Alan Siu's Blog

Category: Uncategorized

  • Prevent a partition from mounting at boot time

    Cheating a bit here, because I’m just linking to an excellent blog post on the procedure: OS X Tip: Prevent a Volume From Mounting at Startup It’s very helpful if you’ve set up a Boot Camp dual-boot with Windows, and you don’t want to have the Windows partition automatically mount when you boot into Mac…

  • One working fix for “filter failed” printer message on a Mac

    There seem to be several “working” (your mileage may vary) fixes for the “filter failed” message when you try to print on a Mac (may happen in Linux, too, since Mac uses CUPS for printing), and they all seem driver-related: ‘Filter’ failed error when printing from EPSON Yosemite and a printer driver that broke The…

  • Manually adding icons to Munki-imported packages

    As with all Munki tutorials, this one assumes you already know some Munki basics. If you don’t, you might want to start with Absolute beginner’s guide to setting up Munki (not monkey). When you use munkiimport to import software packages, it will either find icons automatically or prompt you to try to extract icons from…

  • Creating an installation package for a scheduled Adobe Remote Update Manager

    This is kind of a dual-purpose Mac tutorial—how to automate Adobe Remote Update Manager and how to create an installation package using a point-and-click graphical interface. Automating Adobe Remote Update Manager You can find the Adobe Remote Update Manager on Adobe’s Creative Suite Enterprise Deployment page. Just scroll down a bit until you find it.…

  • Installing MunkiReport

    What is MunkiReport MunkiReport is a web-based reporting interface for Munki clients. It’s cool to deploy a bunch of Munki clients, but it’d be nice to know how many are out there, and any errors or pending installs there may be on those clients. If you haven’t set up your Munki server yet, do that…

  • Mounting an external drive when users are logged out in Mac OS X

    Problem? In older versions of Mac OS X, you could create a special .plist file that auto-mounts disks even when a user isn’t logged in. You can see that (no longer working) procedure here. I don’t know exactly when support for that ended, but some people have suggested around Mountain Lion. (If you try it…

  • Getting started with pygame on a Mac

    There are a lot of pygame tutorials out there, but I haven’t yet found a simple, step-by-step how-to on how to just get pygame installed on a Mac, and then actually use it. So, hopefully, this will work for you. This example was done using Macs running OS X 10.10 (Yosemite). Your mileage may vary.…

  • Movie projects disappear after iMovie upgrade

    When you upgrade to the new iMovie, there’s a quick prompt to update your old iMovie projects, but if you dismissed that and don’t know how to go back and update again… Go to File > Update Projects and Events… More info at Apple: Update projects and events from previous versions of iMovie in iMovie…

  • Adding a carriage return within a cell in Numbers

    If you want to do a carriage return within a cell in Numbers (iWork), hit Option-Return on your keyboard. This will not work in Microsoft Excel (Office 2011).

  • Troubleshooting AirPlay to AppleTV

    This is less of a step-by-step tutorial and more of “this is a situation we encountered and what ended up fixing it… your mileage may vary” post. We had one laptop that had trouble connecting to one Apple TV in a classroom. My own laptop could AirPlay to it just fine. When the non-connecting laptop…

  • Resetting a Windows password with ntpasswd

    Proper Use Case You may encounter situations in which you have forgotten the administrator password on a Windows computer, and you need to reset the password. This tutorial will walk you through how to reset it using an open source tool called ntpasswd. Improper Use Cases If your Windows computer is joined to a domain,…

  • How many times do you have to write zeros or random data to a drive to securely delete data?

    Conventional wisdom says that you need to do many passes of zeros, ones, combination of zeros/ones, and then random numbers in order to securely erase a drive so that its data cannot be recovered. But is this true? The folks at HowToGeek make a good case for one pass of zeros being enough: HTG Explains:…

  • Fix for disk erase failed couldn’t unmount disk

    If you’re trying on a Mac using Disk Utility to erase a hard drive and it won’t unmount, giving you an error similar to Disk erase failed. Couldn’t unmount disk, then you may have to force an unmount through the terminal. Launch up Terminal.app (through /Applications/Utilities or through a Spotlight search). Then paste in the…

  • Running sudo commands in Automator

    If you’re wondering how to run sudo (for privilege escalation) commands in Automator, this is one way to do it. Launch up Automator (of course). Find Run AppleScript in the library of actions. Then, drag it over to the workflow area on the right. By default, Automator will put in some script structure for you…