Teleport is undoubtedly one of the single most useful utilities available to anyone that owns more than one Mac. Using Teleport, you can share a single mouse and keyboard across multiple Mac’s, seamlessly! Setup is an absolute breeze, you need to install Teleport on all Mac’s that you want to use, and once it’s all up and running you can do some pretty amazing things, and accessing another Mac with your mouse & keyboard is as simple as if the other Mac was just an external monitor! Simply awesome.

Features of Teleport include:
* Share your Mouse and Keyboard across many Mac’s
* Share Clipboard / Copy & Paste across multiple Mac’s!
* Drag and Drop files between Mac’s!

Teleport is an absolute must-have for anyone who owns more than one Mac, it makes your life so much easier and will dramatically increase your productivity! I have Teleport setup on my iMac, and anytime my MacBook is at home I just place it on the desk next to my iMac and I can then access my MacBook through my iMac’s keyboard and mouse flawlessly!

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Remember BeOS? If you don’t that’s ok, it came out around 1995 and even though its performance was leaps and bounds above Mac OS System 8 and Windows 95, it never quite caught on, so it died off and seemingly disappeared. Now BeOS is reborn as Haiku, an open source lightweight operating system. It’s certainly more of a novelty at this point, but it’s kind of fun to play around with in a retro sort of way, and who knows maybe it will give Linux a run for it’s money? Well probably not since they’re both free. Anyway, check out Haiku, you can download it as an installable ISO, a VMWare image, or a live boot CD.

Download Haiku
Haiku homepage

Need to get around the boot level Mac firmware password? You can bypass a firmware password by doing a little bit of a hardware hack. There’s many reasons you’d want to get around firmware protection, but here’s why we got the instructions:

This is a tutorial mainly for the people at my school who wish to hack their macbooks, leased by the school. These computers; the white plastic macbooks which are ****, are protected by the firmware password. This prevents you from booting up into Single User Mode, Verbose Mode, Safe Mode, Target Disk mode, and boot off of an external hard drive or network. There is a very simple way to remove these restrictions.

I don’t know what school they’re at but it’s pretty cool to have a MacBook of your own provided by a school. While I can’t condone this activity I must say as a curious and tech savvy student I would have done the exact same thing… with that in mind I have reproduced instructions below:

Get around a Mac Firmware Password

This should work on both EFI (Intel) and OFI (PPC) based Macs. This is a hardware based hack, proceed with caution! We are not responsible for anything that may go wrong in the process. Essentially you are removing the systems RAM and reinstalling it, here are the steps for a MacBook:

1) Shut down your computer

2) Remove the battery

3) Remove the three philips head screws that are on the L-bracket

4) Remove the L-bracket

5) Slide one of the levers (it doesnt matter which one) to the left. This will release the RAM

6) Gently wiggle the RAM card out and put it aside, you will put it back later(do NOT touch the gold bars on the front; you could break it)

7) Replace the L-bracket and put the battery back in

8 ) Boot up the computer while holding COMMAND+OPTION+P+R (this resets the parameter ram)

9) Wait for the startup chime to sound 3 times

10) Release the keys and shutdown the machine once you reach the login screen

11) Remove Battery and L-Bracket, replace the RAM module and slide the lever back while pushing it in until it does not wiggle anymore

12) Replace The battery and L-Bracket

13) Now if you boot up the machine you should bypass the Mac firmware password.

You can now use the machine as usual, boot from an external drive, or whatever else.

Remember, this is bypassing the boot-level firmware password. Most Macs have the software based password protection enabled only in the form of a user login and password. If this is the case, you can use methods to reset a forgotten Mac password to get around the user login completely (instructions for OS X Lion are slightly different).

The Operating System wars are still raging, and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard has bested the new Windows 7 operating system in several speed tests, and a crucial battery life test, according to CNet. Windows 7 did outperform Snow Leopard in some other tests, such as gaming, where Call of Duty 4 had five extra FPS (21fps vs 26fps) in Windows 7, but that’s not too surprising considering that most game developers spend far more time optimizing performance for Windows due to it’s greater gaming market share.

If you haven’t upgraded to Snow Leopard yet, you really should. You can upgrade from Tiger (Unofficially) or Leopard flawlessly and you can buy Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard for $25 at Amazon which includes free shipping. It’s well worth the $25.

[ CNet via AppleInsider ]

I use my MacBook almost exclusively at home and so I frequently forget to discharge and recharge the battery, which is a recommended procedure to have your notebook battery last as long as possible. For people like me, Apple.com offers a nice simple reminder via iCal, it pops up once a month and reminds you to run your battery down so that it can recharge and maintain maximum performance. Thanks Apple!

Apple.com: iCal Notebook Battery Discharge reminder

Sunday funday again! Maybe dogs love Mac’s a little too much… at least in the case of this iBook which was somehow turned into a chew toy! The amount of damage is pretty amazing, it looks like a pooch had his mouth on this thing for hours on end before someone finally found it. Virtually nothing is unscathed, it’s even missing keys and the screen has been chewed to oblivion, that can’t be healthy for a dogs diet. Yikes. [ images via SmallDog and Flickr ]

I came across the aptly named AppleSerialNumberInfo.com today and found it very useful for getting information about a Mac. Type in a Mac’s serial number and a whole slew of information will be reported back to you, including the build queue number, production week, extensive hardware information, unit specific repair and support programs, and so much more. If you want a bunch of information about your Mac, or if you’re troubleshooting a machine, this site is sure to come in handy so bookmark it!

There’s also a mobile version of the site so if you’re troubleshooting on the go, or your main machine is down, be sure to check that out.

We get a lot of comments and inquiries about disabling Spotlight, something that I don’t understand since I think it’s a fantastic application launcher. Opinion aside, if you have disabled Spotlight and want to remove the Spotlight menubar icon from your desktop, type the following command in the Mac Terminal:

Remove Spotlight menubar icon

sudo chmod 0 /System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app

to reverse this and bring the Spotlight menubar icon back, type the following:

sudo chmod 755 /System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app

It’s Friday so why not have a little fun with a Mac Mini used as a toilet paper dispenser? This is the most creative (not to mention silly) use of a Mac Mini that I’ve seen yet. Not quite what I would do with an extra Mini, but to each their own…

[ TwitPic via AppleSpotlight ]

I have become dependent on many command line applications I have installed through the open source MacPorts effort, and if you have too you’ll really appreciate this guide. When upgrading Mac OS X to a new major OS (say, upgrading Tiger to Snow Leopard) you may notice that some MacPorts installations get screwy and no longer work… but no worries, this simple walkthrough on MacPorts.org shows us how to easily reinstall all of our existing MacPorts software in just a few simple commands. Highly recommended reading for all MacPorts users:

MacPorts: Migrating a MacPorts install to a new major OS version or CPU architecture