Showing hidden files in Mac OS X

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I use hidden files (such as .htaccess) extensively on my website, so I needed to be sure that they were included with my local backup copy. Mac OS X doesn’t show hidden files by default (it all gets a bit messy otherwise – although they are visible in a Terminal shell); however I found a tip which details the commands to run in order to show hidden files in the Finder (this can be run using a standard user account):

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

To return to the default display, run:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder

I did find an application to display hidden files too but why bother if a couple of commands will do the trick? Even better, there is a workflow to show hidden files using Automator.

Woohoo! 8Mbps ADSL

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Screenshot from router configuration showing 7552Kbps ADSL connectionPlusNet upgraded our ADSL connection to their “up to 8Mbps” service today. I’m told that it may take a few days to settle down (they advised us to reboot the router once a day for 10 days or so) but the initial connection was a whopping 7552Kbps (7.375Mbps). After the first reboot, this seems to have dropped slightly to a more typical 5.1Mbps but that’s still a great improvement over yesterday – and I live in the sticks where a few years ago we had to campaign to get our telephone exchange upgraded for a 512Kbps ADSL connection! It seems that Moore’s law applies to telecoms too (sort of… our costs haven’t dropped but we have seen a 10-fold increase in connection speeds over a 4 year period).