Easy Fix

Download a pre-patched GrowlMail.bundle and drop it in your ~/Library/Mail/Bundles/ directory¹. If you want it available to multiple users on your system, use /Library/Mail/Bundles/.

Download patched bundle

If you use this method you’re all set; no need to use the command line solution below.

Add New UUIDs to SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUIDs

If you have already had your plugins disabled by opening Mail.app you’ll need to look in ~/Library/Mail (or /Library/Mail if you installed globally) and move the files back to the active bundles directory. They’ll typically be in Bundles (Disabled), so quit Mail, find them, and move them back into the proper directory.

If you have a local installation:

defaults write ~/Library/Mail/Bundles/GrowlMail.mailbundle/Contents/Info SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUIDs -array-add "E71BD599-351A-42C5-9B63-EA5C47F7CE8E"
defaults write ~/Library/Mail/Bundles/GrowlMail.mailbundle/Contents/Info SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUIDs -array-add "B842F7D0-4D81-4DDF-A672-129CA5B32D57"

Global installation:

defaults write /Library/Mail/Bundles/GrowlMail.mailbundle/Contents/Info SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUIDs -array-add "E71BD599-351A-42C5-9B63-EA5C47F7CE8E"
defaults write /Library/Mail/Bundles/GrowlMail.mailbundle/Contents/Info SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUIDs -array-add "B842F7D0-4D81-4DDF-A672-129CA5B32D57"

The capture session could not be initiated ((no devices found) /dev/bpf0: Permission denied).

To have the interfaces show up properly you’ll need to widen the permissions on the Berkeley packet filter (BPF). By default they look like this:

crw-------  1 root  wheel   23,   0 Jan 31 13:47 /dev/bpf0

We need the filter to be readable by non-root, so open Terminal.app and run this command:

sudo chmod 644 /dev/bpf*

Unfortunately every time you reboot this will reset, but if you are a frequent user of Wireshark you can add the ChmodBPF StartupItem to alter them automatically (available in the Utilities folder on the Wireshark disk image). To install you’ll need to follow two steps.

First, drag the ChmodBPF folder to the StartupItems alias in the same folder (or drag it to /Library/StartupItems directly). Type your password to authenticate and move the folder into the correct location.

The second requirement is only for 10.6+ users. Starting with Snow Leopard the security permissions of StartupItems are being enforced. Scripts that do not have the proper owner and group will receive this error:

Insecure Startup Item disabled. – “/Library/StartupItems/ChmodBPF” has not been started because it does not have the proper security settings

The proper security settings are ownership of the scripts by root and group of wheel.¹ To set them:

sudo chown -R root:wheel ChmodBPF

Open Automator (it’s located in your /Applications folder). You will be greeted by a sheet requesting a template for your workflow. Choose service.

You’ll now be greeted by the main Automator window. On the left you’ll see a Library and actions you can perform. On the right you’ll see an empty pane where you drag actions or files to build your workflow. Third party applications you have installed can expose additional available actions, so the list of available actions will vary for each user’s computer.

As an example, we’re going to build a service that allows you to select files in the Finder, automatically zip them, and attach them to a new email. To begin, change the drop down in the upper right from “text” to “files or folders” and change “any application” to “Finder”. This means that the service we’re constructing will accept files or folders from the Finder as input. Next we need to add our first action. To accomplish this type “create” in the search field in the upper left of the actions pane. This will live filter the available actions so you can more easily locate the “Create Archive” action. Once you’ve found it, drag and drop it to the right hand side.

After creating the zip archive we want to attach it to a mail message. Search for “new mail message” and drag and drop it below the first action. It will prompt you with a few dialogs (mostly for permissions to access your keychain), but when you’re done you should have the workflow below.

To test you can click Run, but you’ll receive a warning that states “This service will not receive input when run inside Automator. To test this service within Automator, add the “Get Specified Finder Items” action to the beginning of your workflow. Remove or disable the action before running the workflow outside of Automator.”. Hit cancel (there’s no point to running our service without input!) and add the “Get Specified Finder Items” action to the very top of your workflow. You’ll also need to add an item or two for testing.

To test the entire service, click Run in the upper right! You should see it create a zip file in the same directory as whatever files you specified, then open a new Mail message with your zip file attached.

