I've used LittleSnitch for some years now and consider it a must-have. Short explanation: LittleSnitch is a network filter that watches your applications for outgoing connections (interesting how many applications establish connections to Google, by the way). Perhaps I'm a little paranoid, or maybe you like it as well.

In any event, some months ago I tried GlimmerBlocker, a software proxy between your browser and the internet with the ability to filter ads on websites, manipulate websites, and much more if you have a little background knowledge on how the web works. Something I also can't live without after using it for a while.

By accident, I discovered that LittleSnitch and GlimmerBlocker can't really coexist (at least if you are using Safari, because it uses the system-wide proxy setting as do all other applications). When you use GlimmerBlocker, all web traffic will be redirected to GlimmerBlocker, and GlimmerBlocker will be the outgoing connection LittleSnitch catches. So, it's no different if you're surfing websites with Safari, Mail is checking for emails, or eyeTV is looking for updates: LittleSnitch will pop up with "Glimmer Blocker want's to connect to...".

Before I was able to tell LittleSnitch to allow Safari all connections, but Mail to only allow connections to gmail.com (to not load any images in emails), but no longer once GlimmerBlocker is installed.

If you want to use LittleSnitch and GlimmerBlocker together, read the rest for my workaround, but be warned: Please do all of this only if you have some background knowledge of the network preferences and Apache. You may harm your network preferences and kill the internet on your machine if you don't know what you are doing here!

I upgraded my system to Snow Leopard from Tiger, and noticed that Snow Leopard adds a date and time stamp to screen shots' filenames. I really don't care about this new feature, and wanted to remove it. After a bit of a search, I found the solution.

Type (copy) into Terminal: After you type your password, TextEdit will come up and it will open a text file (Localizable.strings) with root editing powers. Search for these lines:

/* Format screencapture file names */
"%@ %@ at %@" = "%1$@ %2$@ at %3$@";

Between the quotes on the right side of the equals sign is the date and time addition. Just edit it, something like this:

/* Format screencapture file names */
"%@ %@ at %@" = "Screen Shot";

Make sure to not leave this empty! Using the above example, the first screen shot file will be named Screen Shot, and then Screen Shot 1, Screen Shot 2, etc.

If you are using a system language other than English, change the Terminal command as needed. For example, French.lproj, German.lproj, etc. When you are ready, use Save (not Save As) in TextEdit and quit. If you want to see the result immediately, restart the SystemUIServer in Terminal:

killall SystemUIServer

Note that I tested this only on Snow Leopard.

[robg adds: I imagine this will break code signing on the SystemUIServer app...but I'm not sure what impact that may have on daily use. I have not tested this one myself.]

I found this really simple tip (which I also posted on my blog) that describes how to disable the GrowlTunes menu bar icon. In Terminal, copy and paste this command:

defaults write com.growl.growltunes GrowlTunesWithoutMenu 1

Relaunch GrowlTunes, and the menu bar icon is no longer displayed. Note that after making this change, you no longer have access to the GrowlTunes menu bar functions. You can still quit the app by opening Activity Monitor, selecting GrowlTunes, and clicking Quit Process.

To reverse this change, type the same command, but with a 0 at the end, instead of a 1.

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.