Creating HTML signatures in Apple Mail

This content is 16 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I recently switched my e-mail service from my own server to Google Apps. I’ll write more about the move (and the reasons behind it) in a separate post but, as a consequence, I’ve also started using the Apple Mail application to access my GMail over IMAP. On the whole, Apple Mail is pretty straightforward but one of the things I couldn’t work out is how to create an HTML signature.

HTML signature in Apple Mail
Melvin Rivera has the answer in his post on custom CSS signatures in Mail and the basic gist is to create a dummy signature in the Mail preferences; close Mail; create some custom HTML (with inline CSS to keep GMail happy – Melvin has an example linked from his post); save that as a .webarchive file using Safari; copy the new .webarchive file over the .webarchive file that corresponds to the dummy signature stored in ~/Library/Mail/Signatures (keeping the same filename); fire up Mail and open the preferences; rename the signature if required, then drag it to the mail account(s) with which it should be associated.

(To think that I thought Microsoft Outlook’s options were over-complicated!)

Sadly, neither Apple Mail, nor GMail seem to recognise the tel: links for phone numbers.

I have a new printer to install – but where has the OS X Printer Setup Utility gone?

This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

After many years of faithful service, my HP LaserJet 2200dn has started printing black lines and ghosting all over the page. Because most of my printing is for work, I asked the company to finance the repairs (or to provide a replacement) and, because they are so serious about green IT (erhum…), rather than use their engineering resource to work out what was wrong and buy the appropriate consumables, they have given me a new printer (an HP Officejet 6310 All-in-One, which seems to be a nice device but it is an inkjet – so expensive to run – and an unnecessary waste of resources as the old printer could have been fixed).

Predictably, I’m having problems installing the software on 64-bit Windows Server 2008 but I’m sure I’ll get there if I do some research (which I won’t at 10pm on a Sunday), but the XP installation on another PC was straightforward (if bloated and time consuming) and the Mac installation seems to have gone reasonably well too (using Bonjour to track down the device on the network). The only catch on the Mac seems to be that the software is written for Mac OS X up to 10.4 and I’m running 10.5.3. This means that some of the hooks in the installer didn’t work – like when it was looking for the printer setup utility and it seems that utility does not exist in Leopard. Luckily, the Leopard’s lost features blog pointed me in the right direction:

“Tiger’s ‘Printer Setup Utility’ has been removed, and all printer configuration is now done and managed exclusively through the Print & Fax system preference pane.”

DVD burning issues in Mac OS X fixed by restarting Finder

This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I was just packing up my stuff for another few nights away from home and thought it was about time I backed up my photos (been a bit slack on the backups again recently…).Unfortunately, Mac OS X didn’t want to burn a DVD for me, reporting that:This disc could not be used because the disc drive is not supported (Error code 0x80020025)That seemed strange as the drive in question is the superdrive that came with my MacBook.The Apple discussion forums are down right now (displaying a page that says “We’ll be back soon”) and most of the “advice” I found on other sites (or in Google’s cache) was concerned with people having problems after upgrading old Macs from CD to DVD, or was telling people that there are different sorts of optical media (yeah, I know – all I want to do is burn a few files to a DVD – as data, not as something that will play back in a consumer device – how hard can it be?).Thankfully, I found Chris J. Davis’ post describing the issue which suggests restarting the Finder. It worked too (force quit Finder and relaunch).I guess Apple is just trying to make switchers feel at home – forced application restarts on the Mac feels just like running Windows (Explorer)…

Some more on using Active Directory for Linux/Mac OS X user authentication

This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last year I wrote a post about using Microsoft Active Directory (AD) to authenticate users on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) computer (and a few weeks back I followed it up for Mac OS X). This week, I’ve been re-visiting that subject, as I built a new FTP server at home and wanted to use AD for authentication.

In the process, I came across a couple of extra resources that might be useful:

As I was using an almost-new AD (not the old one that I have been tweaking for years), I found that RHEL5 (and Mac OS X 10.5) did not need me to disable digital signing of communications as recent versions of Samba include client side signing. The Samba documentation suggests that it is necessary to set client use spnego = yes in smb.conf when authenticating against a Windows Server 2003 domain controller but I did not find that to be the case with Samba v3.0.23c and Windows Server 2003 R2 with SP2 (perhaps that is the default?).

