Monday, November 24, 2008

Linkto a product on the Apple Store

Have you ever tried to send a link to someone showing them a product on the apple store?

Here's how to do it:

1. Get the product number
The way to do so is to add the product to the cart and then go to the cart. It shows you the product numbers.

2. The rest is easy:

Create a links llike this one:
http://store.apple.com/ch-de/product/MB129

or this one:
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MB128


That's it.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Display only

We wanted to use a Mac Mini as a display only.

That means: jaut a display, no keyboard, no mouse.

Just display a web page.

No problem? Try it. The Mac Mini wants a mouse. It tells you so. Every time you boot it.
Every time the mac starts up, a dialogue appears telling you that you're an idiot because you did not connect a mouse.

OS X in that case tries to set up a mouse using using bluetooth.

So, one way to eliminate this dialogue would obviously to remove the app.
It's this one:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Bluetooth Setup Assistant.app

But that's not a very elegant way to do this.
Besides there is always the risk of an update putting the app back in place thus the dialog appearing again.

After having looked at the app I found a reference to 'com.apple.bluetoothsetupassistant'. I googled a bit I and found a solution on this page:

Managing Bluetooth, or pesky Apple Preferences « Managing OS X

There it says:

# turn off the Bluetooth KB/mouse dialog that comes up if no KB/mouse is found
`/usr/bin/defaults write /var/root/Library/Preferences/blued BluetoothAutoSeekHIDDevices -int 0`;

# restart the Bluetooth daemon
`/usr/bin/killall -HUP blued`;



Or you might open the Bluetooth Preference Pane and uncheck “Open Bluetooth Setup Assistant at startup when no input device is present”

That will do it as well, just in case ;-)

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Folder Redirection & Microsoft Office 2008

When using the Folder Redirection of Mac OS X Server 10.5, I was having really big problems with Word from Microsoft Office 2004.
It would not save!!!
Sometimes even documents were overwritten!!
Very nasty

It seems though there is a solution to this:

I found the hint here: http://jochsner.dyndns.org/scripts/NHR.html

It sais that:

«
There appears to be an issue with Office redirection if there is a folder missing at the root of your network mount on the server. The user will be able to successfully save a new document once, and after that, they will get error messages that they don't have permission to save the file to the destination. The answer to this was found on http://macosxhints.com:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20051122213207398

The fault occurs unless a folder called .TemporaryItems has been created at the root level of any mounted volume containing the saved file; so if the user's home directory is contained in an AFP share called Homes, then there has to be a directory called .TemporaryItems in the Homes folder on the server. If the home directory is on another local volume called UserData, there has to be a directory called .TemporaryItems at the root of that volume.

Since .TemporaryItems is a dot file, it will not be visible in the Finder. When the application is able to create this .TemporaryItems directory, it is world writable and sticky. For improved security, as long as all users are in a common group like "staff," then the folder can be restricted to writing by the group instead.
$ cd /path/to/volume/or/sharepoint
$ sudo mkdir .TemporaryItems
$ chgrp staff .TemporaryItems
$ chmod 1770 .TemporaryItems
»