Listening to a great song that you think everyone should hear? You can easily share music with your friends thanks to iChat and iTunes, just drag a song from iTunes into an iChat window and off it goes! This may be Snow Leopard and iTunes 9 only, I don’t recall this feature working in Leopard.
Flash cookies are not deleted when you remove your browser cookies, because they are stored independent of your browser, meaning Flash cookies from Safari are accessible via Firefox, and vice versa. The interesting thing about Flash cookies though is that they could technically track your web browsing long after you have left the site that originated the Flash cookie, this is particularly the case with some advertising networks that appear ubiquitously around the web. Flash cookies actually have another name, they are known as Locally Stored Objects, or LSO’s, but whatever you want to call them, here is how to delete and remove Flash cookies, or LSO’s.
* Flash cookies are located in two locations, shown as follows:
~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/#SharedObjects
~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/
Note that ~ signifies the user home directory
* You can navigate to these directories by using the Finder or by hitting Command+Shift+G and pasting the above location one at a time into the Go To Folder box and hitting “Go”
* You’ll now see a directory with a bunch of randomly generated names like VDZJH1CX
* Delete all of these folders if you want to delete ALL Flash cookies
* Repeat with the other directory listed above to completely remove all Flash cookies from your Mac
Now if you’ve used an Adobe AIR application, you might want to delete those AIR cookies too since they can track things outside of their realm as well, these are a little more tricky to delete because they are in the following location format:
~/Library/Preferences/AIR App Name/Local Store/#SharedObjects/flash file.swf/flash object.sol
You’ll need to know the specific Adobe AIR application name to delete the AIR cookies.
If you want to read more about Locally Stored Objects (Flash Cookies) check out Wikipedia’s entry on LSO’s, it is informative and helpful in understanding the technology.
If you don’t want to go mucking around in various Mac system preference folders, try out this application called Flush. Flush is very easy to use and will delete the Flash cookies itself, so you don’t have to do much except launch the app. Flush works with Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard.
Download Flush Now
Flush Developer Home
Another option is to use Kill Flash Cookies, the cross platform compatible LSO deletion tool discussed below:
Easy, try out the aptly named Kill Flash Cookies, it’s got the most simple GUI in the world and it deletes flash LSO files in an instant whether you’re running Mac OS X, Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, or Linux. Try it out!
If you have a large iTunes library it’s really easy to inadvertently gather duplicate songs. Thankfully cleaning up and removing the duplicates from the iTunes song library is really easy, here’s how to do it:
* Within iTunes open the ‘File’ menu
* Navigate down to ‘Show Duplicates’ (see below screenshot)
* iTunes will now show what it thinks are duplicates
This method does not always work though to find true duplicates of songs and will sometimes give you songs that are just very similar in name or artist, so you may want to try this instead:
* Hold down the Option / ALT key
* Navigate to “File” menu
* Click on ‘Show Exact Duplicates’
* Now iTunes will display ONLY the exact duplicates (see screenshot)
This list shows you the songs that iTunes thinks are duplicates, so do not delete everything in the list or else you may delete the original song that you want to keep. iTunes isn’t perfect in detecting duplicates either, it looks like it bases most of the detection on song, artist, and album names, so if you have two songs named the exact same thing but they are different iTunes will likely think it is a duplicate.
After you have cleaned up your duplicate songs, you can get the iTunes library looking like normal again by clicking the ‘Show All’ button that is highlighted in the above screenshot, or simply navigate back to the ‘File’ menu and click on ‘Show All’ where “Show Duplicates” once was.
Grave, tilde, acute, circumflex, umlaut… all the fun accent codes that you might need to use. So if you need to type an accented letter in Mac OS X, here’s how.
To get this type of accent over a letter, type this command followed by the letter you want accented:
à – option+`
â – option+i
á – option+e
ä – option+u
ã – option+n
I just used the letter A as an example but you can insert accents over letter. Now my sister in Spanish class can stop pulling her hair out. Buena suerte Trish!
The web browsers most commonly used in Mac OS X are Safari and Firefox, here’s how to delete cookies in both.
* Open the ‘Safari’ menu in the upper left
* Click on ‘Preferences’
* Click the ‘Security’ tab with the lock icon
* Click ‘Show Cookies’ button
* Now click “Remove All” and ‘Done’
* Your cookies have been deleted in Safari!
* Click on the ‘Firefox’ menu
* Navigate down to ‘Preferences’ and click
* Click on ‘Privacy’
* Click ‘Show Cookies’ or ‘Remove Individual Cookies’ button, depending on Firefox version
* Click ‘Remove All Cookies’
* Now your cookies are deleted in Firefox!
¥ – You can enter the Japanese Yen symbol in Mac OS X by hitting Option+Y
Rendering the ¥ Yen symbol is fine in most simpler Mac system fonts, but some of the more fancy and crazy fonts will not be able to display Japanese Yen symbol properly. You’ll know this because it will display a small square glyph in it’s place. Now you know how to type the Yen symbol on your Mac!
£ – Typing the symbol for the British Pound is done by hitting Option+3 in Mac OS X
This should come in handy the next time you’re in the UK with your Mac! Most Mac system fonts will have the ability to type the British Pound symbol but some of the fancier aftermarket fonts will not be able to render the £ pound symbol properly.
€ – If you want to reference the Euro symbol on your Mac, type the following command:
€ Euro Symbol – Option+Shift+2
A friend of mine just asked “How do I type the Euro symbol in OS X?” and he’s pretty tech savvy, so if he didn’t know than I’m sure many others don’t. The Euro is becoming increasingly powerful in global economics so it’s probably a good idea to know how to type the symbol, whether or not you ever use the currency itself or it’s symbol beyond your Mac is up to you though.
It’s worth noting that the Euro symbol is only available to type in some Mac OS X fonts, you won’t be able to use it with all font combinations, particularly some of the custom and funky font sets are lacking euro support.
Ever wanted to watch a movie in ASCII art? What’s that? You haven’t even thought about it before? In what might be the single most useless feature to ever grace a video player, VLC allows you to output any video playback as… ASCII art. Yes, the kind of ASCII art that was quite fancy on BBS’s in 1988. Other than the humor and prank value, I don’t see much point to this, but it is entertaining so here’s how you can watch movies in ASCII art with VLC player. BTW this tip is cross platform for all VLC players, Windows, Linux, and of course, Mac OS X.
* Go to VLC menu and to Preferences
* Click on the Video icon
* Click on the “Output Module” drop down, and select “Color ASCII art video output”
* Restart VLC, open a movie file, and be amazed
The screenshot above shows the visually stunning movie The Fall in visually ridiculous ASCII mode. Wow.
¢ is the symbol for the Cent, and typing it on your Mac may not be as obvious as it should be, but it’s easy.
Just hit Option+4 to type the cent symbol as shown here: ¢
Typing this should work in all Mac apps assuming you are using a font that has support for the cent symbol.
