Hide your drive from the desktop in OSX

Sometimes you simple need all your drives on your desktop, but the ones like ‘TimeMachine’ or ‘Lion Installer’ can also simple disappear. Use this script to hide them at every reboot, without having to unmount them. Adjust your volume name to reflect yours.

sudo echo "echo \"UUID=$(diskutil info /Volumes/Lion\ Installer/ | grep UUID | awk '{print $3}') none hfs rw,noauto\" >> /etc/fstab" | sudo bash

To see if it has worked:
sudo cat /etc/fstab

Results in:
UUID=F4F6562F-1C4D-361D-BBD4-91C12ED96B44 none hfs rw,noauto

If your /etc/fstab doesn’t show the UUIC, then you need to check the volume name and/or delimit spaces with an \.

Print protected PDF files on OSX – using the terminal

The newer versions of Preview (at least OS X 10.5, and maybe earlier) respect the “do not print without a password” setting in PDF files. However, it is possible to create a completely unprotected version of any PDF file using ghostscript. A command like this should work:

gs -sOutputFile=MyNewFile.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOPAUSE -dbatch -q MyProtectedFile.pdf

You may need to type “quit” at the command prompt after gs finishes processing the file. Then open the newly created PDF file and voilà, printable!

(Sony) XDCAM Transfer for OS X

So as I now and then have to fix up a OS X + FCP install with XDCAM PDW-U01 import functionality, here is a short howto:
1) PDZK-P1 XDCAM Transfer, now 2.12
2) Mac i.Link FAM driver
3) XDCAM Browser, currently 1.2

The links might break, so here is the official Sony XDCAM site.

I am not affiliated with Sony, nor do they pay me for this. It’s just a braindump for myself and hopefully others will find this helpful!

The Windows multiple program installer thingie…

I keep forgetting this GREAT tool. After a nice clean Windoze install, all it takes is one visit to http://ninite.com/ and a few clicks, and your all set as far as software goes. Download the bundled installer click on it, and go for coffee… 🙂 Joy!

Before throwing rotten tomatoes, yes this is Windows only… my bad! No I don’t have shares or anything. I’m just lazy!

[solved] OS X 10.7 Lion and mail search not working…

I was stunned to find out that the search function on the Mail.app wasn’t working anymore since I’ve upgraded my Mac from Snow Leopard 10.6.8 to (the very cool) Lion 10.7. Thought it could be Spotlight not working, or something else.

Well, as it turns out, it’s a combination of 2 problems:

1) turn Spotlight indexing on: sudo mdutil -i on /
2) when using IMAP, configure your account to Keep a message for viewing offline

That’s it! Where Snow Leopard was able to search thru already downloaded mail (although the above option was enabled), Lion can’t.

Now the search is working great!