The quickest way to get your external IP address in Mac OS X is by launching the Terminal and typing the following command:
curl whatismyip.org
This will report back your IP address by pulling the result from WhatIsMyIP.org. Alternatively, you could view that site in your web browser and also get your external IP address, but that’s not as quick.
With a little bit of hacking and modification, you can add up to 24 additional visual effects to iChat video conferencing and Photo Booth! Read more »
You can quickly clear all of the text from the Spotlight menu without closing the window by hitting Command-Delete, I discovered the use in this after my cat walked across my keyboard entering in a lengthy mishmash string of characters. Try it out!
You can schedule your Mac to sleep, wake, shutdown, or boot up at any regular interval using the OS X System Preference ‘Energy Saver’ schedule settings, here’s how:
* Launch System Preferences
* Click “Energy Saver” (it’s the coiled eco-friendly lightbulb icon)
* Click the “Schedule” button in the lower right portion of the preference pane
* Set whether you want your Mac to sleep, wake, boot, shutdown, or whatever
* Set the appropriate times
* Click ‘OK’
Now your Mac will be scheduled to boot, shutdown, whatever! This is really handy to setup so that your Mac will be up and waiting for you before you arrive to your workstation, or so that it will sleep through the night and conserve power. Try it out yourself!
If you have a bunch of pictures on your Mac that need rotating, open all of them into the Preview app and using the thumbnail preview pane on the right side, select all (Command+A). Now you can mass rotate all of the selected images together, using either Command+R or Command+L. Once all your images are rotated into the proper orientation, save all and accept the changes, and you’re done!
You can convert m4a music files to mp3 format very easily by using the same program that creates m4a files… iTunes! This is the easiest way that I know of to convert m4a to mp3 that doesn’t require any additional software downloads. Here’s how to do it:
The first thing you’ll need to do is launch iTunes and change the default file type for imported audio:
* Go into the iTunes Preferences and under ‘General’ settings you will see an ‘Import Settings’ button, click that and you will see a screen like the one shown below. In this drop down menu, select MP3 Encoder and click ‘Ok’
now iTunes will create mp3 files rather than m4a.
* Now converting any of your existing m4a files to mp3 files is very easy and you can do it directly within iTunes. Simply select a song that you know is in m4a format, and right-click the song to bring up a menu. With the song selected, navigate to “Create MP3 Version”
Now give your computer a few seconds to convert the m4a file to mp3, it will appear at the top of the playlist, and also within the iTunes music folder, which by default is located in ~/Music/iTunes/
That’s it! Now you can convert those pesky m4a files to mp3 with ease.
Command+Click the Title of any website window in Safari and you can pull up a nice navigable drop-down list of the websites directory paths. This is really handy if you’re deep in some archive or if you’re looking at an image and want to cut down to the parent directory. This tip also works in the Finder
I’m a procrastinator with holiday shopping, and anything I can do online makes my life easier. Unfortunately when waiting until the last minute, you often lose out on having things shipped in time, but thankfully Apple has a new service that will help this situation. Between December 15 and December 24, you can order products online with Apple and pick them up at an Apple store, even having them gift wrapped for you. Cool!
To list all mounted drives and their accompanying partitions from the Terminal, type the following command:
diskutil list
This will give you feedback like the screenshot shown above, listing out the mounted drives and their partition types.