The following notes may also be useful:

  • SSH does not require any further configuration but if Samba is configured to use the default separator for domainname and username (\) then you will need to escape it – so the connection command would be ssh domainname\username@hostname.
  • This also works for FTP (ftp domainname\username@hostname) but I’ve not found a way to make a simple ftp hostname use AD for authentication.
  • Even though Linux/Unix usernames are case-sensitive, Windows ones are not, so any combination of lower and upper case is valid for domainname\username. Passwords do need to be entered in the correct case (as in Windows).

Using Active Directory to authenticate users on a Mac OS X computer

This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

One of the projects that I’ve been meaning to complete for a while now has been getting my Mac OS X computers to participate in my Active Directory (AD) domain. I got Active Directory working with Linux – so surely it should be possible to repeat the process on a system with BSD Unix at the core? Yes, as it happens, it is.

Before I explain what was necessary, it’s probably worth mentioning that the process is not the same for every version of OS X. As explained in a Microsoft TechNet magazine article from 2005, early implementations of OS X required schema changes in Active Directory in order to make things work. Thankfully, with OS X 10.4/10.5 (and possibly with later versions of 10.3 – although I haven’t tried), schema changes are no longer necessary.

By far and away the best resource on this subject is Nate Osborne’s Mac OS/Linux/Windows single sign-on article at the Big Nerd Ranch weblog. This told me just about everything I needed to know (with screenshots) but, crucially, when I tried this over a year ago on my OS 10.4 system I could not get the Mac to bind with Active Directory. This was despite having disabled digital signing of communications (not required for OS X 10.5) and it turned out that the problem is the internal DNS domain name that I use which uses a .local suffix. As described in Microsoft knowledge base article 836413, OS X treats .local domains as being Rendezvous/Bonjour hosts and needs to be told what to do. There is an Apple article that describes how to look up .local hostnames using both Bonjour and DNS; however I’m not sure that’s what fixed it on my OS X 10.5.2 system. My TCP/IP, DNS and WINS settings were all being provided by DHCP and, even though I added local to the list of search domains, it was the second listed domain (after the DHCP-suppled entry) and successful binding seemed to occur after I had pinged both the domain name and the domain controller (by name and by IP address) and performed an nslookup on the domain name. Another thing that I considered (but did not actually need to do) was to create a reverse lookup (PTR) record in DNS for the domain name. Retrying the process and binding to a domain with a .co.uk suffix presented no issues at all.

Nate’s article is for OS X 10.4 (Tiger), and having got this working in OS X 10.5.2 (Leopard), I thought I post a few more screenshots to illustrate the process:

  1. First of all, open the OS X Directory Utility and Show Advanced Settings. Switch to the Services view and ensure that Active Directory is selected, then click the button with the pencil icon to edit the settings:
    Mac OS X 10.5 Directory Utility - Services
  2. Enter the domain name (home.local) in my case and computer name. In the Advanced Options, I left the user experience items at their defaults (more on that later):
    Mac OS X 10.5 Directory Utility - Active Directory User Experience options
  3. Switching to the administrative options reveals some more settings that are required – I checked the box to enable administration by the Domain Admins and Enterprise Admins groups, but others group or user accounts can be added as potential computer administrators:
    Mac OS X 10.5 Directory Utility - Active Directory Administrative options
  4. Click the bind button and, when prompted, supply appropriate credentials to join the Macintosh computer to the domain (i.e. AD credentials). This is the point where the location of the computer account is defined.
    Mac OS X 10.5 Directory Utility - Active Directory authentication
  5. If you receive an error relating to an invalid domain and forest combination being supplied, this is likely to be a DNS issue. Check that DNS name resolution is working (using the OS X Terminal utility and the ping or nslookup commands) and note my earlier comments about support for .local domain name suffixes – you may need to follow Apple’s advice to add local to the list of search domains:
    Mac OS X 10.5 Directory Utility - Invalid Domain error message
    Mac OS X 10.5 Network Preferences - DNS settings
  6. Once successfully bound to Active Directory, the group names for administration of the local computer will be expressed in the format domainname\groupname. The system event log on the domain controller that processed the directory request will also show a number of account management events, as the computer account is created and enabled, then the password is set and the associated attributes changed (password last set and service principal names):
    Mac OS X 10.5 Directory Utility - Active Directory Administrative options
  7. In the OS X Directory Utility, Click OK, and move to the Directory Servers view – is all is well then the domain name will be listed along with a comment that the server is responding normally:
    Mac OS X 10.5 Directory Utility - Directory Servers
  8. Active Directory/All Domains should also have been added to the Authentication and Contacts views in the Search Policy:
    Mac OS X 10.5 Directory Utility - Search Policy Authentication
    Mac OS X 10.5 Directory Utility - Search Policy Contacts

