Synopses & Reviews
Mac OS X is a marvelous confluence of the user-friendly and highly customizable Macintosh of yesteryear and the power and flexibility of Unix under the hood. Those coming to Mac OS X from previous incarnations of the operating system recognize much of the friendly face of the Macintosh but they are also plunged into a whole new world. Unix converts to Mac OS X find a familiar FreeBSD-like operating system at the core and many of the command-line applications that they're familiar with.This presents a unique opportunity for combining traditional Unix hacking and Mac OS know-how. Mac OS X Hacks goes beyond the peculiar mix of man pages and not-particularly-helpful Help Center, pulling the best tips, tricks, and tools from the Mac power users and Unix hackers themselves.The collection reflects the real-world know how and experience of those well steeped in Unix history and expertise, sharing their no-nonsense, sometimes quick-and-dirty solutions to administering and taking full advantage of everything a Unix desktop has to offer: Web, Mail, and FTP serving, security services, SSH, Perl and shell scripting, compiling, configuring, scheduling, networking, and hacking. Add to that the experience of die-hard Macintosh users, customizing and modifying their hardware and software to meet their needs: System Preferences, GUI mods and tweaks, hardware tips, vital shareware and freeware, AppleScript, AppleTalk and equivalents, keyboard modifiers, and general Macintosh-style tomfoolery.Each Hack can be read easily in a few minutes, saving countless hours of searching for the right answer. Mac OS X Hacks provides direct, hands-on solutions that can be applied to the challenges facing both those meeting the Mac for the first time and long-time users delving into Mac OS X and its Unix underpinnings.Mac OS X Hacks is the third in O'Reilly's new Hacks Serier which aims to begin reclaiming the term "hacking" for the good guys. In recent years, the term has come to be associated with those nefarious black hats who break into computers to snoop, steal information or disrupt Internet traffic. But the term originally had a more benign meaning, and you'll still hear it used this way whenever developers get together. Our new Hacks books are written in the spirit of the true hackers -- the people who drive innovation.
Review
"This book is a compendium of Mac OS X hacks in the old sense of the word: tips, tricks, and tools which do all sorts of neat things. The collection is aimed firmly at a user who approaches his Mac from the point of view of a sysadmin...The book will appeal mostly to people want to do more than just edit words or graphics, who want to be power users of OS X." Netserfer Digest
Review
"Mac OS X Hacks, written by Rael Dornfest and Kevin Hemenway, contains an even 100 tips, tricks, and scripts developed by Mac OS X power users and Unix hackers. Each hack can be ready through in a few minutes, and this compilation provides a cornucopia of hands-on solutions that can be applied by either first-time or longtime users, and is targeted at everyone from home users to Corporate IT personnel and anyone in between who has a hankering to get more out of OS X...There is plenty of interesting and useful stuff in this book, and if you are the type of Mac user who likes to proverbially dive under the hood and get your hands dirty, you will find that it more than justifies its modest $24.95 price tag." Charles Moore, Applelinks
Review
"Every so often I see something jaw-dropping yummy... Such a phrase can also describe the reader's experience with a book from O'Reilly entitled Mac OS X Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools." Terry Pollard, South Mississippi Mac User Group
Review
"Mac OS X Hacks...is stuffed full of very useful suggestions to improve your OS X skills...The varying range of hack sophistication and difficulty is one of the best aspects of this book: you can start with the easy tips, move on to the moderate tricks, and hope someday you'll be geeky enough to work the magic of the most exotic Unix-based feats of skill and daring...Mac OS X Hacks is a book you can live with for a long time...MacMice Rating: 5 out of 5." David Weeks, MyMac.com
Review
"Finallya publisher that understands 'hack' isn't a bad word. This book is just a collection of damn cool things. I'm the kind of guy who looks for all the sidenotes and tips in computer books because usually I don't have time to read 500+ pages of stuff I already half know. I just want the meat...The nugget...The hacks...This book is simply a collection of the 'good stuff' that's in other OS X books. What is amazing is that this book is nearly 400 pages (and it's all the good stuff)...If you're a power user, this book is invaluable. It's been either on my desk, or on the bookshelf right next to my desk ever since the UPS man came. I write a weekly power user column and I'm going to admit it here in publicthis book has made my job easy." Jonathan Gales, Editor and Webmaster, MacMerc.com
Synopsis
Offering a unique collection of tips, tools, and scripts for Mac OS X, this book brings together real-world hands-on information from various quarters not easily found elsewhere.
