We recently showed you how to password protect files and folders using encrypted Disk Images in Mac OS X, but if you have an external drive you can go a step further. By using encrypted disk partitions, any drive, be it a USB key, flash drive, hard disk, or whatever else, can be set to … Read More

Stacks are a Dock feature in Mac OS X which allows for an easy way to see the contents of Applications, Documents, Downloads, and whatever other folder placed into the Dock. There are a few different ways to view the Stacks, which appear on the right side of the Mac Dock, like grid, automatic, list, … Read More

You can password protect files and folders in Mac OS X by using a trick with disk images. Here’s how it works; by placing files inside of an encrypted disk image, that disk image will work like a password protected folder and require a password before it’s mounted, preventing unauthorized access to all of the … Read More

If you have a third party SSD you probably noticed that Mac OS X Lion probably doesn’t support TRIM on the drive. While OS X Lion supports TRIM for all Apple SSD’s, many third party SSD’s are left without trim in OS X 10.7, OS X 10.8, OS X 10.9, and OS X 10.10.

Wi-Fi Diagnostics is an incredibly useful utility to troubleshoot and optimize any wireless network and the signal strength of computers that are connecting to it. This utility first came bundled in Mac OS X Lion and works with all wireless routers and not only the Apple branded ones, meaning you can improve the performance of … Read More

Want to quickly get to the User Library folder on Mac? A keyboard shortcut is one of the best ways to do that, particularly if you find yourself frequently accessing that folder. Using keyboard shortcuts are often the fastest way to navigate around the filesystem in Mac OS X, but new versions of MacOS and … Read More

iChat Matte is a popular mod for iChat that removes the bubble aqua style text blocks and changes them to a flatter matte. The tweak works by replacing a few image files, but the official version hasn’t been updated for OS X Lion and an unofficial version floating around has the chat bubbles facing the … Read More

Go2Shell is a free Finder toolbar add-on that creates a new Terminal window from the current directory of any desktop folder in Mac OS X with a click of a button. This is similar to the services option that can be added to the right-click contextual menu, but Go2Shell is faster due to resting in … Read More

Whether you are disabling Spotlight or just wanting to reduce menubar icon clutter, it’s possible to hide the Spotlight icon. Here’s the best part though; if you just want to hide the Spotlight menu, you can do so without disabling the search abilities from functioning in the Finder or with other apps that rely on … Read More

Completely disabling and reenabling Spotlight in Mac OS X Lion, OS X Mountain Lion, and OS X Mavericks can be done with the help of the Terminal. The following command unloads the Spotlight mds agent from launchd, thereby preventing the daemon from running or indexing any drives entirely. Open up the Terminal (found in /Applications/Utilities/) … Read More

I’ve gotten in the habit of immediately putting my MacBook Air to sleep by shutting the lid, by far the easiest method if you’re on the go. Typically this works without a hitch, but today the Air didn’t sleep when shut. Because the MacBook Air has no moving hard drive or sleep light, I didn’t … Read More

If you shuffle between the Terminal and the Mac OS X desktop often, you’ll get good use out of a Services feature which gives the ability to create a new Terminal window (or tab) from a selected folder within the Finder. You have to enable the Service inside System Prefs beforehand though:

iOS popularized the pull-to-refresh gesture, where pulling down and releasing on browser and app windows causes them to refresh their contents. With the help of a browser extension, we can bring the same pull to refresh feature to Mac OS X 10.7 in either the Chrome or Safari web browsers: Extension for Chrome Extension for … Read More

A wide variety of websites and online services are region restricted to the USA: Hulu, Netflix, Pandora, annual credit reports, some banks, the list is significant. Region restrictions are generally something you don’t notice until you need to access a website from outside the USA, and then they’re a huge pain. We’ll show you how … Read More

Traveling abroad can quickly become frustrating when you attempt a search on Google.com and discover you are redirected to the local countries variant of Google, with the local language and all. This language redirect can happen when using a VPN or proxy as well. While this is convenient for things like local search and Maps, … Read More

Of all the Launchpad tips and customizations, one that has been greatly desired is the ability to manually adjust the icon size of apps. A tip sent in by Rohan Agashe moves us in that direction, allowing you to change the Launchpad icon size down from the large icons in OS X 10.7.2 to the … Read More

Want to install a new font in Mac OS? Maybe you want to remove a font you no longer use? Managing fonts on the Mac is incredibly easy regardless of what system software version you are using. We’ll cover the process of installing new fonts, deleting unwanted fonts, and also restoring your default system fonts … Read More

If you want to customize the Terminals appearance a bit beyond the prompt and a custom background, you can make the Terminal much more readable by using this nice trick to add a separator and timestamp between each executed command. This also bolds the current command text and anything that is available from tab completion.