I wrote a little old-school Windows HTA script to delete the .DS_Store, .Trashes, and ._* junk files and directories typically littered across non-HFS media by Mac OS X:

You can download it from my GitHub account if you have a use for this sort of thing. Written and tested with Windows 7 and IE 8; I’m not sure how it will work with earlier versions of either. Standard disclaimers apply: use at your own risk, etc.

Incidentally, I think HTAs are really underrated as Windows scripting goes. More on that topic later…

I always thought I was a bit of an oddball for choosing the ancient scheduler Remind as my favorite OS X calendar software. But as it turns out, I’m not quite as alone as I had assumed. I guess OS X is a bigger draw to Unix geeks than I realized.

So I’ve decided to publish a tool that I wrote a few months back, a simple little Objective-C command line application that reads the birthdays of all your OS X AddressBook contacts and outputs them in .reminders format.

The source code bundle is here. After installation, see the manpage remind_birthdays(1) for documentation.

You can also view the source code repository on Github.

It seems to be a commonly experienced problem with the Intel rendition of OS X 10.4 that some power management settings, such as the halfdim pmset parameter (a.k.a., “automatically reduce the brightness of the display before display sleep”) may be reset when the system boots. Since I started dual-booting Vista my reboots have increased from about once a week to a few times a day, so I decided to tackle this annoying little bug with a StartupItem.

Here’s how to do it. First, make a directory named PMSetManager in /Library/StartupItems. Create two files in this new directory, StartupParameters.plist and PMSetManager, with the specified contents.

/Library/StartupItems/PMSetManager/StartupParameters.plist:

{
Description = "PMSetManager";
OrderPreference = "Late";
Provides = ("PMSetManager");
Message =
{
start = "Starting pmset manager";
stop = "Stopping pmset manager";
};
}

/Library/StartupItems/PMSetManager/PMSetManager:

#!/bin/sh
# pmset manager
#
# Resets the 'halfdim' pmset parameter to false
# on reboot, in order to counteract what appears
# to be a bug on OS X 10.4.
. /etc/rc.common
StartService ()
{
if [ "${PMSETMANAGER:=-NO-}" = "-YES-" ]
then
ConsoleMessage "Starting pmset manager"
pmset -a halfdim 0
fi
}
StopService ()
{
ConsoleMessage "Stopping pmset manager"
}
RestartService ()
{
StopService
StartService
}
RunService "$1"

(The pmset command in this script can do more than …

Read more…

Probably to help ensure that this doesn’t happen to anyone else, Apple has decided to recall more than a million batteries shipped with its G4 iBook and PowerBook computers from October 2003 through 2006:

More information can be found on the Apple web site. On the positive side of this, at least I’m getting a fresh new battery for my two-year-old laptop…