Setting up passwordless SSH logins is a great way to speed up connections to regularly accessed remote Macs and unix boxes. Because OS X doesn’t include the ssh-copy-id command, you will have to use cat or scp to copy over your ssh key. This is how to set everything up, it only takes a minute or so.

First, on the local machine you will want to generate a secure SSH key:

ssh-keygen

Walk through the key generator and set a password, the key file by default goes into ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Next, you need to copy the generated key to the remote server you want to setup passwordless logins with, this is easily done with the following command string but you can use scp if you’d prefer:

cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub | ssh user@remotehost 'cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys'

This command takes the generated SSH key from the local machine, connects to the remote host via SSH, and then uses cat to append the key file to the remote users authorized key list. Because this connects with SSH to the remote machine you will need to enter the password to use this command.

Finally, confirm that you can now login to the remote SSH server without a password:

ssh user@remotehost.com

Assuming initial setup went as intended, you will connect to the remote machine without having to log in. You can shorten the connection steps even further by creating an alias in bash_profile so that you are only required to type a short command to immediately connect to the specified remote server.

There are some obvious potential security risks with using ssh without a password, the best way to mitigate that is to lock down the client machine with lock screens for screen savers and sleep and boot passwords, all of which you should be utilizing anyway.

It’s a good idea to check the hard drive health of a Mac as part of a periodic maintenance routine. Doing this is extremely easy with Disk Utility, here’s how to do it and what to do if you encounter any issues:

1. Launch Disk Utility, found within the /Applications/Utilities folder
2. Select the Mac hard drive from the left side menu and click on the “First Aid” tab
3. Click on “Verify Disk” in the lower right corner and let it run

You will find the window populating with messages about the drives health, messages that indicate things are fine appear in black, messages that indicate something is wrong appears in red. For the vast majority of users it will look something like this, finalizing with a message of “The partition map appears to be OK”, indicating no errors:

Verifying partition map for “APPLE Media”
Checking prerequisites
Checking the partition list
Checking for an EFI system partition
Checking the EFI system partition’s size
Checking the EFI system partition’s file system
Checking all HFS data partition loader spaces
Checking Core Storage Physical Volume partitions
The partition map appears to be OK

If you do see a red message saying something along the lines of “Error: This disk needs to be repaired” and it’s your boot drive, you’ll find the “Repair Disk” button is inaccessible. In this case all you need to do is reboot into the Recovery HD partition and run Repair Disk from there, here’s how to do that in OS X Lion and Mountain Lion:

Before proceeding it’s a good idea to backup your drive quickly with Time Machine.

1. Reboot the Mac and hold down Command+R (hold own Option key on some Macs)
2. Select “Recovery HD” from the boot menu
3. Choose “Disk Utility” from the Mac OS X Utilities screen
4. Click the hard drive that reported the error, click the “First Aid” tab, and now click on “Repair Disk”

After Repair Disk has ran successfully, you are free to boot OS X as normal and the drives issues should be resolved.

A few final notes: relying on a hard drive being healthy is not an alternative to having backups, you need to backup your Mac with regularity using Time Machine or some other method if you choose. Hard drives fail, it’s a fact of computing life. It’s also important to note Disk Utility isn’t a 100% conclusive test suite to determine drive health, and if you hear weird sounds coming out of the hard drive it’s probably a good time to head down to Apple and prepare for a drive swap because that drive is likely going to croak soon.

If you want to use an iPhone or iPad during a plane flight, you’re supposed to turn Airplane mode on to disable the built-in wireless communication aspects of the device. Airplane mode disables cellular and 3G/4g connectivity, GPS, wi-fi, and Bluetooth capabilities, but how are you supposed to use inflight wi-fi service if everything is turned off? The solution is to enable Airplane mode as usual, but then manually turn on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth separately on the iOS device:

• Launch Settings and flip “Airplane Mode” to “ON”
• Tap on “Wi-Fi” and flip the switch to “ON”, join the wireless network as usual
• For Bluetooth use, within Settings tap on “General” and then tap “Bluetooth” to enable separately

Either choice will not reenable the cellular modem or connection, typically keeping you within the realm of acceptable behavior for most flights. You’ll probably want to check with the specific airline before doing this, but chances are if they offer inflight wireless service then it’s acceptable behavior.

