search for respawn

Force the Dock to only show running applications

Here's an interesting Dock modification, though to be honest, I'm not sure exactly when it might prove useful. In Terminal, enter these two commands: $ defaults write com.apple.dock static-only -bool TRUE $ killall Dock As soon as you kill the Dock, when it respawns you'll notice that only your running applications are listed -- in other words, any program you've added to the Dock won't be shown unless it's running. You can obviously accomplish the same end result by simply dragging all your static applications out of the Dock while nothing other than the Finder is running; so that's why I'm not sure how useful this command really is. The only potential use I can see for it is if you've got a really crowded Dock, and you wanted to temporarily simplify it, you can use this command -- because when you reverse the preferences setting by repeating the above command with FALSE at the end, all your static icons will come back, so you don...

published on Thursday, the 8. January 2009, macosxhints

10.5: A possible fix for an iChat 'Camera in use' error

With an Intel iMac running Leopard, I kept getting an error that the built-in iSight was in use. To fix this problem, I now do this from Terminal as an admin user, and I can again use the camera: $ sudo killall VDCAssistant I do not even have to restart iChat for the fix to take effect. The way I deduced this is that I ran sudo lsof | less -i, searched for usb, and found this VDCAssistant process using some VDC (whatever that is) library that the QuickTime component of iChat was using, too. So I decided to kill that process. The system respawns the VDCAssistant process, but after that, the iSight camera can be used again in iChat -- at least until it suddenly becomes unusable again, for no particular reason I can determine.

published on Friday, the 8. August 2008, macosxhints

Automatically remove a certain file from a given directory

Many of us have found a profiles.bin file in our home folders. Many think it is created by MS Office for some reason, but nobody knows for sure. Everybody hates it and tries to remove it, to no avail: the file will respawn the next time you open MS Office. The file is completely useless, as far as anybody can tell.I don't suggest a solution to the issue, nor an explanation; just a cool workaround to have that file delete itself every time you open its containing folder. It does so by means of a Folder Action. Folder Actions are pieces of AppleScript code to be executed automatically every time you open or close a folder, or add/remove items to/from it.Here's how to create the one we need. Open Script Editor (in Applications » AppleScript) and type the following script and then click Compile to test for (most) spelling mistakes:on opening folder tell application "Finder" to delete file "profiles.bin" of homeend opening folderSave the...

published on Monday, the 6. August 2007, macosxhints