This code will basically run until the currently-loading page is done loading in Safari. This code is working in Safari 4.0.3 running on OS X 10.6; I haven't tested in other versions of Safari or the OS. [robg adds: To use this script, save it to your user's Library » Scripts » Applications » Safari folder (create any of those folders if they don't exist). I'm not positive, but I think the idea here is that you can use this script if you're on a very slow connection and/or trying to load a very slow-loading page. Just put the URL into Safari, press Return, then run the above script via the Script menu item. You can then just wait for your Mac to say loaded when the page is done loading.

I had trouble finding a site that would load slowly enough to let me invoke the script, but I eventually found one; the script works as described in 10.6 (it won't compile in 10.5).]

My workflow is very email-centric and I've often wished I could start a new email in Mail by pressing a keyboard combo in any program. I use QuickSilver, and the regular way of searching for a contact's email address and then creating a new mail that way seems awkward to me compared to the email address completion Mail.app offers.

After many tries, I finally found out how to get Mail.app to open a new message window using AppleScript:

tell application "Mail"
  set t to make new outgoing message
  set visible of t to true
  activate
end tell

Save this as an AppleScript using AppleScript Editor, and then tie a keyboard shortcut to that script using your favorite keyboard shortcut creation tool. Tested with 10.6.1.

[robg adds: This also works in 10.5, and probably many releases before that. Spark is one of many program you can use to create the keyboard shortcut. In 10.6, you could also create this as a Service using Automator, and assign a keyboard shortcut in the Keyboard Shortcut's System Preferences panel.]

To turn Spotlight Indexing off and on in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and to remove the Menu Bar Icon, follow these steps...

To turn Spotlight Indexing off in open Terminal and run this command:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

To turn Spotlight Indexing back on, repeat the above command, but change off to on. To remove the menu bar icon, run this Terminal command:

sudo chmod 600 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search

You'll then to restart the menu bar with killall SystemUIServer to see the icon vanish.

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one.]

I run an FTP server on my machine, using Pure-FTPd. Lately, I was getting a lot of noise in my logs about unknown people trying to gain access on my FTP server. I wanted to automate the task of looking through the log and banning the bad IPs, so that my logs will be kept clean from all those try/fails attempts.

What I came up with is a bash script executed as a launchd user daemon whenever the file /var/log/ftp.log is being modified. Parts of the code come from , and irc2samus on the #bash channel (IRC on freenode.net) made the rest.

I thought this might help others, too, so here's the code.

The function to delete the selected page (or pages) from a PDF file disappeared from the Edit menu of Preview in Snow Leopard. Even worse, it was replaced (using the same Command-Delete shortcut) with a command that moves the entire PDF document to the trash.

You can, however, still delete selected page(s) through an undocumented keyboard shortcut. Hold down Shift-Command-Delete with one or more pages selected, and only those pages will be deleted from the document. Page numbering, however, does not update to reflect this deletion until you (re)save the file (in 10.5, the numbering updated instantly upon deletion).

If you have a laptop that supports multitouch gestures, you probably are aware of the fact that a three-finger swipe in Preview will go to the next or previous page in a PDF. But you may be annoyed at how Preview insists on animating each page switch with a small scrolling action. This can make it very slow to scroll through a document -- almost as slow as regular two-finger scrolling.

Fortunately, there is a solution: use a three-finger swipe in the sidebar. When you swipe in the sidebar, the pages will change instantly, without any animation. This works no matter what mode the sidebar is in (table of contents or thumbnails). And if you are in contact sheet mode, three-finger swiping will navigate you through the contact sheet.

I can only test this in 10.6, and I didn't discover it until I was running 10.6, so I don't know if it works in 10.5 or not.

[robg adds: My MBP is also 10.6-only now, so I can't test in 10.5 either. If you can, please post in the comments.]

Locating an email message in your Mail folder hierarchy is now a snap. As of Snow Leopard's version of Mail, if you open a message in a new window, Command-clicking (or Control-clicking) on the icon in the title bar of the message window will reveal the path to the enclosing folder for the message (just like it does in the Finder).

Select the folder from the drop-down menu, and it will open in a new Mail browser window. This allows you to easily locate the message within the Mail folder hierarchy, which can prove quite handy.

Viewing Microsoft Entourage email messages in the Finder with Quick Look doesn't work -- it merely displays an icon image. If you have Entourage 2008 and 10.5 or 10.6, there is a way to display the contents of the message in Quick Look. Download the file named Entourage QuickLook Plug-In.dmg from this site, and place a copy in the /Library/QuickLook folder.

This solution is especially useful for scrolling through Spotlight search results in the Finder, with Quick Look opened in full screen mode on a second monitor.

[robg adds: The plug-in should also work in your user's Library/QuickLook folder. I don't use Entourage, though, so I can't test this one.]

To use the old-style contextual menus when you click-and-hold on an application's icon in the Dock (i.e. how it worked in 10.5 and earlier), type the following two commands in Terminal (don't type the $):

defaults write com.apple.dock show-expose-menus -bool no; killall Dock

All credit for this hint goes to Jeff Johnson of Lap Cat Software, who blogged about the solution. This hint is a significant update to this one, which pointed out you can use Control-click to get the old-style contextual menus.

[robg adds: To undo this behavior, you can either change no to yes in the above command, or delete the key entirely with defaults delete com.apple.dock show-expose-menus; killall Dock.]

Not a big of the yellow background in Apple's Mail.app Notes? Handy with a text editor? You can change the background with a few simple steps. First, make a backup of your Mail application in case something goes wrong.

With the backup in place, Control-click on Mail.app and choose Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu, then navigate into the Resources folder. Using BBEdit (or another plain text editor), open the following three files: note-view.html, note-window.html, and note.css.

In the two .html files, locate the img tag that references note-background-gradient, and delete the entire line (or comment it out with the <!-- --> tag pair). In the .css file, change the background:rgb values to something pleasing; I used 250, 250, 245 so it would look nice with the rest of the Mail motif.

Save the edited files and launch Mail, and enjoy your non-yellow Notes.

[robg adds: Note that this edit will break code signing on Mail (in 10.5 and 10.6); you can check this yourself in Terminal with the modified app:

$ codesign -v /Applications/Mail.app
/Applications/Mail copy.app: a sealed resource is missing or invalid

However, I'm not sure what impact this may have, at least in 10.5. I tested this hint and then used my modified Mail app to check and send email without any troubles. I'd suggest, however, making the changes on a duplicate version of Mail and leaving the original untouched. Run the modified duplicate instead of the original, and then you can easily switch back if you have any problems.]