Outside of flying, using Airplane mode but turning on wi-fi is an easy way to temporarily turn an iPhone into an iPod touch, letting you use wifi networks but avoid any potentially expensive voice or data roaming charges.

There are so many keyboard shortcuts throughout Mac OS X and it’s myriad of third party apps that it’s easy to forget them or get lost trying to memorize the sea of keystrokes for each app. This is where CheatSheet will make your life easier, it’s a tiny free application that sits in the background waiting to be summoned from any app to instantly show all keyboard shortcuts for that application.

• Get CheatSheet for free from Media Atelier (requires OS X 10.7 or later)

After you’ve downloaded CheatSheet, place it in /Applications/ folder and the launch the app. Now from any application, hold down the Command key for a few seconds to summon the “Cheat Sheet” list of all keyboard shortcuts for that app. This allows you to quickly see even the most obscure shortcuts that would otherwise be buried deep within a submenu somewhere.

Here’s a quick video showing CheatSheet in use with Google Chrome and TextEdit:

Quick troubleshooting tips: if some apps aren’t responding to the hotkey, either relaunch those apps or try releasing and holding Command again and it should activate. Also if you’ve forgotten the meaning of Mac keyboard symbols it may be a good time to review those really quickly.

My only complaint about CheatSheet is that since it runs in the background you have to use something like Activity Monitor to easily quit out of it. Having an optional menu item to summon the cheat sheet for the active application, give you some control over basic settings like response time, and having a quick way to quit CheatSheet would be a nice touch, but this is a free app that is very useful as is so we really can’t complain too much.

Whether you’re a longtime Mac user or completely new to the platform, you are practically guaranteed to find CheatSheet useful. Get it now and thank me later.

The iPhone has the Compass app to help show you which direction you are facing, but if you’re in an area with cellular reception a much more practical and useful approach is to use the Maps app. This lets you see which direction you are facing on a map of the area, so you can quickly see landmarks or whatever else you are looking for.

This will work on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with internet connectivity, though it’s likely most useful in the 3G/4G enabled models for obvious reasons.

• Launch Maps app and tap the Arrow icon to locate where you are
• When Maps has centered on your location, tap the Arrow icon again

The arrow icon will switch to show what looks like a flashlight beam coming out of the point, this orientates the Maps app based on which way you are facing. Use this feature to either quickly find North, South, East, and West, or if you’re in the middle of the nowhere you can use it to find your way to the nearest road or familiar landmark that you find on Google Maps.

The primary weakness with this method is that iOS and Google Maps does not store or cache maps data locally on the device. This means if you’re out of cell range and you use the compass feature of Maps, you’ll just have a direction pointed out on a blank grid, unable to find any meaningful landmarks or points on the Map. This prevents an iOS device from serving as a true GPS replacement for serious outdoor uses, but if you’re in a bind it can be better than nothing.

This feature will not work if location services is disabled, a feature some people turn off because it can reduce the life of a battery charge on some iOS devices.

You can image a Mac hard drive with the help of a free third party utility called Carbon Copy Cloner. The resulting image will be saved as the familiar .dmg format, this has a number of potential uses ranging from creating a drive clone for backup purposes, restoring the image elsewhere as a bootable backup, or even for deploying the same Mac OS X installation on multiple machines.

The process below will describe how to create an exact image replica of a selected Mac hard drive. If the hard drive being imaged is very large the resulting disk image is also going to be large, be sure to have adequate space to support the image or consider saving it to another location.

1. Get Carbon Copy Cloner free from Bombich and copy it to the /Applications/ folder
2. Launch Carbon Copy Cloner and pull down the “Source” menu, selecting “Macintosh HD” or whatever the Mac hard disk is named
3. Pull down the “Destination” menu and choose “New Disk Image”



4. Give the disk image a name and select a destination, if you don’t have the local storage capacity for such a large disk image be sure to choose an external or network drive as the image destination
5. Pull down the “Image Format” menu and choose “Read-only disk image”, this saves the image as the familiar DMG format



6. Click “OK”
7. Back at the main CCC menu, choose “Clone” to create the exact replica of the drive as a disk image file

The process of creating the disk image can take a very long time depending several factors, including the speed of the Mac, the size of the disk being imaged, and the destination of the image itself. Don’t be surprised if it takes quite a while to create the backup file.

When finished you’ll have an exact replica of the Macs hard drive in the form of a .dmg image file. If you intend on using the image on a Windows PC, you may want to convert it to an .iso first.

