Wednesday, February 17, 2010

How to Screw with those Smug Apple Hippies via Terminal.app

I know, I know, Drunky, you're just a Flash hate-uh who loves Apple too much. Right? WRONG. I can make Apple look all kinds'a bad. And you can too. WARNING: This is like futzing with HKEYS on Windows. If you don't know what I'm talking about or have never been in DOS then stop here. Read and understand that, but feel free to use this on Boomers. They deserve this kind of grief.

Now pay attention:

So, you have this dumb hippy friend who's all smug with his Mac, tells you that it never gets viruses, and that it's the PERFECT machine, right? It just whizzes along with loads of uptime and never has any glitches, right? WRONG. Heah comes da glitches, bitches! Let's mess with his core OS skin...

When he's not looking, come to this blog. Open a little program called 'Terminal.app' from /Applications/Utilities, and in a term session paste in the following lines, one at a time, hitting return after each 'NO'--

defaults write -g AppleUseCoreUI -bool NO
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSUseLeopardWindowValues NO

Quit Terminal, and to finish the joke, quickly go to the Apple menu and choose 'Log out...' or Shift-Command-Q. Then look all shruggy when he comes back.... You MUST logout or the joke will be delayed. Okay, if you're really mean, walk away then.. No, really, logout.

When your mark logs back his interface will be borked up. You've just turned off his 'Vista' into the Mac version of XP. Fuzzed up Finder.app (Explorer.exe), gaudy Metal UI from like, 5 years ago. Because you just turned the 'new core & application window interfaces to.. OFF.

You should be hearing him go WTF? by now. Let him get all anxious but don't let him leave. Yet. Be entertained for like... 30min or so. Like Dude, what happened to your Mac? The windows look like 2001 or something, eh?

Until you do something, he's screwed. Reinstalling the Snow Leopard, the new OS won't work because it's a global setting that isn't easily trashed in the GUI, because the file is invisible. (Unix folks, it's a dot-file). Trashing 'normal preference files' won't work either. So. Now that your hippy friend is good and scared, tell him you can go into his 'DOS' and fix it.

Then open up Terminal.app again, come back to this blog and copy/paste, each of these, hitting <return> after each 'YES'--

defaults write -g AppleUseCoreUI -bool YES
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSUseLeopardWindowValues YES

And do the logout/login watusi again and turn all that fairy dust chrome back to ON. This shouldn't mess up his system, but hey, you're the one pulling the bad practical joke.

Not mah fault, I can only show you the door, you're the jackass who gets to go in.

Hat tip to Blacktree Secrets, something I won't even link to because it's too dangerous for you little cretins.

In this GLORIOUS morning. And another reason why your Mum will be better off with a locked-down iPad in what? 60 days?

Drunky out.


"Switching to a Mac For Dummies" (Arnold Reinhold)

4 comments:

James said...

I can assure you, if it's a user default, then it IS stored in a .plist prefs file somewhere. Either in /Library or ~/Library.

Mentok said...

My double bad and bingo (search for Global):

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10344624-263.html

If it's like Tiger there's a dot file .GlobalPreferences that any user in the GUI won't be able to see or access. Most if not all the known settings are covered here:

http://secrets.blacktree.com/?showapp=.GlobalPreferences

As the term commands are, this is not a user default, but a 'global' for all users. Updating...

James said...

.GlobalPreferences is just another .plist renamed. Anyone who doesn't know how to find invisible files in a UNIX-based file system computer shouldn't be using a computer.

The NSUserDefaults system on OS X has several domains - one for the current user, one for all users, one for the entire system (global). Hence, if one uses the global domain when reading or writing user defaults, he/she has access to those prefs also.

I suggest you read up on how NSUserDeafaults works.

Mentok said...

James. To answer your first two paragraphs with the same sentence: Yes I know.

The point of this exercise was to 'dumb down' the process of setting defaults from the command line to the average 'mostly in the GUI' DOS user.

Personally? I didn't come from NEXT OS per se, nor do I have a deep understanding of Objective C or the old NEXT NS* internals. Yet.

The point of the exercise was to show the Win32 jackasses out there that there's more to a Mac than the chrome, and YES, they can be fucked with. And that their knowledge of other platforms is a bit shallow.

Kudos to you, OF COURSE this applies to me because I'm not a programmer. DOH!

But yeah, in addition to all the other horseshit I have to read today I probably oughta go a little deeper than open Term and type 'man defaults'.

Mentok out.

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