If everything is working you can remove or disable the “Get Specified Finder Items” action and save your new service. Whatever you name it will be how it appears in your Services menu, so try to give it a descriptive name (something like “Create Zip and Email”). Now head to the Finder, select a file or folder, and click the Finder menu to see the Services submenu.

Success!

But what if you don’t want to use that submenu? OS X allows you to assign global shortcuts/hotkeys to any Service using the Keyboard preference pane in System Preferences. Go to Keyboard Shortcuts within it, click the services option on the left, then find your “Create Zip and Email” option on the right. To add a shortcut you’ll need to double click on the righthand side of the Create Zip and Email row. Once the text box appears, press the key combination you want to use to invoke this service. Try to choose one that won’t conflict with anything.

Automator has a great deal of power, so try experimenting with various actions to build your own ideal workflow. For example, I frequently parse SSL certificates in the course of my day, so I built this workflow to do it quickly and display the results in a text document in my editor of choice:

I also wanted a universal key combo to start the screensaver (which requires a password) so I could lock my computer quickly without using the mouse.

If you’ve got other service ideas or want to show off one of you’ve written drop a comment! It’s always great to discover a better/more efficient way to accomplish a task.

Accessing Hulu Outside The US

In this case, we’ll be using a small VM and the open source VPN server pptpd. All the server side instructions below are applicable to both OS X and Windows, but the client setup is only specified for Mac OS X.

Server Setup

First, obtain a VM from a reputable (and fast) US vendor. The VM must be located in the US since that’s our required origin. I personally use Slicehost, but there are many others. Once you get your login be sure you change the root password.

Install pptpd. If you’re running on Ubuntu or Debian you can simply run

apt-get install pptpd

Once you have pptpd installed, we’ll need to add a user. The default pptpd configuration is fine, but we’ll need to edit /etc/ppp/chap-secrets. When you edit the file (using vi, nano, emacs, et cetera) you’ll see this:

# Secrets for authentication using CHAP
# client        server  secret                  IP addresses

Client is your username, server is “pptpd”, secret is your password in plaintext, and IP addresses is a range of allowed IPs. If you’re unconcerned about who might attempt to access your VPN, you can simply use a wildcard (*). Once you’ve populated this file with data it will look something like this:

# Secrets for authentication using CHAP
# client	server	secret			IP addresses
testuser	pptpd	mypassword		*

We need to set up IPv4 forwarding, so edit /etc/sysctl.conf and uncomment the line below from the file (remove the #).

#net.ipv4.ip_forward=1

This will enable the behavior after a reboot, but you can enable it right now by running:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

Now run these commands:

/sbin/iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
/sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o ppp0 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
/sbin/iptables -A FORWARD -i ppp0 -o eth0 -j ACCEPT

Once you’ve run these you can save them so they execute every time your VM boots by following these quick instructions. This completes the server side setup.

Client Setup

Now it’s time to configure the Mac to utilize the VPN server. Bear in mind that all traffic to the internet will be routed through your VPN server when this is active, so you’ll only want to connect to your VPN when watching Hulu.²

Open System Preferences and go to Network.  Click the plus sign in the lower left and choose add to add a VPN PPTP interface.  Then set the server address (the IP of your VM) and account name (“testuser” from above).

After filling out those fields, click authentication settings and type your password, then click Okay.

Finally, click advanced, then click DNS and click the plus sign.  Add 4.2.2.1 as a DNS server.³

Save these changes and then you can click connect to test it out. Your traffic should all be routed through the VPN and since the endpoint is located in the US Hulu should work just fine!

Lately Apple has been revving the version number (and plugin compatibility UUID) of Mail.app with every version of 10.6. This breaks bundles like GrowlMail even when they are still compatible. The easy fix (although not necessarily the best if it turns out an update is required!) is to run a few commands in Terminal to add the new UUIDs¹ to the SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUID key in the Info.plist.²

If you have already had your plugins disabled by opening Mail.app you’ll need to look in ~/Library/Mail (or /Library/Mail if you installed globally) and move the files back to the active bundles directory. They’ll typically be in Bundles (Disabled), so quit Mail, find them, and move them back into the proper directory.