Synopsis
Mac OS X Hacks reflects the real-world know how and experience of those well steeped in Unix history and expertise, sharing their no-nonsense, sometimes quick-and-dirty solutions to administering and taking full advantage of everything a Unix desktop has to offer: Web, Mail, and FTP serving, security services, SSH, Perl and shell scripting, compiling, configuring, scheduling, networking, and hacking. Add to that the experience of die-hard Macintosh users, customizing and modifying their hardware and software to meet their needs: System Preferences, GUI mods and tweaks, hardware tips, vital shareware and freeware, AppleScript, AppleTalk and equivalents, keyboard modifiers, and general Macintosh-style tomfoolery.
About the Author
Rael Dornfest is Founder and CEO of Portland, Oregon-based Values of n. Rael leads the Values of n charge with passion, unearthly creativity, and a repertoire of puns and jokes - some of which are actually good. Prior to founding Values of n, he was O'Reilly's Chief Technical Officer, program chair for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (which he continues to chair), series editor of the bestselling Hacks book series, and instigator of O'Reilly's Rough Cuts early access program. He built Meerkat, the first web-based feed aggregator, was champion and co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification, and has written and contributed to six O'Reilly books. Rael's programmatic pride and joy is the nimble, open source blogging application Blosxom, the principles of which you'll find in the Values of n philosophy and embodied in Stikkit: Little yellow notes that think.
Kevin Hemenway, coauthor of Mac OS X Hacks, is better known as Morbus Iff, the creator of disobey.com, which bills itself as "content for the discontented." Publisher and developer of more home cooking than you could ever imagine, he'd love to give you a Fry Pan of Intellect upside the head. Politely, of course. And with love.
Table of Contents
Credits; About the Authors; Contributors; Acknowledgments; Foreword; Preface; How to Use This Book; How This Book Is Organized; Conventions Used in This Book; How to Contact Us; Chapter 1: Files; 1.1 Hacks #1-12; 1.2 Understanding and Hacking Your User Account; 1.3 Taking the Bite Out of Backup; 1.4 Backing Up on the Go; 1.5 Dealing with Archives of Many Colors: .img, .sit, .tar, .gz; 1.6 A Line Break Is a Line Break; 1.7 Fiddling with Type/Creator Codes and File Extensions; 1.8 Locking and Unlocking Files; 1.9 Stubborn Trash, Stuck Images, and Jammed CDs; 1.10 Aliases, Symlinks, and Hard Links; 1.11 Recent Filenames; 1.12 Inspecting the Contents of an .app Package; 1.13 Opening Microsoft Word Documents Without Microsoft Word; Chapter 2: Startup; 2.1 Hacks #13-17; 2.2 Getting a Glimpse of the Boot Process; 2.3 Booting from Another Device; 2.4 Turning Your Mac into a Hard Drive; 2.5 Using Open Firmware Password Protection; 2.6 OS X for This Old Mac; Chapter 3: Multimedia and the iApps; 3.1 Hacks #18-32; 3.2 Top iChat Tips; 3.3 AIM Alternatives; 3.4 Printing to PDF or Bitmapped Image; 3.5 Image Conversion in a Pinch; 3.6 Top 10 iPhoto Tips; 3.7 Make Your Own Documentary; 3.8 From Slideshow to Video Presentation; 3.9 Hijacking Audio from Mac Apps; 3.10 Running Your Own Web Radio Station; 