I have the following scenario: A couple of Mac computers push their hourly/daily backups to a timecapsule device using timemachine (actually, pushing to a samba share would do equally well, see this older post of mine). One of the benefits is that my work group has total control over this timecapsule, it is always accessible to us. On the other hand, in case of fire or burglary, not only our workstations might be lost, but also our backup device.

So, the easiest workaround to this problem is to make frequent backups of the contents of the backup device, it... Read more.

In Snow Leopard (and probably older versions as well) you can disable the login window buttons for restarting or shutting down the computer. The following commands are pretty self explanatory:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow RestartDisabled -bool true

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow ShutDownDisabled -bool false

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow SleepDisabled -bool true

This will disable the sleep and restart buttons and enable the shutdown button.

Changing the page numbering of existing PDF files with the usual unix command line tools is seemingly not so straight forward. Reading the manual, I thought that pdftk should be up to the job, but did have no success making it work on my PDF file in question. As the issue of renumbering pages in PDF files came up already a few times for me, I decided to give it a go and tackle the problem and invest a little more labour. I have found two working approaches.

Approach one: pdfoffset, a command-line tool written in Clojure,... Read more.