Mac Tutorials

Set Automatic Startup and Shutdown Times

wmcraver — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:47:14 +0000

This tutorial will walk you through the steps to set your Energy Saver schedule so your computer will be on when you want it and off when you’re done for the day.

Open System Preferences

1. Click the Apple Menu and click System Preferences…

Open Energy Saver Preferences

2. Click Energy Saver

Open the Schedule

3. Click the Schedule… button

Set the Schedule

Once the schedule panel loads, choose your Start Up/Wake and Sleep/Shut Down settings. Use the drop downs to control schedules for weekends or weekdays only or specific days. Once your selections have been made, click the OK button.

Quit System Preferences

4. Quit system preferences and enjoy your new settings.

Terminal: Take a screenshot and attach it to an email

wmcraver — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 01:54:16 +0000

I overheard someone at work saying “I wish there was a way to take a screenshot and then automatically add it to an email as an attachment.” so I decided to find a way to make it happen with applescript and terminal.

Terminal has a screen capture command, which should be easy to remember as it is called screencapture. To find more information on this command, type ‘man screencapture’ in terminal to read through the entire manual.

There are two three parts to this command, two of which are essential for the command to run properly.

Part 1 – The command ’screencapture’
Part 2 – Modifiers (optional)
Part 3 – Where you want the file to be placed

Command I used for this script: screencapture -iM ~/capture.jpg

In this example, the modifiers -i and -M tell terminal to allow the user to draw a selection and create a new email with the capture as an attachment. The file is then placed in the in the users root directory.

From here, you can copy the terminal command to Script Editor, add some applescript, and save it as an application. You can add this to your dock to send a screenshot to your mom.

Terminal: Ditto Command

wmcraver — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:39:37 +0000

The command ditto is a unix based command that can be used in Terminal on OS X. Ditto is useful if you have a hard drive that is failing or if you need to transfer data from one directory to another. There are other commands that can perform this same function, but I find ditto a much better option as it preserves resource forks in each directory and file. The command will grab any files in a specified directory and copy them. If the hard drive is failing or the file is corrupted, Terminal will skip over them and move on. Compare this to the normal method of copying. If a portion of the drive is failing and you attempt to copy a directory, the copy will fail, and almost no data will be transferred.

The command itself is rather easy to remember: ditto src_directory dest_directory. src_directory and dest_directory can be manually typed in or the actual folder you want to copy can be dragged onto the terminal window; Terminal will do a lot of work for you if you let it. My preference when using ditto is to use the -V option, which outputs all files and folders copied to the new location. Without using an option, or modifier, there will not be an output or visual indicator that files are being copied.

For instance, if I wanted to copy another user folder from my internal hard drive to my external hard drive, the command would look something like this:

sudo ditto -V /Users/bobthebuilder /Volumes/BackupDrive/bobthebuilder

The sudo command is necessary when you do not have proper permissions to access or copy data from a specific directory. Sudo requires an administrator password and basically tells Terminal to: “Do it, and don’t ask any questions”, so be careful!

A great resource to find more information about ditto or any other command, open terminal, and type man (short for manual) and then the command: man ditto

If you have questions, feel free to leave them as comments or email me.