It’s not out in the wild yet, but Mac OS X 10.6.2 is released and has been confirmed to kill support for the Intel Atom processor, this is especially important for Hackintosh users who have hacked various Atom based netbooks to run Snow Leopard. So what should you do if you have an Atom based Hackintosh Netbook? StellaRolla recommends staying with 10.6.1 (or 10.5.8 if you’re running Leopard on your Hackintosh, sine 10.5.9 will likely have the same Atom problems) for the time being, otherwise you can try upgrading to 10.6.2 but run an older or modified kernel. I think I’ll just stick to 10.6.1 when the update rolls around, I have a lot of confidence in the Hackintosh community so I imagine there will be a workaround rather quickly.

You can’t help but suspect this move is Apple’s attempt at shutting down the growing and popular Hackintosh Netbook community, since Apple has no product line that runs the Atom itself. Mac OS X runs absolutely flawlessly on much of the PC Netbook hardware, once it’s configured you wouldn’t know you’re not on a Mac. Maybe it’s in effort to kill the Atom Hackintoh Netbooks in anticipation of the rumored Tablet? Or maybe it’s something totally unrelated? Who knows, but for now, just take note that when the 10.6.2 upgrade comes out and you use a Hackintosh, you might want to avoid it for now.

StellaRolla: 10.6.2 kills Atom

Update: the most recent 10.6.2 build supports the Atom chip again, whether or not the final version of 10.6.2 will kill the Atom or not remains to be seen.

Update 2: The most recent 10.6.2 build does NOT SUPPORT the Intel Atom chip and this has been confirmed. See link for details.

Shell scripting is wildly useful and a powerful way to manipulate a lot of files and to automate behind-the-scenes tasks in Mac OS X. This guide is intended for Linux users but the Bash shell is also used in Mac OS X, and as far as I can tell everything in this bash shell scripting guide works the same across the two platforms. Before checking out the guide you might want to check what shell you are using in Mac OS X by typing the following in the Mac Terminal:

echo $SHELL

Something like /bin/bash or /bin/tcsh will be reported back to you, obviously this Bash scripting guide only works for the Bash shell. If you need to, you can change the default shell rather easily in the Terminal preferences, but Bash has been the default shell since 10.3 and continues to be in Snow Leopard.

LinuxHelp: 10 second guide to Bash Shell Scripting

If you’re looking for more, a much more advanced and complete guide to Bash scripting is available here:

Advanced Bash Scripting Guide

And if you really want to dive into shell scripting, a good book like Pro Bash Programming: Scripting the GNU/Linux Shell will do you wonders.

We’ve long been fans of the Dell Mini 10v for Hackintosh purposes, it’s small, quick, attractive, and can be obtained for surprisingly cheap in the $200 range. It looks like the rest of the blogworld is catching on to this little beast of a MacHack Netbook, Gizmodo has an excellent write up on installing Snow Leopard on the Dell Mini 10v, it’s definitely worth checking out. I’d highly recommend buying a refurbished unit from the Dell outlet to save yourself some serious cash (a friend got one for $189!), so check out our guide to a cheap Mac Netbook with the Dell Mini 10v, and then follow the Gizmodo guide to get it all up and running with Snow Leopard. For $200 you can’t go wrong!

Gizmodo: How to Hackintosh a Dell Mini 10v into the Ultimate Snow Leopard Netbook

MAMP is a really useful instant webserver for your Mac that requires practically no setup or installation, you run the app and click “Start” – yes it’s that simple. I use MAMP a lot for local web development and really like it, it’s probably the easiest way to develop locally with something like WordPress. I was going to write a full article on setting up MAMP and WordPress, but TUAW beat me to it! So rather than re-writing the wheel, let’s take a look at TUAW’s simple walkthrough on getting WordPress setup under MAMP:

TUAW: Getting Started with WordPress & MAMP on your Mac

If you’re still a little confused or want a more thorough walkthrough, check out this one at labs.dariux.com:

Labs.Dariux: Install and Run WordPress Locally with MAMP

If you do any kind of web work or development, you really should check out MAMP!

