Limit Connection Bandwidth with SpeedLimit
Aug 19, 2009 - Leave a Comment
Broadband internet really made the web what it is today, but if you’re a web or iphone developer it can be really useful to know how your application or website behaves at various bandwidth speeds. SpeedLimit is a nice little system preference pane that allows you to set bandwidth limits to test different internet connection speeds, 768k DSL, Edge, 3G, and Dialup. Of course if you wanted to play a prank on someone, you could install this app and set their bandwidth to dialup speeds for a painfully slow internet flashback to the 1990′s!
Microsoft officially stopped developing Internet Explorer for Mac’s a few years ago, but you can still download and run Internet Explorer on your Mac using either an older version of the software or a few different tools. We’ll cover how to run Internet Explorer under Mac OS X using a tool called WineBottler, which allows you to run windows apps like IE6, IE7, or even IE8 on your Mac. Now I don’t know anyone that wants to run Internet Explorer 6 for personal use, but if you’re doing any kind of development work for the web, you likely are required to check for IE6 compatibility. Many Mac users install Windows in VMWare or Parallels to get the ability to check their work in IE, but that’s not needed thanks to WineBottler. WineBottler is dependent on Wine to be able to run Internet Explorer 6, IE7, or even IE8 on your Mac and it’s included in the WineBottler download package.
If you’re like me you tend to have 10,000 windows open at once on your Mac while you work and multitask, thanks to Expose this is not a particular problem in Mac OS X. But, there comes a time when you don’t want to use Expose to either clear the screen or select a specific window, you just want to move some of the background clutter around, to access the Desktop or something of that sort. Easily done! Hold the Command key and select a Window titlebar in the background to move it around elsewhere and clear up space, now you can access that JPG on your desktop easily without having to hide all windows!
I was driving myself up the wall recently trying to figure out why Preview.app would not save my image rotations, so looking for a solution I stumbled onto our friend 
The Mac Rumor mill is churning out all sorts of juicy tidbits on Apple’s latest operating system update, known as Snow Leopard. 
and it will ship for free as soon as it arrives. Mac users rejoice, a fantastic system update awaits us all very soon!
GeekTool is a fun system preference utility for Mac that allows you to really customize your desktop. You can dump log files, system status messages, graphs, CPU usage, and all sorts of things right onto your desktop background. Basically if you can run it in the Terminal, you can have it appear on your desktop. Check out the screenshot below, and if you’re a customization geek absolutely download GeekTool yourself. Be sure to read the excellent walkthrough on MacLife linked below that shows how to setup GeekTool to really make your mac desktop customized too. If you want weather information displayed on your desktop, LifeHacker has you covered, so read on.
It seems like people either love or hate Spotlight, if you love it then ignore this tip, but if you hate Spotlight and want to turn Spotlight off in 10.5 here’s your new favorite post. You can completely disable Spotlight in OS X 10.5 by moving a few system files (or you could delete them but that is strongly not recommended for various reasons). Here are the files you should move, be sure to place them in another location for backup in case you want to enable Spotlight again.
This is a really cool tip that should be particularly useful to those who share their mac with other people. 
You can easily rearrange the status items in your Mac OS X Menu bar, simply hold Command and drag the icons to the desired location within the menubar. You can move just about anything, except for Spotlight and some third party apps, which will stay stubbornly in place.