Google’s Mac deployment engine “Simian” is a Google App Engine server based on Munki and was open sourced at MacWorld SF 2011, according to The Register.
Category: Utilities
Lingon now on the Mac App store
If you’re a user of Lingon to generate your launchd plist files you can now find it on the Mac App store (US$4.99), where presumably it’s now being more regularly maintained than it has been recently (it was crashing for me…)
Alternatively there’s now a web based “OS X launchd property list generator”
More Mac Java Apps
Of course, now that Apple’s deprecating Java, that’s probably going to annoy the folks
- Using the Cyberduck S/FTP/WebDAV/etc. client
- playing Minecraft.
iTunes 9.1 supports books
In line with the imminent arrival of iPads in the sweaty hands of their anxious new owners, Apple has released version 9.1 of iTunes, which offers support for Books. Audio books are apparently classed as books. Not sure how it works for those of us outside the reach of the iBooks store either.
via Macintouch
Checking for idleness from the commandline
I was looking for some way to tell if a remote machine was idle from the commandline and I stumbled across this snippet on Mac OS X Hints.
ioreg -c IOHIDSystem | awk ‘/HIDIdleTime/ {print $NF/1000000000; exit}’
returns a time in seconds and fractions thereof, ie 4.00711
Free sound ripping on your Mac
If you want to record sound that’s coming out your Mac’s speakers (audio channel), but are too cheap to shell out for a copy of Ambrosia’s Audio Hijack Pro or WireTap Studio, you can try installing the free SoundFlower, setting it as the audio destination in your Sound System Preferences pane, then recording from it using the free Audacity.
iPhone Oracle and MySQL client – jHeidi
If you can’t get away from your databases, you can at least talk to them from your iPhone using the iPhone version of jHeidi (presumably not using Java on the iPhone…). Supports Oracle and MySQL, only $3.99.
Retrospect 8 beta forum
If you’re interested in making sure Retrospect 8 works for you, check out the Retrospect 8 beta downloads and comments in the forum, and make your own if you find something is broken!
dscacheutil is command of the day
Having recently changed ISP, my command of the day is
dscacheutil -flushcache
which flushes your machine’s DNS cache to allow you to access your named sites via their new IP addresses once you’ve changed them in the DNS thus making the locally cached IP addresses stale.
HFSDebug 4.0 released
The ultimate Mac OS X hacker, Amit Singh (last I heard, snapped up by Google) has released a new version of his HFSDebug tool (that’s a commandline tool folks :).
The new version has more features to do with hard links and hard link chains, new filters, component-wise path lookup from scratch, and is now Snow Leopard compatible (even if it is still only a PPC binary running under Rosetta 🙂
via MWJ