Restoring hidden files with Time HMachine

I recently, after a 4 month wait for my company to get the discs, upgraded to Snow Leopard. I trusted Time Machine for my backup of the Leopard install, and did a wipe and install. I like to start with a clean system whenever I can.

After having installed Snow Leopard, I needed to restore some files, including my .profile. The only trouble is that, as far as I was able to figure out, there is no way of displaying hidden files when you are in Time Machine mode, and as a consequence, no way of restoring them unless you restore the whole directory. 

There is a way of displaying hidden files in Finder when not in Time Machine, and it turns out that if this mode is enabled when you start Time Machine, hidden files are displayed also within Time Machine.

You need to do the following two commands in order to turn on the display of hidden files

$ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
$ killall Finder

You may now restore your files. When you have restored the files and want to turn off display of hidden files (they clutter things up in the display), just do the same two commands again, but replace "TRUE" in the first command with "FALSE"

Adding a dictionary not included with Snow Leopard

As a native Norwegain speaking, I have had to install cocoAspell in order to have Norwegian spell checking. This has worked fairly well, but now it is possible to have spell checking in any language, as Snow Leopard comes preinstalled with Hunspell, an open solution for spell checking. Hunspell is used by a number of products, including OpenOffice.org, and as OpenOffice include spell checking for most languages, Snow Leopard is able to use those dictionaries for spell checking. In order to add spell checking for a language that is not already included in Snow Leopard is to go to 

       http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/dictionary

and download the dictionary for the language in question. Extract the zip-file copy or move all files with .dic and .aff endings to either ~/Library/Spelling (or only your user) or /Library/Spelling (for all users on that system). 

For the changes to take effect, restart the programs you want to use with the new dictionary, or log out and back in.

Generate Passwords

Ahh, just what I need. An app that lets me access he built in password generator for OS X. No need to open Key Chaing or create a new user account. At CodePoetry, you can download this application for free.Very handy for all the times you need a new password.