Following this, it should be possible to view AD contacts in the Directory and also to log on using an AD account (in domainname\accountname format). Although this worked for me, I was having some issues (which I suspect were down to a problematic AirPort connection). Once I had switched to wired Ethernet, I was able to reliably authenticate using Active Directory, although I did not re-map my home drive to the network (Leopard’s SMB/CIFS support is reported to be problematic and I felt that can of worms could stay closed for a little longer until I was comfortable that AD authentication was working well). Instead, and because my computer is a MacBook, so will often be disconnected from my network, I changed the User Experience options for Active Directory to use a mobile account – effectively creating a local account on the MacBook that is mapped to my domain user:

Mac OS X 10.5 Directory Utility - Active Directory User Experience options

At the next logon, I was prompted to create a mobile account and once this was done, I could access the computer whilst disconnected from the LAN, using the using the AD credentials for the last-logged-on user.

One more point that’s worth noting – if you have existing local accounts with the same name as an AD account, the permissions around user account settings get messy, with the AD logon resulting in a message that there was a problem creating your mobile account record and the local logon reporting that there was a problem while creating or accessing “Users/username“.

That’s all I needed; however I did compile a list of links that might be useful to others who come across issues whilst trying to get this working (perhaps on another version of OS X):

Microsoft’s MacBU is moving in the right direction, just not fast enough

This content is 17 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Office for Mac product iconsA few weeks back, I wrote about the frustration of working (or rather not be able to work) with Open XML documents on a Mac. Some wag even pointed out on a recent podcast that Apple beat Microsoft to provide support for its own document formats in the new iWork 08 application suite. I hear good things about iWork and it’s very reasonably priced (especially when compared to Microsoft Office) but I work with Microsoft Office 2007 on Windows and need something functionally equivalent for the Mac so I’m sure I’ll be getting a copy of Office 2008 for Mac in due course (attempts to get a beta invitation have failed dismally). There is light at the end of the tunnel though – since my original post, the MacBU has released a (time-limited) beta of the Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac, so that at least gives me something to work with for now (the previous version was only for Word documents).

Mac RDC logoAnother new product from the MacBU is (at last) a universal binary version of the Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac. I’ve been beta testing this and whilst it’s far more stable on an Intel Mac than the old version, it still doesn’t seem to offer something that I need – support for multiple client connections. I’ve provided feedback on this (others were less charitable in their contributions). In the meantime, I’ll be sticking with CoRD.

It seems that the MacBU is releasing new products but at an almost glacial pace. I don’t care that it’s been 4 years between Office releases – there was a similar gap for the Windows product – but surely the file format converters could have been ready when Office 2007 shipped on Windows. Similarly, based on what I’ve seen with the Microsoft’s RDC client for the Mac, it’s not exactly worth waiting for.

Kernel panic

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ve written before about how, according to Apple, reason number 1 to get a Mac is because “all the hardware and software just works, and works well together“. I can’t be bothered to get into the whole Mac vs. [Windows] PC (vs. Linux) thing now… I’ve written plenty on that subject before, and anyway – it’s just a PC – but no sooner had I just commented to Alex about how a certain podcast presenter is very quick to criticise Windows for it’s blue screens of death (of which I’ve seen very few in recent years – and only then because I’ve done something stupid like installing the wrong device driver or removing a hard disk before powering down the computer), did I witness my first OS X kernel panic (actually, from looking at /Library/Logs/panic.log, I seems that I had one a few days ago as well, which explains why the Mac had strangely shut itself down whilst I was at work one day last week).

