My beautiful bride accidentally created duplicates of every photo in her iPhoto Library; her machine was running Mountain Lion (10.8.x). She was unable to undo the madness and a week went by before I was able to take a look at it. Bragging that our Time Machine backup would be able to bring us back in time, failed; when I had iPhoto launched, I tried to enter Time Machine, but every time I tried this, a new window called “Desktop” would appear and then the Time Machine would be opened based on the Desktop.

This was no good. I then tried to recover her entire iPhoto Library from her backed up Pictures folder, but that too failed over permissions.

Enter Terminal.app and rsync. To get around the strange permissions issue, I synced the iPhoto Library using sudo and rsync:

sudo rsync --archive --stats --human-readable --progress /Volumes/Time\ Machine\ Backups/Backups.backupdb/Tina\'s\ MacBook\ Pro/2014-03-07-081254/Macintosh\ HD/Users/christinaschwie/Pictures ~/

It worked like a champ and she’s happily using her iPhoto Library without duplicates again.

This might come in handy for people using owncloud or Dropbox that want their files to occur in the cloud and somewhere on their machine. If you want to make a certain directory path see files in the actual location they exist, run the following with Terminal.app:

ln -s path/where/files/really/exist path/you/wish/would/work

If you’re doing this with Owncloud or Dropbox, the first file path should be the directory path of your Dropbox account and the second directory path should be where you want your files to appear.

So, I recently updated to Server 3.0 and my PHP installation was obliterated. Since PHP in Mavericks server is something like 5.4, I decided to take this opportunity to upgrade to 5.5.5 through the liil project. To upgrade, fire up Terminal.app and run this script:

curl -s http://php-osx.liip.ch/install.sh | bash -s 5.5

Still in Terminal.app, use pico and modify the Apache .conf file:

sudo pico /Library/Server/Web/Config/apache2/httpd_server_app.conf

While you’re in pico, press “control” and “w” and search for “php5”. Add a hashtag to the line your search results hit and add the line below, as shown here:

#LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

LoadModule php5_module /usr/local/php5/libphp5.so

Finally, press “control” and “x” and save your changes. To reload with your upgraded PHP, run the following:

sudo apachectl restart

To be sure the syntax in your modified .conf is working properly, you can test it this way:

sudo apachectl -t

The key to my 2001 New Beetle broke off the remote housing a couple days ago. The RFID chip and radio inside the remote were fine, so I ordered up a replacement housing on Amazon. After following instructions on YouTube to carefully swap the internals, I found that the buttons on the new remote didn’t appear to lock/unlock the vehicle, nor was the RFID being acknowledged by the vehicle. Ironically, my backup master key/remote would also no longer lock/unlock the vehicle, so I figured something else was going on.

As recommended by VW, I reset the non-working remote by following page 31 of the manual. For those that don’t have it handy:

1. Press either the lock or unlock button on the non-working remote one time for one second.
2. Lock or unlock the vehicle with the master key (non-working remote).

The non-working remote should now be able to lock/unlock doors! Repeat as necessary for additional non-working remotes. I also started the vehicle and the RFID appeared to be acknowledged, as it was no longer tripping the vehicle’s security system as indicated by the dashboard.

Digi is working on version 6 of XCTU that runs on Mac OS X. Get it here:

http://ftp1.digi.com/support/utilities/40003027_1P.dmg

I’ve been using it on Mountain Lion and it works fine for me, but I’ve only begun to test it out.

I’ve had the need to append pages to PDFs encoded with DRM. A great tool for removing DRM one file at a time is a service called pdfclean for OS X, an installer of the command line utility included with mupdf’s MuTool clean. I successfully installed and used the service under Mountain Lion and found it effective. Thanks, be3n!

For macOS Sonoma and later, be3n’s tool works as an Automator app, just drop an encrypted .pdf on it. I’m having some trouble with it removed the encryption under Sonoma and am checking with be3n on a potential solution. Right now, when pdfclean attempts to remove encryption on a .pdf, it makes a new file that takes the form “old_file_name.pdf.broken” – removing “.broken” allows the file to open, but the encryption is still there.

My beloved Ibex Commuter Knickers are wearing through. Say it ain’t so!

This is the right butt cheek in a close up.

This is the right side from further away.

This is the left side further away.

This is the left side close up.

I normally don’t have a use for a password cracking application like John the Ripper, but a family member was having problems logging in to their Mac and they couldn’t remember what password they were using for the keychain. I decided to give John the Ripper a try and I’m glad I did. It picked the password for the keychain in about a minute using its built-in dictionary. If you get in a similar bind, the following worked for me running Mountain Lion Server.

The family member was remote, so they zipped up the login.keychain file and sent it to me. I moved the file to my local machine running Mountain Lion Server, but this should work on Mountain Lion, Lion, Snow Leopard, and maybe further back… I downloaded a jumbo build of John the Ripper, moved the login.keychain file into the same directory as the “run” directory of the downloaded JtR, and ran the following commands from JtR’s run directory with Terminal.app:

./keychain2john login.keychain

(running keychain2john spews out a few lines of characters, copy all of the lines to a .txt file and save it to the JtR directory – I copied keychain2john’s output to “clwlogin.txt”) and then I ran the following command from Terminal:

./john -i=all clwlogin.txt

While the command above is running, you can press “enter” and see JtR’s status. When JtR picks the password, it will automatically throw it up on the screen followed by a question mark in parentheses. At this point, JtR will keep running to look for more passwords, so I press Control-C to force it to quit. Success!

I recently upgraded to iLife ’11 from iLife ’09. When I attempted to fire up iPhoto, I was prompted to upgrade my library. I accepted, but not more than a few seconds into the upgrade, I was greeted with: “Unable to open this Library”.

To get around this, fire up Terminal and do the following:

Type “sudo chown -R yourusername” (replace yourusername with the username on your Mac), press the space bar, drag your iPhoto library file from the Finder to the Terminal window, and press return.

Repeat the following process with these commands (enter the command, press space, drag iPhoto library to Terminal and press return):

sudo chmod -R -N

sudo chmod -R u+rwX

I recently migrated data from an Active Directory user account to a new user account, due to a bungled unbind from the Active Directory. Inside the new user account, I was able to import the login.Keychain, but the System.keychain was read only. I’m not sure if this is the correct permissions for the System.keychain, but I fired up Terminal and ran the following:

bash-3.2# sudo chmod 644 System.keychain