Mac Stuff

Where I work I have lots of people stopping in to ask questions. Usually this involves me getting up to work with them, often for long periods of time. I’m not very good at remembering to change my iChat status to “away” so I came up with this AppleScript.

I have it run via a cron job every 20 minutes. It checks to see if the screen saver is active. If it is then it changes my iChat status to “away’. Simple.

Paste this code into Script Editor and compile. Save it out as a script file.

[codesyntax lang=”applescript” lines=”no”]
tell application “System Events”
set theList to the name of every process
if theList contains “ScreenSaverEngine” then
tell application “iChat”
set theStat to status
if theStat is available then
set status to away
set status message to “Away”
end if
end tell
end if
end tell
[/codesyntax]

Now use something like Cronnix to set it up as a cron job for your account.

When running AppleScripts either in Terminal or for something like a cron job you need to use “osascript”. If you’re using Cronnix you can use the settings below. Click “OK” in the window and then “Save” in the main Cronnix window and you’re done!

admin :: Mar.23.2007 :: Applescript, Management, Scripts :: Comments Off on Using the Screensaver to change my iChat status

I have lots of users where I work that have folders full of pictures that they just want to import into PowerPoint. I came up with this Automator workflow to allow just that.

It makes a new PowerPoint presentation, then lets you select the folder that contains the images you want to import. It then pads the images so that they fit onto a standard PowerPoint slide and imports them.

This workflow uses actions from the Microsoft Automator Actions package.

Click on PowerPoint AutoImport Workflow to download

admin :: Mar.20.2007 :: Applescript, Automator :: Comments Off on Automator workflow to import images into PowerPoint

While it’s quite easy to change which disk your machine starts up from using System Preferences there may be times when you need/want to do it either at the command line or within a script.

The command for setting the startup disk using Terminal is “bless“. To get the full story on “bless” open up Terminal and type “man bless” (no quotes).

To change the startup disk type the following in Terminal:

sudo bless -mount /Volumes/"name of your startup disk" -setBoot

So, if the desired disk was named “TestDisk” you would type this:

sudo bless -mount /Volumes/TestDisk -setBoot

If your disk name has spaces in it you’ll need to put quotes around the path to the disk, like this:

sudo bless -mount "/Volumes/My Disk" -setBoot

You can incorporate this into a UNIX shell script to reboot your machine to another disk at a certain time. Perhaps you want to reboot to another disk every Friday to run a disk utility on it, or to image it.


#!/bin/bash
bless -mount /Volumes/TestDisk -setBoot
shutdown -r now


Breaking down this script the first line sets the disk your Mac will boot from. The second line tells it to shutdown and restart immediately. If you have an Intel Mac you can add “–nextonly” at the end of the “bless” line. That will boot the machine to that volume first and then boot back to the original volume on subsequent reboots without having to reset the startup disk.

This command also comes in handy if you’re booting back and forth between volumes to test things. For example, you have a partition with 10.3 and another with 10.4 on it and you want to test some software in 10.3. You can wrap all of this up in an AppleScript and either save it on your desktop as an application or save it as a script and put it in your Script menu.

Paste this code in Script Editor and run it. Make sure you change the disk name to your disk. What for the AppleScript line breaks in the code. Any line that ends in “¬” means the line below is part of the same line. Pasting it in as it is on the web page will still work however.

[codesyntax lang=”applescript” lines=”no”]
do shell script “bless -mount \”/Volumes/Drive Name\” ¬
-setBoot with administrator privileges
do shell script “shutdown -r now” with administrator privileges
[/codesyntax]

Then simply click on the application or select if from the Script menu, enter your admin name and password and it will select the disk and reboot for you.

If you want to choose between several disks you can add in a dialog box to let you choose the correct disk.

[codesyntax lang=”applescript” lines=”no”]
display dialog “Select a startup disk” buttons ¬
{“name of disc 1”, “name of disc 2”]
set bootVol to the button returned of the result as text
do shell script “bless -mount \”/Volumes/” ¬
& bootVol & “\” -setBoot” with administrator privileges
do shell script “shutdown -r now” with administrator privileges
[/codesyntax]

admin :: Mar.15.2007 :: Applescript, shell scripts, System, Terminal :: 1 Comment »

Here are three quick ways to identify which DHCP server your machine is getting it’s IP address from. This can come in handy when trying to track down rogue DHCP servers that pop up on a network.

In Tiger:

• Open System Profiler
• Click on “Network”
• Select which service you want to see
• It is listed under “DHCP Server Responses:” next to “Server Identifier”

In Panther and below:

• In Terminal type “ipconfig getoption en0 server_identifier”
• Change “en0” to “en1″ if using wireless

You can also wrap it in an AppleScript. This should work on most version of OS X.

[codesyntax lang=”applescript” lines=”no”]
do shell script “ipconfig getoption en0 server_identifier”
set theIP to the result
display dialog “Your DHCP server IP is: ” & theIP
[/codesyntax]

Save it as an application. Great for getting this information from the Terminal-challenged user.

admin :: Mar.14.2007 :: Applescript, Management, Scripts, System, Terminal :: Comments Off on Identifying a DHCP server

In certain AppleScripts you’ll find you need to get the name of the computer you’re currently on. Usually you need this for things like writing to logs, etc. Here’s how to do it in Tiger:

[codesyntax lang=”applescript” lines=”no”]set theName to the computer name of the (system info)[/codesyntax]

This sets the variable “theName” to the name of your computer from the Sharing preference panel

Here’s an example. Paste the text below in Script Editor and run it.

[codesyntax lang=”applescript” lines=”no”]set theName to the computer name of the (system info)
display dialog “My computer’s name is ” & theName[/codesyntax]

admin :: Mar.13.2007 :: Applescript, Scripts :: Comments Off on Get the name of the computer in Tiger (10.4)