Once you’ve gotten the files moved into the proper location use either the local installation or global installation commands below (depending on where you found your bundles). To run them, simply copy/paste them into a Terminal window.³

For GrowlMail (assuming local installation)

defaults write ~/Library/Mail/Bundles/GrowlMail.mailbundle/Contents/Info SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUIDs -array-add "2F0CF6F9-35BA-4812-9CB2-155C0FDB9B0F"
defaults write ~/Library/Mail/Bundles/GrowlMail.mailbundle/Contents/Info SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUIDs -array-add "0CB5F2A0-A173-4809-86E3-9317261F1745"

For GrowlMail (global installation)

defaults write /Library/Mail/Bundles/GrowlMail.mailbundle/Contents/Info SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUIDs -array-add "2F0CF6F9-35BA-4812-9CB2-155C0FDB9B0F"
defaults write /Library/Mail/Bundles/GrowlMail.mailbundle/Contents/Info SupportedPluginCompatibilityUUIDs -array-add "0CB5F2A0-A173-4809-86E3-9317261F1745"

Update: Letterbox has been updated, but the above instructions can be adapted for any future OS update that breaks compatibility.

Update 2: You can download a pre-patched copy if you don’t want to follow the above instructions. Just unzip it and drop it in your bundles directory.

Update 3: GrowlMail 1.2.1 has been released, which fixes 10.6.2 compatibility. This issue will likely occur again with 10.6.3 though!

#!/bin/bash
cd "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/isoimages"
mkdir original
mv darwin.iso tools-key.pub *.sig original
perl -n -p -e 's/ServerVersion.plist/SystemVersion.plist/g' < original/darwin.iso > darwin.iso
openssl genrsa -out tools-priv.pem 2048
openssl rsa -in tools-priv.pem -pubout -out tools-key.pub
openssl dgst -sha1 -sign tools-priv.pem < darwin.iso > darwin.iso.sig
for i in *.iso ; do openssl dgst -sha1 -sign tools-priv.pem < $i > $i.sig ; done
exit

Now open Terminal and chmod the script to executable.

chmod 755 /path/to/my/script

Finally, execute the script with root privileges.

sudo ./path/to/my/script

This will modify and re-sign the darwin.iso to allow OS X client as a guest. Hat tip to several sources online (which I can no longer remember) that were used to help make this script many moons ago.

• You can specify a unix path with the go to folder command in Finder? ⌘-⇧-G
• Using ⌘-1 through 9 in Safari will take you to your Bookmarks Bar bookmarks. Folders will be ignored in the numbering
• If you’re in a file selection dialog you can use ⌘-D to go to Desktop. Similarly ⌘-⇧-A works for Applications, ⌘-⇧-C for computer view, ⌘-⇧-H for home, and ⌘-⇧-I for idisk (automounts)
• If you have a save/don’t save dialog up you can select don’t save with ⌘-D
• ⌘-click on a window’s title bar (in Finder, Safari, and other apps) to see a hierarchical menu
• Drag/drop the icon in the title bar of document windows in nearly any application to perform drag/drop operations. For example, you can drag a Word/Excel doc to Mail.app or Entourage to immediately open a new email with that doc attached.
• Hold ⌥ and drag a file in the Finder to copy it to a new location.
• Hold ⌥-⌘ and drag a file in the Finder to create an alias at the new location.
• In cocoa applications you can use emacs shortcuts.
• When browsing lists in the Finder type the first few letters of the file you’re going to and it will immediately scroll to the first occurrence of the characters alphabetically.

To fix this I modified the script to check for an existing macvim process, and if it exists attach tabs to it.² Additionally, it checks for args and if none are present (or just -) the script invokes stdin. I am not much of a bash hacker though, so there are a few caveats…

• –remote-tab-silent doesn’t seem to work with listening on stdin, so the script always pops it out into a new window.
• You (apparently) can’t pass extra parameters when using –remote-tab-silent, so tricks like mvim /etc/hosts +5 to have it open with the cursor on line 5 will not work.

These are both irritating, but I feel the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Hopefully someone can contribute fixes to these problems!

