OS X ships with a tool called keychain. It is a central database where tools can store sensitive information like logins. Luckily, it is accessible from shell scripts with the command line utility security.

Let’s say you want to securely access an FTP server’s username and password. First of all, add a new Internet password to your keychain. To do so, just fire it up, select New password and enter the credentials. Remember to add the prefix http:// or ftp:// to your service name to create an Internet password.

Now you read the username like this from the command line

security find-internet-password -s ftp.home.com | grep "acct" | cut -d '"' -f 4

The service is what you entered in keychain, but without the prefix. And finally your password

security 2>&1 >/dev/null find-internet-password -gs ftp.home.com | cut -d '"' -f 2

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 Christopher Füseschi (ICQ 40520202) for pointing me to this issue and also for doing final tests.

You can download the updated script here.

We will first create a new partition on the backup drive, then clone the install DVD to this partition and finally boot from the external hard disk.

Add new partition

First of all, we need a new partition on the backup drive to boot from. Thanks to the OS X disk utility, this is quite easy. I use an SATA drive with 1 TB capacity living in a Sharkoon Quickport Pro connected via USB. So fire up disk utility, select your backup drive and open the Partition tab.

As you can see, there is already plenty of space used on the drive, but that’s no problem at all, as disk utility can resize partitions. Just drag the lower right corner of the partition upwards until it frees the space you need. I set up a 10 GB partition. Finally apply the changes.

Clone Install DVD to new partition

Next we clone the install DVD (Snow Leopard in my case) to the new partition. Insert the DVD, select your new partition in disk utility and go to Restore. Drag the Mac OS X Install DVD to source and your new partition on the backup drive to target. Then click on restore and wait.

That’s all you need to do. Let’s try to boot.

Boot from the backup drive

Finally, reboot your Mac and hold down option key on startup. If everything went well, the new partition appears in the list of bootable devices. Select it and be amazed how fast you enter the OS X setup.

SteerMouse

First I tried SteerMouse from Plentycom-Systems. It’s a solid and stable piece of Software with a fair price of $20. You can easily reassign mouse buttons, fine-tune tracking speed and much more. But there is a major drawback: the mouse sensibility can no longer be changed on the device. Because I like this feature very much, the search went on.

USB Overdrive

The second tool was USB Overdrive by Alessandro Levi Montalcini, also priced at $20. This tool is equally easy to use, offers reassignment of mouse buttons, but without disabling the sensibility adjustments. So that’s the way I go.

Summary

Both tools, SteerMouse and USB Overdrive let you reassign buttons on the Logitech G5. They work equally stable (that’s at least my impression) and cost exactly the same. While SteerMouse has the nicer interface and was updated more recently, USB Overdrive let’s you still change the sensibility on the mouse. So it really depends if you want to use the later feature or not. If so, you have to use USB Overdrive, choose SteerMouse otherwise.

Update: USB Overdrive also works in Snow Leopard, even without updating to version 3.0

But let’s first talk about the installation. That’s pretty easy. Just extract the downloaded archive, copy the script to an arbitrary location and then drag it to Finder’s toolbar. That’s all. Now let the fun begin.

Open in Textmate

Textmate is my favorite text editor. I use it a lot and so the Open in Textmate script comes in handy. It allows you to open the selected file directly in Textmate or if none is selected, open the whole directory for tabbed browsing.

Enhanced Open in Terminal Here

This script opens a Terminal window and changes to the directory shown in Finder. Very useful, but because it’s enhanced, it can do even more. Holding the Command-Key while clicking on the button opens a new tab instead of a new Terminal window. The Option-Key tries to recylcle an already running Terminal session and just changes to the directory. However, if this fails because the session is busy executing a program, a new window is created instead.

LSelect

Last but not least: LSelect. This script opens a dialog box where you can enter a globbing pattern like “*.jpg” and hitting enter selects all files with extension JPG. I think, you got the idea. It’s extremely useful for moving or deleting multiple files.

These were my top 3 Finder toolbar scripts making my daily work so much easier. If you happen to know scripts worth mentioning, then please leave a comment.

