Category Archives: tutorials

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

Traffic Shaping with pfSense and HFSC

Posted on June 30, 2012 by dre

Traffic Shaping with pfSense and HFSC (youtube) This screencast demonstrates the use of a pfSense device for traffic shaping on a typical home network, with the goals of minimizing latency and maximizing throughput. In particular, we use a three-tier queue configuration … Continue reading →

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LDAP client: local static and variable mappings

Posted on November 23, 2009 by dre

I was recently discussing Mac OS X / Active Directory integration with a friend, and one of the things I mentioned was the local static / variable mappings feature of the Mac OS X LDAPv3 plugin. After some fairly extensive … Continue reading →

Posted in OS X, OS X Server, tutorials | Leave a comment

get notified!

Posted on September 7, 2008 by dre

Mac OS X makes extensive use of a variety of event notification mechanisms, as described here. One such mechanism is documented in the notify(3) man pages, and it is these types of libnotify notifications that are the focus of this … Continue reading →

Posted in development, OS X, OS X Server, scripts, tutorials | 1 Comment

Applied Kerberos troubleshooting

Posted on July 4, 2008 by dre

The following is an IRC transcript taken from #afp548, irc.freenode.net. It chronicles the troubleshooting process of a fairly well-hidden edge case of Kerberos configuration in Mac OS X Server. pastebin.ca was used to relay larger hunks of textual information; I’ve … Continue reading →

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Tiger Server servermgrd library for Python

Posted on June 11, 2007 by dre

motivation I finally found a reason to write some Python. Being something of a monitoring and data junkie, I’ve had a fair amount of experience with snmp, data mining scripts, etc. After writing this post to the server list, I … Continue reading →

Posted in development, OS X Server, scripts, tutorials | 17 Comments

X11 mobility with Xmove

Posted on April 29, 2006 by dre

X11 is a windowing system for *nix computers. There is one point about X11 that needs to be understood before anything that follows will make sense, so I’ve cribbed the following bit from the X11 wikipedia page to explain: X … Continue reading →

Posted in tutorials | 2 Comments

The Journeyman’s Guilde to Quicktime Presentations

Posted on April 29, 2006 by dre

This guide will demonstrate a method for creating multi-track, multi-media, self-contained quicktime movies. A good example of this would be the presentation format where there are multiple tracks of media that need to be coordinated with specific timings. Perhaps there … Continue reading →

Posted in media, OS X, tutorials | 1 Comment