I have to manage several Macs in a lot of locations and I was very confortable with the Bonjour discovery, saved connections, and hidden features of the 10.5 Screen Sharing app. Alas, with the release of 10.6, they have gone -- Apple wants to sell Apple Remote Desktop.

I have found that using this command in Terminal...

defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing controlObserveQuality n

...changes the quality of the connection's display, based on the value of n:

• 1 = black and white
• 2 = grayscale
• 3 = 8-bit color
• 4 = 16-bit color
• 5 = full color

I also set up shortcuts using the vnc://192.168.0.1 URL convention in Safari, as discussed in this hint and comments. I save all my connection shortcuts in a folder, and put that folder in my Dock. I now have a Saved Connections folder that I can use to launch Screen Sharing automatically.

[robg adds: This Terminal command was covered in this comment, but I felt it worth repeating as a full hint. If you have a Screen Sharing session currently open, you'll need to close and reopen it to see the changes.]

If you click-and-hold on the Trash icon in the Dock, the contextual menu appears, showing Open and Empty Trash. Press and hold the Command key, though, and Empty Trash turns into Secure Empty Trash.

If you launch Stickies and create a new note, it sticks that note to the Space where it was created. If you click the Stickies icon in the Dock to make another note, the system will move you back to that Space. Fine, except that if you usually work on Space 1 and you end up with all your Stickies on Space 3, for example, they are "out of sight, out of mind" -- not what you want in a reminder. Notes won't drag off the edge of a screen onto another Space like normal windows, nor do they respond to the "click-hold-control-number" method of switching a window to another Space. There doesn't seem to be any way to get your Stickies back to your main Space.

You can use Spaces' All Spaces view (F8) to drag Stickies notes between Spaces, but that's slow. (It's OK if you want to move just one or two notes between Spaces). But if you want to quickly consolidate all your notes, quit Stickies, return to your main Space, and relaunch Stickies. This will bring all the notes into your main Space.

To enable anonymous FTP in Snow Leopard (and probably Leopard as well), just execute the following commands in Terminal:

$ sudo dscl . -create /Users/ftp
$ sudo dscl . -create /Users/ftp NFSHomeDirectory /path/to/ftp/folder

Replace /path/to/ftp/folder with the path to the directory that the guest account will have access to. To disable anonymous access, use this command:

$ sudo dscl . -delete /Users/ftp

You may have to restart the FTP daemon by stopping File Sharing and starting it again in System Preferences. Although I didn't test it in Leopard, I see no reason why it shouldn't work there as well.

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

iCal's alarms come in handy for those of us who tend to forget the various little things we always need to do. However, you may find iCal getting cluttered with such regularly-scheduled events, pushing other events out of view. But there's a simple solution to this problem.

Go to File » New Calendar » On My Mac, and name the new calendar Reminders or something similar. Put all of your reminders in this calendar, and make sure they all have alarms. Then, simply click on the checkbox next to the Reminder calendar in the sidebar to hide the calendar. Alarms for the hidden calendar will still go off, but all your miscellaneous reminders will no longer clutter your iCal window. (This "hide in other calendars" strategy is useful for other things as well.)

[robg adds: I thought we had run a similar hint in the past, but (even searching with Google) I couldn't find it. If you do, please let me know.]

By now, everyone knows how to delete a file or folder from time-machine using the Gear menu in Time Machine's Finder view. But I was puzzled by the problem of deleting entries for an entire external disk I no longer had. Because that disk was no longer available, I could not simply attach the disk and then use Time Machine to delete the backups for it. You also can't do this with the Finder (it won't let you edit the Time Machine folder). And you probably would prefer not to do it by hand in Terminal, since there might be Time Machine database entries this would gum up.

The solution is to navigate in the Time Machine interface not to the disk itself, but to the backup entry for that disk on the Time Machine disk itself. Specifically, in Time Machine's Finder view, select the Time Machine disk, then enter the Backups.backupdb folder, and drill down to find the last entry for the obsolete disk. Then tell Time Machine to delete all backups of that entry. The original disk need not be connected!

If you think about this, it's an unexpected behavior since it's outside the standard paradigm of pointing to the "real file" you want to remove the backups of.

This is handy because Time Machine promiscuously tries to back up even temporarily-connected drives which might not be your own, leaving you with orphan backup entries you don't want. This has only been tested on 10.5, but probably works the same way in 10.6.

In OS X 10.5, to view available disk space on your drive (or partition), you had to either open Activity Monitor, or open an Inspector/Get Info window for your hard drive.

In OS X 10.6, you can use Quick Look instead. Select the drive in the Finder, then press the Space Bar. In the Quick Look window, you'll see the drive's capacity and unused space details.

I often have to rotate my photos to the proper orientation, because my camera doesn't have position sensor. I'd like to do this operation without loss of quality, so I discovered exiftool, which simply rewrites some exif tags. The exiftool itself is a command line application, so I've created a simple GUI in AppleScript. The script is follows: Save the script as an application and simply drag the image (it should also work for multiple images) on the app. You will be asked which side to rotate. It may happen that you will have to adjust to values in the script (8 and 6); these values work with my camera. I personally use the app as an external editor for iPhoto.

A while back, Time Machine on my DP G4 running 10.5.8 started failing, after having run for several months without any problems. This is the error from the logs:

So I tried all the usual fixes:

1. I reformatted and rebuilt all my drives.
2. I ran Disk Utility to repair the drives and permissions. More than once.
3. I reapplied the 10.5.8 Combo Update.
4. I was backing up to a WD 1TB My Book Studio. I tried backing up the internal drive instead, but that failed too.
5. If I excluded an application from backup, it failed on the next app in the line.
6. I found nothing online (Google, Apple, et.al.) that said do X, Y, and Z, and all will be well, even though this error is all over the web. Not even this KB article helped.
7. I arrested all the usual suspects.

In short, nothing worked. But, "He that perseveres to the end, the same shall be saved." I still don't know the cause (old age prehaps) but I found a solution. I booted from my 10.5 DVD, archived and installed OS X, and then updated my software from there to 10.5.8. Problem solved.

[robg adds: This seems like a very particular issue, but just in case it's happening to anyone else, here's one solution at least.]

With the ever growing popularity of Facebook, I had a number of people asking me how to use a Facebook badge as an email signature, so here are the directions for doing it.

The process is fairly easy. First you need to use Facebook to create a Facebook Badge. Once you have created your badge, select Other for the location it will be used, and then copy the code provided.

Open Dreamweaver or another HTML editor (but not iWeb). Insert the copied code in the body section of the code.