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 the most famous combination of WLAN router and telephone system in Germany. By sending special HTTP POST-requests to the Fritz!Box, you can dial phone numbers from your computer. I wrote a small Applescript which glues both features together.

The installation is pretty simple. First of all, open the script in Apple’s script editor and adjust the parameters. The password and the phone port are very likely to change. Save it to Library/Application Support/Launchbar/Actions under your Home folder. The script assumes that you are using Launchbar 5, which currently is in public Beta. Now open Launchbares preferences, choose Actions and select the script for phone numbers.

That’s all. Now fire up Launchbar, navigate to an entry from your address book, select a number and hit enter. The script immediately tries to call the number and prints a message in large print on the screen. After the specified delay (25 seconds by default), the script gives up reaching the number.

The script is based on a shell script by Christian Felder posted here and an expample script for dialing with Skype from Launchbar found in its help.

You can download the script here here.

But the usual format of my tweets when posting websites is the title of the page, followed by the URL in parenthesis. So I adjusted the bookmarklet to use this format.Just drag this link Post with Tweetie to your bookmarks bar. Tested with Safari 4 Beta and Firefox 3.0.7.

The short story: Pass 1 prints only even pages and in reverse order (see Paper Handling), Pass 2 odd pages in normal order.

If you’re lucky, this setup works for your printer, but here’s some more background information. There are some pitfalls we have to take care of. First of all, what happens if the second pass prints more pages than the first one? Then the additional page needs to be the last one of the document, as that’s the one without a backside. As a consequence, Pass 2 needs to print in normal order. And because this can only happen if the total number of pages is odd, we print only odd pages.

Now let’s have a look at Pass 1. Even pages are still missing, so select them. The order is highly depending on your printer, especially the way and the order it pulls in the sheets of paper in the second pass. My printer first selects the top most sheet, expecting the white side heading to top. Remember, Pass 2 prints page 2 first, so make sure page 1 is put on the other side. In my case that means using reverse order.

That’s the way it works for a Samsung ML-2010R, but I think you got the idea. After some test prints, your manual duplex is ready to go. As soon as you finished your setup, chose your document, print using Pass 1 preset, then put the stack of paper back into your printer and print again, this time using Pass 2. Done! Manual duplex the easy way.

Imagine you’re at work an realise that you need some files at home. No problem at all, just log in at dropbox’s web interface, upload the data. At home, dropbox automatically downloads it to your local folder. Could it be any easier? 

You might say now, you don’t need it at all because you always keep an USB stick in your pocket just in case of emergency. And that’s not only faster but also does not need an Internet connection. Well, keep reading! It gets even better.

Using dropbox, you can easily share files with other people like friends or family. There are 2 prossibilities. Your dropbox folder has a special folder named Public. Anything that goes in there can be shared with other people. Just right-click on the file and select Dropbox - Copy public link. As the name suggests,  a link is copied to your clipboard heading to the file. Anybody can access the file via that link, even without being a dropbox user at all.

If you often share file with the same people, always copying public link is annoying. Luckily, there’s a second possibility. Just create a new directory somewhere in you local dropbox folder, right-click on it an select Dropbox – Share. You’re headed to a website where you enter mail addresses of other dropbox users. After accepting your invitation, the folder appears in their dopbox as well. Anybody in that group can add or remove content and changes are immediately reflected in all the other user’s dropboxes. How cool is that.

People quite often ask me for help with their computer problems. Dropbox in combination with Sktich makes this a lot easier. If you want them to have a screenshot, just fire up skitch, take the screenshot and drag it in the shared dropbox folder.

If you’re not yet a dropbox user, create an account right now! It’s easy and it’s free. It would be very nice if you would use this link for registration, containing a referral that offers extra 250MB for both of us. Now happy dropboxing.

Dialog shown after execution of script

It does nothing more than telling Safari to execute the same Javascript as the bookmarklet would do. Calling it from within an Applescript has one huge advantage called Quicksilver. I set up a trigger to execute this script with the scope of Safari (scopes seem to be broken in Leopard) and assigned the hotkey CMD-D.

This trigger in combination with Quicksilver’s “Social bookmarks” plugin is a great way use delicious with Safari.

Download the script: delicious_add_from_safari