Where I work, Apple computers is the standard for Communications majors. That being said, we’ve got a few labs with Mac Pro’s and 13 individual editing suites. The edit suites provide the students with a cubical shunned away from the world by a sliding glass door allowing their video creativity juices to flow. In the labs, there is a desktop at the front of the room dedicated for the teacher with wall-mounted speakers and a projector. Although all this hardware looks great on the outside, one issue that came up was audio. Since the change to Intel chips, the three audio sources (headphone, audio speaker and line-out) which if you remember, would auto-switch based on what was plugged in, has now changed to three independent sources. What this means is if a user wants to make any changes to how audio gets routed they must make the change manually. To add to this issue, my environment consists of users logging in individually every time they use a machine whether it’s in a classroom or in an editing suite. If the audio changes were a global change, I wouldn’t be having this issue; but because it has a default value (front speaker jack) for each person that logs in, I’m stuck with another problem. Which if you are thinking, I’m leaving all my grunts and complaints about OSX’s “features” in a lab environment for another blog post. Read the rest of this entry »
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Apple Training Series: Mac OS X Deployment v10.5
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Selecting audio ports on Mac Pro’s in lab environments.
December 1st, 2008 by 
Michael in Greensboro, NC
Posted in Technology | 
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Tags: 10.5, audio, classroom, command line, jack, leopard, line-out rear, mac pro
Log into a mac using ARD’s “send unix command.”
October 21st, 2008 by Michael in Greensboro, NC
I stumbled across this useful little tidbit of knowledge. Have you ever needed to log into several machines in a lab but hated going to each one and typing in your credentials. Well thanks to “David Kahn3″ and others for coming up with the following script,
osascript <<EOF
tell application “System Events”
keystroke tab
keystroke (ASCII character 8 )
keystroke tab
keystroke (ASCII character 8 )
keystroke return
delay 0.5
keystroke tab
keystroke “username”
keystroke tab
delay 0.5
keystroke “password”
delay 0.5
keystroke return
keystroke return
keystroke return
keystroke return
end tell
EOF
I was able to push this script out using Apple Remote Desktop (run as root not admin) to my macs while they were at the login screen window. Just a few changes for the account username/password fields and bam the computers logged in without me having to even touch them.Beautiful
Original Post from Apple Support
Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »
Tags: 10.5, Apple, Apple Remote Desktop, ARD, command line, leopard, login
OSX Leopard, Deep Freeze and Active Directory… oh my
August 12th, 2008 by Michael in Greensboro, NC
With the never ending roadblocks I encounter at work, my task this year was to utilize the new 10.5 Leopard operating system (and then some) for a local private university. I’ve used Deep Freeze for many years and it has proved to be a great asset in keeping lab machines consistent. What the Macs haven’t utilized was a way for users to log-in with their username and password. Being a predominant PC campus, Active Directory (AD) will be the choice of Mac’s Directory Service. With all the bad rap Leopard got with Active Directory not working, I luckily was able to get 10.5.4 to bind fine with AD. Glancing into Directory Utility the light was green, all is good.
I then sent out the command through Remote Desktop to freeze the machines with Deep Freeze. Moving on to other labs I noticed after 10ish days people started reporting that they could no longer log into the computers that I had initially setup. Going into Directory Services it showed a red light with the message “This server is not responding.” Grrrrrr Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Technology | 10 Comments »
Tags: 10.5.4, active directory, deep freeze, dsconfigad, faronics, leopard
Trippy Photo plugin
May 2nd, 2008 by Michael in Greensboro, NC
So with the endless amount of new things that I get to encounter at my job I was shown the coolest photo plugin for firefox. A professor who is always scouring the infinite corners of the internet just to find things that students have not yet discovered stumbled across a plugin called Piclens. This little small 2MB plugin turns your facebook or google image search pages into a 3D frontrow like environment of picture bliss. The best thing about this clever plugin is that it’s totally free! What I’ve found particularly helpful is when I’m searching in google for a specific photo, using Piclens I can scroll into what seems an endless 3D wall of pictures. Find the one you want, just click on it and it immediately zooms into view. The picture’s resolution then becomes magically crisp. Brilliant!! Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »
Tags: firefox, photography, plugin, safari
Apple coming soon to Greensboro, NC
November 30th, 2007 by Michael in
After playing phone tag all day with a friend, Jen was trying to be the bearer of good news. She told me Apple was soon to come to The Shops at Friendly Center. Not that there’s enough stuff there already, but it will fit in perfectly with the feng shui.
I searched and found two listing already in Craigslist for store positions. Has Apple grown so large that it can put a store in Greensboro, North Carolina? Apparently this will be store number four in this state, sorry Winston-Salem, ya missed out. But when you come visit the Apple store at Friendly be sure to try out Jay’s Deli, they have great ham and cheese omelette’s. 
Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »
Tags: Apple, Friendly Shopping Center, Greensboro