3.11 Sharing Your Listening Preferences; 3.12 Controlling iTunes with Perl; 3.13 iCal Calling iTunes; 3.14 Publishing and Subscribing to iCal Calendars; 3.15 Using Bluetooth for SMS and Phone-Call Handling; 3.16 iSync via Bluetooth; Chapter 4: The User Interface; 4.1 Hacks #33-47; 4.2 Finding Your Way Back to the Desktop; 4.3 Alt-Tab Alt-Ternatives; 4.4 Putting Things in the Apple Menu; 4.5 Keeping Your Snippets Organized; 4.6 LaunchBar, a Dock Alternative; 4.7 DockSwap, Another Dock Alternative; 4.8 Tinkering with Your User Interface; 4.9 Extending Your Screen Real Estate with Virtual Desktops; 4.10 Top Screenshot Tips; 4.11 Checking Your Mac's Pulse; 4.12 Screensaver as Desktop; 4.13 Dipping Your Pen into Inkwell; 4.14 Speakable Web Services; 4.15 Using AppleScript in Contextual Menus; 4.16 Prying the Chrome Off Cocoa Applications; Chapter 5: Unix and the Terminal; 5.1 Hacks #48-65; 5.2 Introducing the Terminal; 5.3 More Terminal Tricks and Tips; 5.4 Becoming an Administrator for a Moment; 5.5 Editing Special Unix Files; 5.6 Setting Shell Environment Variables; 5.7 Scheduling with System Tasks and Other Events; 5.8 Opening Things from the Command Line; 5.9 Introducing and Installing the Mac OS X Developer Tools; 5.10 Top 10 Mac OS X Tips for Unix Geeks; 5.11 Turning a Command-Line Script into an Application; 5.12 Installing Unix Applications with Fink; 5.13 Mirroring Files and Directories with rsync; 5.14 Using CVS to Manage Data on Multiple Machines; 5.15 Downloading Files from the Command Line; 5.16 Software Update on the Command Line; 5.17 Interacting with the Unix Shell from AppleScript; 5.18 Running AppleScripts on a Regular Basis Automatically; 5.19 Running Linux on an iBook; Chapter 6: Networking; 6.1 Hacks #66-78; 6.2 Anatomy of an Internet Shortcut; 6.3 Renewing Your DHCP-Assigned IP address; 6.4 Sharing an Internet Connection; 6.5 Creating a One-Wire Network; 6.6 Secure Tunneling with VPN or SSH; 6.7 Remotely Log In to Another Machine via SSH; 6.8 Running Windows on and from a Mac; 6.9 Sharing Files Between Mac and Windows PCs; 6.10 Mounting a WebDAV Share; 6.11 Mounting a Remote FTP Directory; 6.12 Exchanging a File via Bluetooth; 6.13 Using Your Cell Phone as a Bluetooth Modem; 6.14 Setting Up Domain Name Service; Chapter 7: Email; 7.1 Hacks #79-84; 7.2 Taming the Entourage Database; 7.3 Using IMAP with Apple's Mail Application; 7.4 Setting Up IMAP and POP Mail Servers; 7.5 Getting sendmail Up and Running; 7.6 Downloading POP Mail with fetchmail; 7.7 Creating Mail Aliases; Chapter 8: The Web; 8.1 Hacks #85-98; 8.2 Searching the Internet from Your Desktop; 8.3 Saving Web Pages for Offline Reading; 8.4 Reading Syndicated Online Content; 8.5 Serving Up a Web Site with the Built-In Apache Server; 8.6 Editing the Apache Web Server's Configuration; 8.7 Build Your Own Apache Server with mod_perl; 8.8 AppleScript CGI with ACGI Dispatcher; 8.9 Turning on CGI; 8.10 Turning on PHP; 8.11 Turning on Server-Side Includes (SSI); 8.12 Turning on WebDAV; 8.13 Controlling Web-Server Access by Hostname or IP Address; 8.14 Controlling Web-Server Access by Username and Group; 8.15 Directory Aliasing, Indexing, and Autoindexing; Chapter 9: Databases; 9.1 Hacks #99-100; 9.2 Installing the MySQL Database; 9.3 Installing the PostgreSQL Database; Colophon;