Category Archives: The More You Know

A Better Activity Metric

Posted on November 20, 2023 by dre

Using CPU utilization to measure overall CPU activity is like trying to infer how far a car has traveled by looking at the speedometer instead of the odometer. Continue reading →

Posted in quiesce, scripts, The More You Know | Leave a comment

os_log haystack needler

Posted on March 25, 2021 by dre

Here’s a method to find where any given NSUserDefault setting is persisted. This might help if you’re trying to write a script to get or set that setting. As a bonus, this post details a reusable strategy for withstanding the … Continue reading →

Posted in OS X, The More You Know, tutorials | Leave a comment

How to rescue aborted QuickTime Player audio recordings

Posted on February 1, 2016 by dre

Know that feeling when you remember you don’t have your keys while you are closing a locked door? It’s the same feeling as when you use QuickTime Player to record some lengthy audio, and you remember you didn’t stop the recording while you are putting the … Continue reading →

Posted in media, OS X, Pro Tip, scripts, The More You Know, tutorials | Leave a comment

Traffic micro-management: limit network bandwidth used by an OS X process

Posted on August 8, 2015 by dre

Problem: you have some silly uploader app that only knows one speed: maximum. You would love a way to make that app back off so it doesn’t saturate your uplink and badly impact the other things using your network. Previously in … Continue reading →

Posted in OS X, scripts, The More You Know, tutorials | 3 Comments

PKTAP extensions to tcpdump in OS X

Posted on July 8, 2014 by dre

The tcpdump man page in OS X contains various references to something called PKTAP, such as in the documentation for the -k option: Control the display of packet metadata via an optional meta- data_arg argument. This is useful when displaying … Continue reading →

Posted in OS X, Pro Tip, The More You Know | 1 Comment

Longcuts occasionally form when shortcuts conspire

Posted on July 29, 2013 by dre

Saw a tweet about one of those one-touch ‘build me a VM’ things for Oracle server + rails and decided to try it; this one is mostly driven by some software called vagrant, which seems cool enough. It definitely doesn’t seem … Continue reading →

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The case of the excessively congratulatory Memory Slot Utility

Posted on October 15, 2011 by dre

A while ago I filled up my final unused memory slot in my awesome Mac Pro with an additional 4 gigorams (for a grand total of 16). Since then, whenever I reboot I’m showered with praise by the Memory Slot … Continue reading →

Posted in mac pro, OS X, Pro Tip, The More You Know | 3 Comments

Somniac and a UI scripting quickie

Posted on August 4, 2010 by dre

Just about every time I want an AppleScript to wait a second or two during script execution, I instinctively insert a “sleep x” statement, where x is some small number of seconds. Every time, I’m surprised when I test the … Continue reading →

Posted in bit bucket, scripts, The More You Know | Leave a comment

Of logs and non-boot volumes

Posted on March 14, 2010 by dre

It’s a beautiful Sunday morning, and as you wait for the coffee to start working, you figure it’s probably about time that you started on those benchmark results that have to be done by Monday. You’re sitting there thinking “MAN … Continue reading →

Posted in OS X, OS X Server, Pro Tip, The More You Know | 2 Comments

Cross-application URL cache searching!

Posted on October 27, 2008 by dre

I was out taking a (filesystem) walk, and wandered into /var/folders. Not remembering where / when this came from, I was pleased to find that the hier(7) manpage is aware of this directory, describing it as ‘per-user temporary files and … Continue reading →

Posted in OS X, scripts, The More You Know | 3 Comments