You’ll notice we didn’t choose to create an encrypted image, that is an option you can use if it fits your use case, though creating encrypted drive images takes even longer and they also have the potential of issues when restoring down the road.

If you want color icons back in your OS X Finder window sidebar but don’t want to deal with the existing procedures of manually installing SIMBL and the other components, grab SideEffects instead. SideEffects is a simple package that includes the three necessary components to add color back to Finder sidebar icons; SIMBL, ColorfulSidebar, and RelaunchFinder, all wrapped into a single easy to use installer to shorten the process considerably. Gone will be the drab grayscale icons, welcome back the color.

• Get SideEffects free from MacUpdate

SideEffects works with OS X 10.7.4 or later including Mountain Lion (supposedly).

For those wondering what is being installed and where it’s going, the files added by SideEffects are as follows:

SIMBL
/Library/ScriptingAdditions

ColorfulSidebar
/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins

RelaunchFinder
/Applications/RelaunchFinder.app

Also note that RelaunchFinder.app is also added to the active users login items so that the color icons take effect on each reboot or login.

Thanks to Simon for the tip, similar icon colorization is available for iTunes too.

The command line tool wget lets you retrieve a group of files from FTP and HTTP protocols, it’s a very useful utility for web developers and powerusers to have around because it lets you do things like perform quick and dirty site backups and even mirror websites locally.

This approach is going to build and install wget in OS X from source, this means you’ll need Xcode and the Unix dev tools (free @ Mac App Store) installed, but it has the benefit of eliminating the need of a package manager like Homebrew or MacPorts.

Assuming you have Xcode and the command line tools installed, launch Terminal and enter the following commands:

First, use curl to download the latest wget source:
curl -O http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/wget/wget-1.13.4.tar.gz

Next we use tar to uncompress the files you just downloaded:
tar -xzf wget-1.13.4.tar.gz

Use cd to change to the directory:
cd wget-1.13.4

Configure with the appropriate –with-ssl flag to prevent a “GNUTLS not available” error:
./configure --with-ssl=openssl

Build the source:
make

Install wget, it ends up in /usr/local/bin/:
sudo make install

Confirm everything worked by running wget:
wget --help

Clean up by removing wget source files when finished:
cd .. && rm -rf wget*

You’re all set, enjoy wget in Mac OS X.

Platypus is an excellent utility that lets you turn virtually any script into a self-contained Mac OS X application. Free and remarkably simple to use, Platypus will support just about any shell script, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Tcl, AppleScript, Expect, and even other scripting languages.

Using the app is easy, drag and drop a script onto the application, give it a name, assign an Output type (progress bar, script output, webkit view, etc), set drag & drop support or not, and adjust a few other variables as necessary. When done configuring, click “Create” to build a self-contained application that holds the script inside. The resulting application is completely portable and runs independently, letting you use the app on your own Mac or elsewhere, allowing for even novice users to perform complex tasks and run scripts that would otherwise be beyond their skill level to even execute.

The possibilities are practically endless so let your creativity go wild, because it’s Playtpus that makes apps like the troubleshooting tool Consultant’s Canary possible.

• Download Platypus free from Sveinbjorn

For a basic yet practical use case, build an app to perform a necessary repetitive task and add it to a users Login Items or put it in the Dock or Launchpad for easy novice access. It certainly beats trying to explain to someone how to run a bash script!

Virtually everyone knows you can click the yellow pill button in the upper left corner of a window to minimize a window in Mac OS X, but there are actually a few other ways minimize windows faster than that. The first is my preferred method which is a quick keystroke, and the other lets you double-click anywhere to send a window hiding.

The Minimize Window Keyboard Shortcut: Command+M

By far the fastest way to minimize windows is the Command+M keystroke, which works anywhere with the currently active window. You can modify it by adding an Option+H as well to minimize and hide everything including the currently active window with Command+Option+H+M

Double-Clicking Title Bars to Minimize Windows in OS X

Longtime Mac users should be familiar with this feature which lets you double-click anywhere in the titlebar to minimize a window. To do this in OS X, you’ll have to enable the feature in preferences:

• Open System Preferences and click on “General”
• Look under the scroll bar section and check the box next to “Double-click a window’s title bar to minimize”

This feature has been around in various forms since the early days of Mac OS 7, 8, and 9, long before OS X came along.