Mac OS X kernel panic

So, my point is that Macs don’t “just work”. They run software, created by humans, that crashes from time to time, just like non-Apple PCs running any other operating system. Now, if Apple really could create “the world’s most advanced operating system” and it did “just work”, I’d be very impressed.

Useful digital photography utilities

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’ve just got back from a weekend in the Peak District National Park and, rewarded with clear blue skies as dawn broke yesterday morning, I rushed to the top of Mam Tor to rekindle my long-dormant desire to make great landscape photographs (I’m no Joe Cornish, but there has to be some reward for leaving my tent at 5.15).

It gave me a chance to try out a number of things that I’ve wanted to do for a while – shooting camera raw (.NEF) images and using the Lee Filters 0.6 ND graduated filter that I bought a couple of years ago. I have to say, that I am definitely a convert to these features (although they would not be practical for the majority of my photography which falls into the “snapshots of the kids” category). Both the OS X Preview application and my post-production tool of choice (Adobe Photoshop CS2) had no difficulty opening the camera raw files and the quality is excellent (Windows users might find this post useful). Meanwhile, whilst using a large graduated filter on a camera with only a 24mm image sensor makes it slightly difficult to position, using the 0.6 ND filter to tone down the sky by two stops meant that I was able to take pictures with a well-exposed foreground, without washing out the highlights.

Renamer4MacI also found a couple of little programs came in useful when I got home. Firstly, having had some issues with my CF card before leaving home, I formatted it and the file numbering recommenced from DSC_0001.* – thanks to a little recommendation from my buddy Alex, I used Renamer4Mac to bulk rename the files. Also useful (although not for the RAW files) was Simple EXIF Viewer for Mac OS XAli Ozer’s Simple EXIF Viewer for Mac OS X, which let me easily examine the EXIF data on my images (something sadly lacking in the OS X Finder).

Finally, whilst writing about OS X and digital photography (apologies to Windows readers but my digital photography workflow is based on a Mac) it’s worth mentioning one little tip that can come in useful (much as I hate to publicise anything from Scott Bourne, whose “advice” often serves only to fuel Apple elitism and general Mac vs. PC bigotry, I think I picked this up from an iLifeZone podcast). Previewing multiple images in Mac OS XUnlike the Windows Preview function, which lets viewers page forwards and backwards through a directory of files, the OS X Preview default is to open just a single file. Switchers are often frustrated by this (I know I was) but it is possible to open multiple images in Preview (by selecting multiple files, then choosing to open with Preview), after which the cursor keys can be used to scroll through the list.

Access all of your applications from the OS X Dock

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I’m not sure where I picked this tip up but I heard about dragging the Applications folder to the OS X dock in order to provide one-click access to all applications (not just the frequently used ones).

Launching applications from the dock in OS X

At first I was pretty underwhelmed (it didn’t seem to do much except launch a new Finder window) but then I realised that if I click and hold the applications folder icon in my dock then a menu opens up with all the available applications. Dare I say that it’s a bit like a Start Menu for the Mac!

Quick tip for Mac users to recover a forgotten password

This content is 18 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

If you’re anything like me, then you have hundreds of security credentials to use at many websites. Best practice dictates that you should use a different password at each one but sometimes that’s just not practical – and, unless you write it down, sometimes you just forget what the password is.

I’m not sure how Windows and Linux applications store passwords, etc. (I suspect they use a variety of methods) but Mac applications tend to use the Mac OS X keychain feature – the equivalent of writing down all your passwords and storing them in one (secured) database.

If credentials are stored in the keychain, you don’t normally need to use them again as the application (e.g. a web browser) reads the keychain as required but users can come unstuck if they need those credentials to log in from a different computer. Luckily, it is possible to find out what the password is for a particular application or website (as stored in the keychain). Simply open the Keychain Access utility, open the appropriate item, select the show password checkbox, supply the keychain password when prompted and click the allow once button – at this point the password should become visible in clear text.

Password visible in the Mac OS X Keychain access utility