#!/bin/sh
#
# This shell script passes all its arguments to the binary inside the
# MacVim.app application bundle.  If you make links to this script as view,
# gvim, etc., then it will peek at the name used to call it and set options
# appropriately.
#
# Based on a script by Wout Mertens and suggestions from Laurent Bihanic.  This
# version is the fault of Benji Fisher, 16 May 2005 (with modifications by Nico
# Weber and Bjorn Winckler, Aug 13 2007.  Some mediocre hacking by Paul Kehrer Sep 30 2009).
# First, check "All the Usual Suspects" for the location of the Vim.app bundle.
# You can short-circuit this by setting the VIM_APP_DIR environment variable
# or by un-commenting and editing the following line:
# VIM_APP_DIR=/Applications
 
if [ -z "$VIM_APP_DIR" ]
then
	myDir="`dirname "$0"`"
	myAppDir="$myDir/../Applications"
	for i in ~/Applications ~/Applications/vim $myDir $myDir/vim $myAppDir $myAppDir/vim /Applications /Applications/vim /Applications/Utilities /Applications/Utilities/vim; do
		if [ -x "$i/MacVim.app" ]; then
			VIM_APP_DIR="$i"
			break
		fi
	done
fi
if [ -z "$VIM_APP_DIR" ]
then
	echo "Sorry, cannot find MacVim.app.  Try setting the VIM_APP_DIR environment variable to the directory containing MacVim.app."
	exit 1
fi
binary="$VIM_APP_DIR/MacVim.app/Contents/MacOS/Vim"
 
# Next, peek at the name used to invoke this script, and set options
# accordingly.
 
name="`basename "$0"`"
gui=
opts=
 
# GUI mode, implies forking
case "$name" in m*|g*|rg*) gui=true ;; esac
 
# Restricted mode
case "$name" in r*) opts="$opts -Z";; esac
 
# vimdiff and view
case "$name" in
	*vimdiff)
		opts="$opts -dO"
		;;
	*view)
		opts="$opts -R"
		;;
esac
 
tabs=true
stdinoption=false
 
#let's see if we need to read from stdin
#script currently assumes NO PARAMETERS
if [ -z "$1" ] || [[ $1 == \- ]]; then
	stdinoption=true
fi
 
# Last step:  fire up vim.
# The program should fork by default when started in GUI mode, but it does
# not; we work around this when this script is invoked as "gvim" or "rgview"
# etc., but not when it is invoked as "vim -g".
if [ "$gui" ]; then
	# Note: this isn't perfect, because any error output goes to the
	# terminal instead of the console log.
	# But if you use open instead, you will need to fully qualify the
	# path names for any filenames you specify, which is hard.
	if $stdinoption; then
		exec "$binary" -g - 
	else 
		if $tabs && [ `ps x|grep 'MacOS/MacVim'|grep -v grep|wc -l` = "1" ] && [[ `$binary --serverlist` = "VIM" ]]; then
			#when using remote tabs you can't pass things like +5.
			exec "$binary" -g $opts --remote-tab-silent ${1:+"$@"}
		else
			exec "$binary" -g $opts ${1:+"$@"} 
		fi
	fi
else
	exec "$binary" $opts ${1:+"$@"}
fi

I use NTFS-3G + MacFUSE to write to NTFS disks on occasion, but I hate restarting System Preferences just to run a 32-bit PrefPane when I want to view/change some settings. Behold the power of open source!

To compile a 64-bit System Preferences compatible version of this item simply

1. Grab the source for the NTFS-3G PrefPane
2. Right click and get info on the build target to add x86_64, turn on Objective-C garbage collection to “supported”¹
3. Build the target.

…and you’re all set. You can download my copy, but I don’t recommend using it in 10.5 or 10.4. Of course, you don’t need a 64-bit PrefPane prior to 10.6 so why would you download it anyway?

First you’ll need to create a secondary admin account and log into that. While you can directly change the short name of an account you are logged into, I wouldn’t recommend it. Next, open system preferences, go to accounts, and right click the user you want to change. You’ll see a single menu item called “advanced options…”.

Choosing that will bring up a sheet that lets you change your user ID, group ID, short name, logins hell, home directory path, UUID, and add/remove aliases (other login names) for your account. While these are all very powerful tools we’re only going to use short name and home directory this time. In general it is safest to keep your short name and home directory path synchronized to avoid any issues that might arise from poorly written apps, but it is not required to change both. If you do change the home dir, then be aware that you’ll also need to run this command from the terminal to complete your account switch.

sudo mv /Users/oldshortname /Users/newshortname

Once you’ve done this you can log back in to the other account and you’re all set. Be aware that some apps do use hard coded paths for preferences, so you’ll probably have a few small issues to correct as you get up to speed.