Geeks are the magicians of the Mac community. Like Houdini, we use our knowledge to get out of bad situations. And like David Copperfield, we use sleight of hand to dazzle the uninformed. With these three tricks, you can conjure up some magic of your own in the New Year.
You printed something weeks ago—perhaps an airline-ticket receipt. Now you want to print it again, but you didn't save a copy of the Web page and can't find the information on the airline's site. What to do? Reprint it from your automatically saved backup of every document you've ever printed, of course.
. Locate the cupsd.conf file.
) at the start of this line. This tells the CUPS software to save print jobs and to treat the line as an active instruction rather than as a comment to be ignored.
. (Again, you are deleting the pound symbol.) You don't have to reduce the number, but your hard drive will thank you. Finally, save these changes. If you opened TextEdit using Pseudo, the document should save directly. If you're using BBEdit or TextWrangler, OS X will ask for your password.
Select Do Administration Tasks. If you're using OS X 10.3.4 or later, a sheet will drop down asking you to fill in your name and password. Do so and click on the Log In button. You now have administrative access to the CUPS software.
Click on the Manage Jobs button. In the screen that appears, click on the Show Completed Jobs button. To see your most-recent print jobs, scroll to the bottom of the window that appears. To reprint a job, click on the Restart Job button next to its name.
Password Hassles If after you click on the Restart Job button, CUPS rejects your correct password, you may be mired in a Panther problem. Panther uses a new form of password encryption that CUPS can't decrypt. That's a problem if you created a brand-new user account in Panther and you're running OS X 10.3.4 or later.
Every week, your Web server kicks out a log file that you want to download with the $39 Interarchy file-transfer software ( ; November 2004 ) and process with your log-analysis program. This sounds simple enough—but there's a glitch. By default, Interarchy uses file-name extensions to decide how to download files. Your logs use the .log extension; therefore, Interarchy doesn't recognize them as text files. What's a Webmaster to do?
Obviously, he needed an iChat autoresponder that could identify a chat initiated by the boss and type a series of responses. Here's how to whip one up using Pygmy Software's free iCAR utility, an iChat plug-in for creating autoresponses, and Script Software's $20 iKey, a very cool macro utility.
It works this way: in iChat you must click on a chat window to make it active. iCAR performs this service for you, but it also does something once it activates that window—it sends a message or triggers an AppleScript. If it sends a message, it reveals to your correspondent that it's autoresponding. Instead, you can set it to trigger an AppleScript—but you leave the AppleScript field empty. This generates an inconsequential error message that doesn't appear. Then iKey steps in and types your phony response.
. Under Source, select AppleScript and leave the selection field blank.
in the Number Of Times field.
Now click on the Sequence tab and select Shortcuts: Utility: Wait Front Window With Title. In the window that appears, click on the Utility tab, choose Wait Window Title Contains from the Action pop-up menu, and enter your boss's iChat handle (whatever appears in the title bar when you two chat) in the Title/String In Title field. This tells iKey to wait until your boss initiates a chat.
in the Delay field. This tells iKey to pause in a natural manner before issuing its first response.
(a busy but casual response). Choose Shortcuts: Keyboard: Type/Press/Release Keys. Click on the Keyboard tab, click on the Key field, and press the Mac's return key. This sends the response to the boss.
to end it. Create a 4-second pause. And for some final insurance, use the Type/Press/Release Keys shortcut to type Command-W and end the chat before your boss can ask questions. When you're done with the sequence, click on OK.
Once you've modified your cupsd.conf file, you can click on Restart Job to reprint a document even if you've since lost or deleted the original file.The boss won't wise up to those 45-minute coffee breaks you're taking if you have a customized iChat autoreplier in place.Here's the complete sequence of lifelike replies we created in iKey.