Running out of iCloud backup capacity happens quick whether you have a single iPhone or a handful of iOS devices. You’ll know this has happened because you get a friendly popup informing you of “Not Enough Storage” and that the automatic backup can not occur as a result. So what to do? There’s really two choices, one is the most obvious and involves upgrading the iCloud account, and the other is free and relies on you more actively managing your backups.

#1 – Upgrade iCloud Storage

Obviously the easiest and most immediate solution is to just buy more iCloud storage, it’s cheap and a variety of plans are offered starting at $20/year for a total of 15GB storage. Going this route is simple and recommended for those who can afford it:

• Tap on Settings, tap “iCloud” and scroll down to tap on “Storage & Backup”
• Tap “Buy More Storage” and choose the plan that works for you

Easy enough, but what if you don’t want to add a yearly expense to your iCloud account? That brings us to option number two, which is free but will involve some more effort.

#2 – Manage & Delete Old iCloud Backups

If you want to stay free, you’ll have to manage your iCloud backups a bit more hands on to clear up some space, here’s two options on how to do that.

1. Launch Settings, tap “iCloud”, then tap on “Storage & Backup”
2. Tap “Manage Storage” and tap the name of the device you are going to manage storage for, now you have two real options:
• Option 1) Turn off iCloud backups for certain apps
• Option 2) Delete the current Backup and create a new one

Option 1 really just thins down the backup size, but it’s not always a reasonable choice. If you’re going that route the first thing you’ll probably want to do on an iPhone is move the pictures to a computer and then delete them from iCloud. You can also selectively remove other apps from the backup list, though outside of photos and movies you likely won’t save much space using this method.

Option 2 clears out the existing iCloud backup and could be a better solution, but before doing so it’d be smart to connect the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to a computer with iTunes and create a quick manual backup by right-clicking on the iOS device and choosing “Back Up”, this saves a backup locally to the computer just in case something goes wrong. After you’ve done that, delete the backup from iCloud Settings and then immediately start a new manual backup with iCloud by tapping “Back Up Now”, that will become the most recent backup. If you’re going this route you’re probably right on the brim of iCloud storage capacity again though, so you’ll have to do this on your own anytime you get the popup alert warning of not enough iCloud storage.

For those with multiple iOS devices, it’s probably best to just upgrade the iCloud storage. This is especially true for Mac users who intend on updating to OS X Mountain Lion, since the new version of Mac OS has even more iCloud integration and you’ll undoubtedly end up storing plenty of data in Apple’s cloud.

Troubleshooting computer problems is never particularly fun, and with so many potential third party add-ons, plugins, extensions, scripts, and whatever else is buried into OS X, how are you supposed to find everything to help determine what’s causing an issue? You need Consultant’s Canary, because whether you’re troubleshooting your own Mac or someone else’s, it’s going to save you tons of time and hassle.

Consultant’s Canary is a free self-contained python script that lists an absurd amount of information about the OS X installation that it’s launched from, including general system information, all login items, overly privileged processes, and a whole slew of third party system changes and augmentations, including address book plugins, Automator actions, additional frameworks, Safari plugins and extensions, kernel extensions, launchd jobs and launch agents, Mail plugins, third party System Preference panels, screen savers, Spotlight add ons, startup items, and more. Got all that? In other words, virtually every third party add-on that is currently installed on the Mac will be found and reported back in an easy to follow list that even includes the full file paths to the found items. Nothing is modified however, leaving the task of determining what doesn’t belong in the lists up to you.

• Get Consultant’s Canary free from KHI

Using Consultant’s Canary is easy, you can run the standalone Consultant’s Canary app directly on a single Mac which launches Terminal and a python script on it’s own, or you could open the apps package to find the heart of the app “dispatcher.py” which could then be used over a network to remotely diagnose and troubleshoot multiple Macs. The same version of Consultant’s Canary will work on any version of OS X later than 10.5, including Lion.

CC may just be the ultimate troubleshooting aid for Mac OS X, a remarkable feet for a free utility, making it’s an absolute must-have addition to a Mac power users toolkit.

Thanks to Jean N for the great tip

Certain Wi-Fi networks require clients to use static IP addresses or manual DHCP information in order for a device to connect properly, setting either of these is easy within iOS.

