Asinine Monkey

The ramblings of a systems administrator

Mac OS X

Add spacers to the Leopard Dock

The dock in Mac OS X Leopard is generally functional but once populated with a lot of applications can become quite cluttered.

One way of solving this is by using an undocumented method of adding a spacer to the dock. To do this fire up Terminal and enter the following two lines:

$ defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{"tile-type" = "spacer-tile";}'
$ killall Dock

You can then drag the spacer to its desired location. To add more spacers just repeat the above commands as many times as necessary.

Additional Network Devices for Time Machine

Apple's Time Machine is a perfect example of a consumer backup tool done right. Uncomplicated and great at enticing the user to actually use it.

Unfortunately Apple in trying to keep it consumer friendly stopped short of allowing Time Machine to see all the possible network devices you may have that could be potential Time Machine backup drives.

To fix this fire up Terminal and enter the following line:

$ defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

You will now have access to devices such as D-Link's DNS-323 which wouldn't normally show up in Time Machine.

Tweak the Leopard Dock

Don't like the new 3D look to Mac OS X Leopard's dock? Fire up Terminal and enter the following two lines:

$ defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
$ killall Dock


You'll now be treated to a 2D dock without the 3D glass effect that some have found to be quite annoying.

PHP on Mac OS X

To enable PHP 4.x on an installation of Mac OS X Tiger, just follow these 8 simple steps:

  1. Launch Terminal which can be found in Applications > Utilities
  2. Launch Nano (a simple command line text editor) by entering the following command at the prompt (you will be prompted for your password): sudo nano -w /etc/httpd/httpd.conf
  3. Locate the following line by pressing CTRL+W and entering the following text: #LoadModule php4_module
  4. Remove the # from the beginning of the line.
  5. Locate the following line by pressing CTRL+W and entering the following text: #AddModule mod_php4.c
  6. Remove the # from the beginning of the line.
  7. Save the file and exit Nano by pressing CTRL+X
  8. Finally restart Apache by entering the following command at the prompt: sudo apachectl restart

PHP has now been enabled.