Welcome to 2010! No new hints today; we'll be back as usual on Monday.

-rob.

The following is not a hint, really, but an observation of a cool non-publicized Snow Leapord feature.

While flying home from the west coast this holiday season and changing the time zone on my MacBook, I noticed a new feature on the map that you see in the TIme Zone tab of the Date & Time System Preferences panel: The map of the Earth changes based on the time of the year.

For example, if you set the month to August in the Date & Time tab of the panel, the map will display a lush green northern hemisphere. Setting the date to December changes the northern hemisphere to the appropriate snow cover.

I like to keep a weather page from Wunderground on my Opera speed dial. The monthly summary page contains the information I'm seeking (moon phase and sunrise/sunset). However, the URL contains a date, and the page displays information for that date. I was changing the date manually once a month, but this method doesn't show accurate daily information. So, I wrote a perl script that changes the date every day. I use cron to run the script at midnight every day (I hate launchd; it's overly complicated).

Opera stores information about Speed Dial links in a text file located at ~/Library » Preferences » Opera Preferences » speeddial.ini. This script closes Opera and changes the date in the URL in the speeddial.ini file.

Apple Software Restore (ASR) has a font issue when used from the command line (asr), or from Disk Utility (Restore tab) in 10.6.

When booting off the imaged drive, upon first log in to each user account, a message pops up stating that the Lucide Grand font has been changed and restored. There are two ways to fix this issue:

1. Run Disk Utility from the 10.6 install disc: this insures that all caches are in sync.
2. In Terminal, do this: rm -rf /Volumes/some_drive/private/var/folders/*: this removes the font caches from the users' accounts.

Hope this helps someone else.

It suddenly took was taking iPhoto over a minute to load on my machine, with the spinning wheel visible during this whole time. This went on for days. I read various solutions online, and tried turning off program options.

Eventually, I found a solution to the problem. In iPhoto's Preferences, on the Sharing tab,I disabled both sharing options (looking for and sharing). iPhoto then loaded nearly instantly.

[robg adds: I don't know if this is a widespread issue; I have sharing enabled on my two main machines here, and both seem to load iPhoto with no change in launch time based on this setting. I suspect a broader network issue is behind the problem, but if you're trying to troubleshoot slow iPhoto launch times, this may be worth trying.]

My new Olympus E-620 is not (yet) directly supported by Snow Leopard. Since I only shoot in RAW, I searched the web and found that there is a Raw.plist file that can be tweaked. However, that didn't work. I then found out that you need to tweak the RawCamera binary, too (that's a shame Apple, hiding ID Strings in a binary).

I encountered an issue with a mounted SMB shared drive, where users have always put their files using Tiger or Leopard without any issues. Some software (in this case, ADI Chart) uses the resource fork to store information. In Snow Leopard, SMB mounts are set to use the xattr (extended attributes) feature instead of ._ files for storing the resource fork (a nice change; less clutter).

Unfortunately, this method is not backwards compatible, so our other users are unable to read files uploaded by 10.6, and our 10.6 users cannot read any files already on the server (uploaded by pre-10.6 systems). So, we need to disable this new feature.

It turns out to be related to the 'NTFS Streams' feature of SMB mounts, so if we disable those, then all is well. To do this globally (per machine), we need to create /etc/nsmb.conf, or add the streams line below to the [default] section if the file already exists:

#######
[default]
streams=no
#######

I used Terminal to make this change: sudo vi /etc/nsmb.conf.

I wrote a bash script that will find the current IP address of the WAN port on an Airport Extreme (and possibly other wireless routers) from the command line. It also works on a Linux-based computer, if you have the package net-smnp installed.

Go to the Advanced settings in your AirPort configuration, and select the Statistics tab. Make sure that 'Allow SNMP' is checked, and note the 'SNMP Community String -- it can be changed, but I would just keep it at public. Save your settings if they've been changed.

In the script below, the variable SNMPKEY needs to be changed if the 'SNMP Community String' is anything but public. You can also pass it from the command line if you wish. Here's the script: [robg adds: I haven't tested this one.]

In the recent Move messages to a target folder via keyboard shortcut hint, I noticed a user describing a script he'd written to allow him to archive messages from four different Gmail accounts. I replied with this simpler suggestion, and I think perhaps it might merit being considered as a hint in its own right. A quick search of the site didn't show that it'd been posted before.

When you define your Gmail account in Mail.app, make sure you do the following:

1. Under Mailbox Behaviors for Trash, make sure both options are unchecked. You want Mail to not move deleted messages to the trash, and not to store them on the server.
2. For Junk, check Store junk messages on the server, and set auto-delete to never. In the listing of your GMail account's folders within your Mail.app sidebar, select the Spam folder and choose it as Mail.app's Junk folder. You can do this by selecting 'Use this Mailbox for..' under the Mailbox menu, and selecting "Junk." This sets it up so that both Mail.app and Gmail are using the same folder for Junk and/or Spam.

Once you've done the above, you can easily archive messages without any custom scripts or plug-ins. Note: the following solution has one key limitation: if you have any accounts in Mail.app that aren't Gmail accounts, you'll be in for an unpleasant surprise if you try to archive mail from one of those accounts' inboxes by deleting it. With that caveat in mind, here's how I handle GMail in Mail...

I discovered a great little app, Proximity, and have now made my Mac's security very seamless. This approach requires:

1. Bluetooth-enabled Mac and a Bluetooth-capable phone (including the iPhone).
2. Some AppleScript writing or copying-and-pasting.
3. Tested only on 10.5.6 and 10.5.8 install; untested in 10.4 and 10.6.

Read on for the background on the solution, as well as the step-by-step implementation.