I just found out about Skim and I find it to be wildly useful for personal use, but I can imagine this could be a huge productivity booster for anyone in academia in particular. In short, Skim views any PDF files quickly as expected, but more importantly it allows you to take notes and annotate sections of the PDF file itself, how cool is that? If you’re a student, teacher, researcher, educator, or anyone using PDF files regularly, you absolutely have to try out Skim and you will thank me later.

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Download Skim 1.2.2 now

Creating your own cheap Mac Hackintosh out of a PC Netbook is pretty popular right now, so I compiled a list of various how-to guides mostly for myself but figured I would share it with our readers as well. The guides rank from reasonably easy (Dell Mini 9) to an arduous hack, and it’s technically against Apple’s OS X EULA agreement, so whether or not it’s worth proceeding with making one of these frankenstein Macs is entirely up to you.

Gizmodo: How to Hackintosh a Dell Mini 9

MSiWind Forums: How to Install Mac OS X on an MSI Wind

InsanelyMac: Install OS X on an Acer Aspire One

Stuart Shelton: How to install Mac OS X on a Samsung NC10

S10Lenovo: Install Mac OS X on a Lenovo S10

MyHPMini: Install Mac OS X on an HP Mini 1000

Enik: Install Mac OS X 10.5.6 on an EEE 1000h

It’s worth mentioning that BoingBoing has a pretty good OSX/Netbook compatibility chart but much of the info looks out of date (from December of 2008) so it’s worth doing some of your own due diligence before relying 100% on the chart.

Have you ever wanted to have your mac require a password on waking from system sleep, but not ask for a password when the screensaver is on? Well, me neither, but someone out there might and it’s kind of a nifty customization tip. I came across this nice trick on TUAW that I thought it was worth reposting here to our readers.

Launch the Terminal and type the following command:

defaults -currentHost write com.apple.screensaver askForPassword -int 0

reversing this should just be a matter of changing the 0 to a 1

defaults -currentHost write com.apple.screensaver askForPassword -int 1

I really enjoy videochatting with friends and family using iChat, so I was pretty frustrated when seemingly out of nowhere iChat video started freezing completely after a video chat session was initiated. I searched around a bit and noticed other people having the same problem and symptoms - iChat video freezes but iChat audio still works, so I know this isn’t a rare thing. While I don’t know the cause, I did manage to find a solution, and here it is:

How to fix iChat video freezing problem

1) Launch System Preferences and click on the QuickTime preferences pane. Under the “Streaming” tab, set streaming speed to “1 Mpbs Cable” and close the System Prefs

2) Now within iChat, open the Preferences and select the Audio/Video pane, set the Bandwidth Limit to “500 kbps” and close the preferences

3) Try starting an iChat Video Chat again - should work fine now!

This seems to work by forcing a slight reduction in the video quality based on available bandwidth, although I can’t tell a difference in quality myself. It’s worth mentioning that I’m on a fast broadband cable connection, so your mileage may vary with DSL or slower networks; you may try reducing the settings even more if you’re on a slow network and still having problems.

Mac users are largely immune to the world of virus and trojans, but it’s not uncommon for you to be a Mac user in a LAN sea of Windows PC’s. The Conficker Virus is Windows only but it’s garnering a lot of attention, so if you’re on a Windows LAN at home, work, or school, you may want to check if the Windows machines are vulnerable or infected with Conficker. You can do this from your immune Mac OS X machine pretty easily with a cool command line utility called nmap. Here are the steps:

1) First you need to install the command line tool nmap, you can download the OS X install package from the official nmap site here. I recommend downloading the latest beta version to have the most up-to-date scanning scripts.

2) Use nmap to search your LAN for vulnerabilities to Conficker by using the following command:
nmap -PN -T4 -p139,445 -n -v --script=smb-check-vulns --script-args safe=1 192.168.0.1-254
Note: Be sure to substitute the IP range for your LAN, so this may be something other than the IP range above, like 10.1.1.10-100

3) Examine the output of nmap, you are looking for something like this to tell if you have a problem:
Host script results:
| smb-check-vulns:
| MS08-067: FIXED
| Conficker: Likely INFECTED
|_ regsvc DoS: VULNERABLE


If you find a Windows PC that is likely infected, you can follow the following two Microsoft knowledge-base articles to help you out: Protection from Conficker for Consumers and Conficker Protection for IT Professionals - we won’t cover the details here because this is a Mac site.

Nobody really knows if Conficker is dangerous or not, but we’ll all likely find out soon as April 1st is some mystery execution date - it could be a joke or the Windows world could explode into calamity, we’ll see. You can read more about the nmap Conficker scan script we reference above here. It’s worth mentioning that you can install nmap with MacPorts, but the version included in MacPorts is nmap 4.60 and does not contain the script we want to use for this scan, which is why I recommend installing the latest beta version (as of now, nmap 4.85b5).

It’s very easy to mirror an entire web site on your local machine thanks to the terminal command wget, here’s how to do it:

Launch the Terminal and type the following command, replacing guimp.com (a tiny website) with the URL you desire to mirror locally.

wget -m http://www.guimp.com/

This will download the entire site on your local drive in a directory named the websites URL… note that this isn’t a particularly effective way to truly backup a website and it’s functionality, it’s simply mirroring it locally.

Note: various readers pointed out that wget is not installed in Mac OS X by default and that you’ll need to install it using MacPorts, you can check out our past article on installing MacPorts or visit the developer website at macports.org. MacPorts is a very useful tool allowing you to easily install open source software packages and is highly recommended for moderate to advanced OS X users, or those interested in the command line.

Here’s a quick tip. If you find yourself needing to access hidden files on your Macintosh, run this from the terminal. Please note that the inverse of the first command will restore your default settings.
Display Hidden Files
# defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

# KillAll Finder

If you are like me and struggle to keep up with a years worth of Hollywood releases check out this page at apple.com. It gives a nice run down of the nominations with direct links to media for each category. The trailers are in HD and make a nice primer for tonight’s Academy Awards ceremony. Now I feel so in tune with pop culture!

MAMP: It stands for Mac Apache MySql PHP. It delivers on all four of these fronts and it does it very efficiently. MAMP is nice because you can install it (and delete it) without altering anything “built-in” to your OS X installation. Every file that MAMP needs and uses lives inside of the MAMP folder that you download. This includes all php, mysql and apache configuration files. MAMP ships with a small application that when launched gives you the ability to switch port numbers and control the state of the servers. Also included is a dashboard widget which allows for the same control, from a slightly different angle. For those command-line faint of heart, MAMP ships with phpMyAdmin a very nice front end to MySQL. All of this, out of the box, for free! Other eye-catching features include the ability to switch from PHP 4 to PHP 5 and the ability to enable cache mechanisms on the fly. Visit the MAMP site for more details.

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Seems simple right? It should be, however in Mac OS X Leopard there is not exactly a straight forward or easy way to lock your desktop. Of course you can use the System Preferences and enable the screensaver and sleep password functionality but I’m looking for something quicker. Thankfully I found this automator based application aptly named “Lock Desktop.app”. There isn’t really a whole lot I can say about this app. Double click the application and boom goes the dynamite, your desktop is locked. Originally it appears to have been written/sponsored by Pro Service Hosting but at the time of this post, their site is down. Irony? Anyways, I placed it on the OS X Daily servers for download. It is available here.

UPDATE: inaminit says “If you have Fast User Switching enable through the System Preferences/Accounts, you can just click on Login Window in the drop down menu from the menu bar to do the same thing.”