Earlier today I was looking for a way to lock the 1Password keychain using a keyboard shortcut. The easiest way I could think of doing this is with QuickSilver (namely, a QuickSilver trigger). I found this forum post that describes a terminal command that can be used to lock keychains. I put together the attached script so that this can easily be setup as a QuickSilver trigger. It’s a really simple script, only one line of code:
security lock-keychain 1Password.keychain (Note: this only works if using the OS X keychain and not the Agile Keychain format) (more…)

Last night I ended up having to do a full restore of my MacBook Pro using Time Machine. I was trying to uninstall libusb, SANE, and some other utilities that do not have proper uninstallers. I wrote a shell script that got a list of all the files added by the installer (using the lsbom command line utility) and deleted them. Unfortunately it somehow also deleted my entire /Applications folder, and who knows what else. My bad.

Luckily for me, Time Machine had just finished a backup before I started. I didn’t have much confidence / hope that it would do a good job of doing the restore, but it did much better than I expected.

I booted from the OS X Leopard install DVD and chose Restore System from Time Machine Backup from the Utilities menu. It found my My Book hard drive that is attached to my AirPort Extreme (and has my Time Machine backup on it). Logging into the drive and starting the restore was very easy and straight forward.

The restore took about 3 – 4 hours (over 100Mb ethernet). Everything looked good when I started the laptop. I logged in as usual and everything seemed to be OK. I only ran into a couple of issues. (more…)

The long awaited version 2.5 of Shirt Pocket’s SuperDuper! backup application for OS X has finally released.

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I was reinstalling part of Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 (Web Premium) last night, and after it had reinstalled the shared components it asked me to “Please Insert Adobe ExtendScript Toolkit 2 to Continue Installation.” There isn’t any CD labeled anything like that with CS3.

I found the fix here: elaine montoya » Blog Archive » Workaround: Please Insert Adobe ExtendScript Toolkit 2 to Continue Installation.
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The popular NoScript addon for Firefox, which used to be primarily used for blocking Javascript (for security reasons) now allows easier blocking of Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime, Sun Java, and Microsoft Silverlight content. This used to be possible using the Flashblock addon, but the catch 22 with that is that it only works on pages which you have javascript enabled for (which obviously defeats the point). (more…)