Category Archives: Apple

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.

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Add a Little Retro to Your Google Notifier

I use the Google Notifier for Mac to alert me when my gmail account has new messages and lately, I’ve grown tired of the standard OS X notification sounds that it lets you use.  I wanted to use my own sounds so that I can more easily distinguish this aural alert from other notifications.

Google Notifier lets you choose from the Mac’s standard notification sounds, or two custom tones that Google supplies.  We’re simply going to replace one of these tones with our own. (more…)

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How To: Manage a Shared USB Printer in Workgroup Manager

UPDATED: To the best of my knowledge, this method does not work on OS X 10.5 Leopard, or OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, due to changes in the way the printing system works in those versions of the Operating System.

While configuring our Middle and Upper School art rooms at work, I ran into an issue that was potentially going to cause a massive headache.  How to use Workgroup Manager (WGM) to manage a local, shared USB printer?

Managing networked printers is easy with WGM, it even lets you decide if users have the ability to connect their own local USB printer.  It does not, however, allow you to share this local printer and manage it.

What’s an admin to do?  The first thing I did was start digging around for property list files, and that’s exactly where I found my answer.

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