drivers. The mouse works just fine out of the box without any proprietary driver, but [...]
My Top 3 Finder Toolbar Scripts
With Leopard’s Finder, you can not only add applications to the toolbar, but also scripts. That’s an extremely useful feature I use every day and so I put together an introduction to my favorite three. But let’s first talk about the installation. That’s pretty easy. Just extract the downloaded archive, copy the script to an [...]
Launchbar: Dialing phone numbers with Fritz!Box (Applescript)
Update: The script on this page no longer works. Please refer to this one. Launchbar is a very convenient application launcher for Mac OS X. Among other great features like instant send, it can execute a script when invoking a phone number from your address book. I own a Fritz!Box 7170, which is one of [...]
Include website’s title in Tweetie’s bookmarklet
Tweetie is the most hyped twitter client for Mac OS X at the moment. It offers a bookmarklet for simple tweeting of websites opening its quick post dialog and showing the URL. But the usual format of my tweets when posting websites is the title of the page, followed by the URL in parenthesis. So [...]
Manual duplex printing with OSX presets
Duplex printing means printing on both sides of a sheet of paper. There are many printers supporting automatic duplex, so the printer takes care of printing on the front- and on the backside without user interaction. But especially low-cost printers don’t support this very useful feature that not only saves paper but also space. That’s [...]
Easy file sharing using dropbox
Dropbox is an easy way to synchronise your files across computers. First of all, it offers a web based interface where you upload files and store them in your account. Additionally you can install client software on Mac OS X, Linux or Windows, that creates a special dropbox folder on your computer. As soon as you [...]
Applescript: add document currently shown in Safari to Delicious
I just switched from Firefox to Safari and was looking for a nice way to add the website currently shown in Safari to my Delicious bookmarks. Delicious itself offers a bookmarklet for that purpose, but I prefer leaving the bookmark bar hidden. So I came up with a litte Applescript… It does nothing [...]