Murphy Mac

Murphy found himself locked out of his Mac for the first time ever the other day. The Genius Bar had replaced his Macbook Pro with a new machine. They used Target Disk Mode to transfer Murphy’s data from the old machine - but when he got home his password wasn’t accepted.

Murphy called the Apple store thinking maybe they’d changed his password to some Genius Bar standard password. While he was on hold, he Googled the procedure for resetting a forgotten password. Before getting through to the Genius Bar the problem was solved. Here are the steps:

• Boot with your install disk, holding C as the machine starts up.
• Select your language
• The menu bar will appear where it usually does, though you might not notice it! Select the Utilities menu and click Reset Password.

That’s all there is to it. Now your account is accessible and you can get back to work. Apple has a support document on the topic or you can search the Help system for Reset Password.

Hopefully this post shows you how important physical security is when it comes to protecting your data. See the previous post for more information on securing sensitive files.

Here’s a link to a guide you should print out. Have it somewhere handy for that day your Mac won’t boot.

Murphy has been on the lookout for an easy way to use the Quick Add feature of Google Calendar, even when his calendar isn’t open in Safari or Firefox. There doesn’t seem to be a widget, but there is a Firefox plugin. Last time Murphy tried the plug-in there were some problems.

If you’re partial to the Terminal you might like gcalcli. Murphy uses gcalcli to make Quick Add entries from the tiny Terminal window he’s always got open. Simple, fast, convenient. He’s also using gcalcli with GeekTool to display calendar events right on the desktop, like the image you see above. (more…)

If you didn’t participate in Macheist you missed out on a great application called 1Password. With 1Password you can store your login credentials from multiple websites and log in with a couple clicks.

Do you have multiple Gmail accounts? 1Password makes it a snap to switch between them. (there are other applications for this purpose) Actually, if you have multiple usernames on ANY website 1Password will help you keep them straight. Watch the screencast to see how Murphy sets up sites for 1Password.

It seems like Murphy is creating new usernames and passwords all the time. Keeping them sorted can be taxing on the brain. The last thing you want to do is use the same password on multiple sites. Better still, 1Password can help you generate strong, unique passwords since you won’t have to remember them. (more…)

Murphy has been using SuperDuper for backups for a while now. Its flexibility and ease of use have helped it build up quite a following. Usually, Murphy sends his SuperDuper backups to a sparse image file. The sparse image file is a container that grows as you add more content. But what if content is removed from the sparse image file? That’s a good question.

The answer is that the sparse image file needs a little help to shrink. For example, let’s say you backed up your drive on Wednesday to a sparse image file. Then you deleted some big video files on Thursday and did another backup with SuperDuper on Friday. Your video files aren’t in the sparse image file anymore, but the backup is still taking up space on disk as if they were. The solution is simple. Use a simple command in the Terminal to reclaim the wasted space in your sparse image file. Just type everything in the line below, replacing the path and file name with the path and file name of your sparse image. (more…)

In a previous screencast we used Photoshop to make an image suitable for a folder icon in Leopard. Now we’ll turn that Photoshop file into an icon and apply it to the Finder folder.

It’s probably more steps than you might have guessed, but it’s very straight-forward once you have all the tools in place. Murphy installed the Developer Tools from the Leopard install DVD which include a utility called Icon Composer. The first step is to drag the Photoshop file we created earlier into Icon Composer. The icon is created in various sizes appropriate for Leopard and we export to an icns file.

The catch is that the icns file doesn’t use its own icon content as its icon. That sounds confusing, but when you see the file you’ll know it’s not right. The background isn’t transparent. But that’s no problem. Just drop the icns file onto an application called IconDroplet. A new file will be created that uses the icns file’s content as the icon.

From there, the process may be familiar. Open the Get Info panel for the file created with IconDroplet. Select the tiny icon in the top left corner and hit Command-C on the keyboard to make a copy. Then open the Get Info Panel for a the folder or file that needs a new icon. Select its tiny icon and hit Command-V to paste it in. That’s it.

If you’re confused Murphy slapped a screencast together. For a general look at changing icons on files there’s an old post on the subject too. But keep in mind, using an icns file is the way to go for best results in different Finder views, like Cover Flow.