1. Tap on “Settings” and then tap on “General”
2. Tap “Wi-Fi” and look for the network name you are connected to, tap the blue (>) arrow next to it
3. Tap the “Static” tab and enter network appropriate DHCP/static IP information
4. Close out of Settings and launch Safari or another network app to confirm connectivity

Settings are applied automatically after all the information is typed in, if you need an easy to remember DNS try using Google’s 8.8.8.8 server.

I’ve had to set manual DHCP information in order to connect iPads to certain older Wi-Fi networks on more than one occasion, something I’ve encountered in Mac OS X Lion before as well.

Ever wish you had a system wide equalizer to adjust all audio output in Mac OS X and not just in iTunes? Maybe you want to adjust the way all audio output sounds or maybe you just want to boost the output volume of the built-in Mac speakers. We’ll show you how to do both by creating your own universal EQ using two free tools, follow along:

Requirements

• Soundflower – free download from Google Code
• AU Lab – free download from Apple Developers (requires free Apple Dev ID)

Download and install both Soundflower and AU Lab, you will then need to restart your Mac to have full access to the audio components. Once rebooted, follow along with the instructions below:

Set Up a Universal Audio Equalizer for Mac OS X

1. Set System Volume to the maximum level, do this either through the menu bar or by hitting the Volume Up key repeatedly
2. Open System Preferences from the  Apple menu and select the “Sound” panel, followed by the “Output” tab. Select “Soundflower (2ch) from the Output list
3. Now launch AU Lab, found in /Applications/Utilities/
4. From the “Audio Input Device” pulldown menu, select “Soundflower (2ch)”, and then from “Audio Output Device” menu select “Stereo In/Stereo Out”
5. Click the “Create Document” button at the bottom of the screen
6. At the next screen, look for “Output 1″ column and click the “Effects” dropdown, selecting “AUGraphicEQ”
7. This is your new system-wide equalizer, set it how you see fit. Changes here will impact all audio output on the Mac
8. When satisfied with the EQ settings, hit Command+S to save the EQ settings file and put it somewhere easy to find like the Documents folder
9. Now open AU Lab preferences from the AU Lab menu, click on the “Document” tab and click the radiobox next to “Open a specific document”, selecting the .trak EQ file you saved in the previous step

Optional final step: If you want the EQ settings to load on every Mac OS X boot, right-click on the AU Lab icon, go to Options, and select “Open at Login”

It’s important to note that AU Lab must be running in order for the equalizer to have an effect, keeping it running will consume a small amount of CPU resources but it’s much less process hungry than some of the third party alternatives available on the market.

A big thanks to Dan Wong for sending in this tip

Photo Stream is an excellent iCloud feature that automatically syncs all pictures taken on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch to one anothers Photo libraries, and it will even sync with Mac OS X through the iPhoto app. Not everyone uses iPhoto to manage pictures though, and if you just want quick access to those pictures from the OS X Finder you can use a neat trick to access the entire iOS Photo Stream directly from the Mac desktop.

In order for this to work, you will need the following:

• Mac OS X 10.7.2 or later on the Mac, with iCloud configured
• iOS 5 or later on all iOS devices, with iCloud configured
• Photo Stream must be enabled on all iOS devices involved, and must be enabled on the Mac

If you don’t have iCloud set up and Photo Stream turned on, do that before proceeding.

Accessing the iOS Photo Stream from Mac OS X Finder

1. From anywhere on the OS X desktop, hit Command+Shift+G to bring up Go To Folder and enter the following path:

~/Library/Application Support/iLifeAssetManagement/assets/sub/


2. In the upper right corner of the Finder window, search for “Image” and select “Kind: Image” from the pull down menu



3. Now click the “Save” button to save this search, name it something like “Photo Stream” and check “Add To Sidebar” to keep the item in the sidebar

Now anytime you click “Photo Stream” in an OS X Finder window, you will get instant access to all images from the iOS Photo Stream from your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or all of the above.

For quick access to photos, this is easier and faster than transferring them all from iOS to the computer because it’s practically instantaneous and automatic, and it’s simpler than using the past tip for an AppleScript to save all images from Photo Stream because there is very little potential for error.

Once you have this set up you’ll likely find yourself using it very often, it’s so useful that hopefully the upcoming release of OS X Mountain Lion will include a similar featured enabled by default.

This is a variation on a great tip that was posted a while back by IconMaster to get to iOS screenshots from OS X, but by specifying any images in the search you can access all the Photo Stream images rather than only screen captures. If you do want to see only screen shots searching for file type “PNG” will achieve that.