Advanced Mac users may have noticed that X11 is no longer bundled with OS X, and it’s also no longer available as a separate installation option through Developer Tools. Instead, to run X11 on OS X Mountain Lion (and later), you’ll want to download and install the free XQuartz system, which bundles all the necessary … Read More

This weeks Mac setup comes to us from Michael H., the owner of a digital media company that focuses on web and graphic design. As you might have guessed, the hardware is used for every stage of the design process from the creative aspects to the business side of things. Hardware and accessories shown includes: … Read More

A fair amount of Mac users have encountered long lasting Wi-Fi connection issues, whether it’s a dropping connection, a refusal to reconnect after waking from sleep, or any other number of oddities pertaining to wireless networking. Often these connection problems can be resolved with renewing a DHCP lease and changing the MTU size, but sometimes … Read More

Though most Mac users will likely prefer to use Preview to batch resize images because of the ease of use, advanced users often like to go with the command line for repetitive tasks. We’ve discussed sips before as a way to resize, rotate, and flip images, but if sips is combined with wildcards it can … Read More

This weeks Mac setup comes to us from Alex A., a student in Australia who has a wide variety of hardware that combines Mac OS X, iOS, and even Windows 8. Hardware shown includes the following: Mac Mini – 1.42 GHz PowerPC G4 running OS X Leopard BenQ 21.5″ LED Monitor Toshiba Portege m930 slider … Read More

Now that Mac Mini, iMac, MacBook Air, and Retina MacBook Pro have moved away from carrying internal SuperDrives, owners of these newer Macs will possibly get more usage out of the Remote Disc feature than ever before. For those unfamiliar, Remote Disc does pretty much what it sounds like, allowing one Mac to share and … Read More

This weeks Mac setup comes to us from Mike L., a Masters student in International Relations who uses his Apple gear for coursework, research, photo and video editing, and some fun too. Hardware shown includes: MacBook Pro 15″ with Retina display – 2.6GHz Core i7, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD Iiyama 22″ Full HD LCD Display … Read More

To compare and list the different contents of two directories without the extra output you get through commands like diff, you can use the comm command instead. To get started, launch Terminal and type the following command, adjusting the directory paths as appropriate: comm -3 <(ls -1 folder1) <(ls -1 folder2) The output listed will … Read More

If you’re a Mac owner you know that every time the Mac reboots or starts up it makes a startup chime sound. Though you can temporarily mute the chime by holding down the Mute key on any Mac keyboard, you can also choose to disable it completely by turning to the command line. To be … Read More

This weeks featured Mac setup is the home office of Ronny M., a professional photographer and videographer. Hardware shown includes: MacBook Air 13″ – 4GB, 128GB SSD iMac 27″ – 2.7Ghz Core i5, 16GB RAM, 1 TB HDD and 128 SSD, connected to two external displays Benq 17″ display on the left Samsung 19″ display … Read More

The history command is a useful way to find specific commands that have been used in the past, and it can also be used to discover what your personal most used commands are with the following command string: history | awk ‘{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head -15 The … Read More

The Help menu that’s always visible in Mac OS X and within Mac apps is far more powerful than just serving as a knowledge base for questions about the app in use; it can also function as a full-fledged action launcher for any menu items. This is useful for when you’re either still learning keyboard … Read More

Searching the file system for a specific document or file is easy and very fast. Though most users are best served using Spotlight from the menubar, there are times when either Spotlight isn’t working, you need more paramaters, you’re working in the Terminal, operating with a remote machine, or perhaps just would like to use … Read More

This great multi-Mac setup belongs to Terry R., a Vice President at a leading cybersecurity firm. You’ll find a wide variety of gear and software in use, with three different Macs and a handful of iOS devices, all of which provide an interesting look into how Apple hardware is used at the executive level. Hardware … Read More

You can set unique names for how your Macs computer name appears locally, from file sharing and networking, and even Bonjour services, with the help of the scutil command. This allows you to have a custom hostname for Terminal and SSH, another friendlier name for what’s visible to others on local networks, and yet another … Read More

This weeks Mac setup comes to us from Chris C., an iOS and web app developer. Whether he’s writing code or designing a user interface, there’s plenty of great hardware in this beefy setup to get the job done: Macbook Pro with 15″ Retina Display – Core i7 2.6GHz,16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, GT650M 1GB Dell … Read More

Following up about Screen Sharing in Mac OS X, which lets you remote control a Mac from another Mac, you can also remotely access and control Macs from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch using VNC. There is minimal work involved to get this working, and if you already set up Screen Sharing you’re halfway … Read More

For anyone who uses the command line regularly, a new tool called pkill makes killing processes significantly easier in modern releases of Mac OS and Mac OS X. Improving on the standard kill command, pkill easily supports wildcards, making it easy to terminate all processes belonging to a match or even a specific user.