How To: Run Lego Education’s WeDo software on OS X 10.4.11

I realize the topic of this post may be a bit specialized, but I would surely have liked to had something like this as a guide when I recently had to overcome this challenge.

Most of our entire campus is still running OS X 10.4.11, for the sole reason that login times for a .local Active Directory domain STILL take 2-3 minutes (as of 10.5.6).  Our Lower School purchased some Lego robotics kits which came with new software called WeDo.  The minimum requirements are OS X 10.5, and the installer will not run on OS X 10.4.

To get around this, I did the following: Read more…

Custom CS4 Icon

Since my CS3 folder icon has been my most popular blog post, I decided to create a new one for the CS4 suite of Adobe applications.

I debated sticking with the ugly black font Adobe uses for the application icons, but I’m a sucker for consistency. Feel free to download and use, and as always, please leave a comment if you like the icon.

[Download]

Enable OS X Dock Magnification on the Fly

I accidentally discovered that in OS X Leopard, if you have dock magnification turned off, you can temporarily enable it by holding Shift and Control while moving your cursor over the dock.

This does not appear to work at all in Tiger, and I’ve only tested it in OS X 10.5.6, so it’s possible it may not work below that.

Change Twitterrific’s Default Protocol

Twitterrific by The Icon Factory

We have a web filtering appliance installed as part of our network at my place of work.  Among the many functions it performs, packet shaping and filtering is one of the most important, and most annoying.  In our setup, port 443 (https) isn’t heavily restricted, so I use port 443 where available for any software I want to bypass the appliance and its rules.

Mail.app, iChat, Mailplane, etc all have options in their preferences to set alternate ports, while Twitterrific does not.  However, through a simple .plist hack we can tell Twitterriffic to use https traffic.  Navigate to and open the following property list file:

~/Library/Preferences/com.iconfactory.Twitterrific.plist

If it does not already exist, add a new Child property and call it “protocol” (all lower case, no quotes).  Set the class to String, and the value to “https://” (again, without the quotes).  Quit Twitterrific if it’s open, relaunch and voilá, you’re now connecting to Twitter over the secure http protocol.

Your results may vary if your LAN administrator blocks Twitter packets, or has other means of restricting traffic on port 443, but it’s worth a shot.

Tags: plist edit

Time Machine Vortex Icon

UPDATED: I went back and added the drop shadow and also lightened up the Vortex image to make it stand out a little better.

I got a little icon happy today and decided to merge the outer space image you see in Time Machine (called Vortex) with it’s default disk icon, to create the Time Machine Vortex icon.  I got a little lazy so there’s no drop shadow and the part of the Vortex image I used looks almost black, but I think it’s subtle enough without going overboard.

Replace the default OS X Time Machine disk icon with this one for some customized interface goodness, and as always, if you like the icon leave a comment and let me know.

[Download]

Another Way to Kill Dashboard at Login for Managed Users

I love Dashboard, I have several widgets I can’t live without.  Most of my users however, don’t even know what it is.  I also love the Mighty Mouse but again, most of my users don’t understand how it works.

I’ve tried managing the mouse preferences to prevent Dashboard from opening when users click the scroll ball, but I can’t seem to get it to work for the life of me.  The same applies to disabling the Dashboard application and all accompanying applications through Workgroup Manager.

I came across DashOff, an application for enabling and disabling Dashboard, but it requires user interaction and I want this to be automated.  I finally gave up and decided to create an Applescript application called KillDash to run at login, to issue a “defaults write” command to disable dashboard.

Read more…