If you’re a web developer you probably do a fair amount of development on your local machine using either the built-in Mac OS X Apache server or, in my case, something like MAMP. You can make your local development life a bit easier by setting a local domain, here’s how.

from the Mac Terminal type the following:
sudo nano /etc/hosts

this will bring up the /etc/hosts file in the nano editor, it will look something like this:
##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting. Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost


next, you’ll want to add the hostname (in this case, local.dev) you’d like to use locally to the end of that file on a new line, in the following format:
127.0.0.1 local.dev

Save the changes to /etc/hosts file by hitting Control-O and then Control-X to exit. Now you can access your local domain via the web browser, ftp, or whatever other means.

Did you read that correctly? Your purchase of a Mac Mini becomes free after 2 years due to it’s energy efficiency. Yea, it sounds ridiculous I know, I didn’t believe it either, but recent Mini owner CJ Gill compared his months of electricity bills with a Mac Mini to the months before one when he had an HP Pavilion desktop PC, and the monthly electricity savings of roughly $20 are going to pay for his Mac Mini in about 2 years. Check out the power bills in this chart:

When someone first sent me the link to this blog post titled “Free Mac Mini! No Strings Attached!” I figured it was yet another one of those pyramid scams where you sign up for 50 offers and you get your friends to sign up for 20 more and then you get a free burrito that eventually morphs into a Mac Mini after you sell 300 more offers. How awesome is it that Apple’s claim of having the worlds most energy efficient desktop translates into significant cost savings, enough so that after a few years depending on the Mini model you buy, it becomes free! Simply amazing. I know what my next Mac purchase is going to be!

You can buy the latest Mac Mini for $579 at Amazon and it includes free shipping.

Ever wanted to play music while you’re working in the command line? With the command line tool ‘afplay’ you can do just that, you can play practically any audio file from the Terminal, just type:

afplay /path/to/audiofile.mp3

You can then stop it with Control-C, otherwise the song will play itself through then terminate. If you’d rather afplay run in the background while playing audio, use this command:

afplay /path/to/audiofile.mp3 &

This launches afplay into the background, if you want to shut it up you can just kill the process with:

killall afplay

Not that I’m condoning this type of behavior, but I recently used the afplay command to play a pretty amusing prank on a coworker by SSHing into his work machine and forcing him to listen to a Miley Cyrus song, he didn’t figure out what was going on until it was over and I told him.

From the Terminal, if you want to quickly find out what the largest files are in a directory, try this variation of the ls command:

ls -lShr

the l flag will display the items in a list, the S flag sorts by size, and h makes it readable in MB/GB (human readable), with r reversing the report order so that the largest file is the last on the list and thus right above the returned command prompt.

If you want the largest file in a directory of a certain type, simply specify the file type with a wildcard to show all files fitting that description:

ls -lShr *.zip

Try it out with any filetype *.mp3 *.mov *.wmv *.psd , etc

In Snow Leopard, you can show (or hide) hidden files in dialog boxes by hitting Command-Shift-Period, nice!

It really drives me nuts that files of the same kind but different type open different apps, I want to open all my images in Preview and all my video files in VLC. You can make Mac OS X open every file of a certain type with a certain application by changing the file association from the Finder. Here’s how to change the file type association in Mac OS X so that you can set file kinds to open all in one application.

* Find the file type(s) that you want to change the application to open with
* Get Info about a file that is of that file type, say a .mov
* Click the ‘Open With’ arrow to expand an application list
* Choose the application you want all files of this type to open with (in this example we’ll use VLC to open all .mov files)
* Click “Change All” and then “Continue” when the confirmation dialog appears

Now all of the files of that type will open in the application you specified. You can do this with any file type to keep things consistent.

I find this particularly useful after you have installed a new app that tries to take control over certain related file types, for example Adobe Acrobat Reader will hijack PDF’s from Preview and FlipForMac will do the same with WMV’s when I want to use VLC for all my video needs. There’s countless reasons to change file associations and the apps that are launched with them, so now you know how!