Find your IP Address on a Mac

Nov 21, 2010 - 24 Comments

Knowing your Mac’s IP address is important for setting up a network or sharing files, here’s two different ways to find your IP address in Mac OS X; an easy way through the GUI and a more technical approach with the command line. These methods will be the same whether you are connected via ethernet … Read More

Enable IP Blocking when downloading torrents in Transmission

Nov 17, 2010 - 24 Comments

Transmission has a built-in IP blocklist for what are determined to be “bad peers” and it should be enabled if you use Transmission with any sort of regularity. The blocklist helps to insure a better experience with torrents and also helps to protect your privacy. How to enable the IP Blocklist for downloading torrents in … Read More

Random MAC Address Generator

Nov 10, 2010 - 21 Comments

Do you want to generate a random MAC address? That’s no problem with this neat openssl tip sent in by one of our readers, and you can run the command once or multiple times to generate a randomized MAC address instantly on each execution. This command will work to randomize MAC addresses in in Mac … Read More

Use Time Machine to backup to a networked Windows or Linux drive

Nov 10, 2010 - 3 Comments

Time Machine is a very convenient backup solution for Mac users, but typically requires an external drive to backup to. If you’ve got a network with an extra Windows or Linux PC hanging around with tons of disk space, you can get Time Machine to backup to that computers excess disk space instead of an … Read More

Watch Disk Use, CPU, and Load Average via Command Line

Oct 31, 2010 - 2 Comments

Here’s a nice trick if you need to continuously observe your Macs system usage, including disk usage, CPU, and load average. The great thing about this iostat trick is that it updates constantly, allowing for realtime monitoring of system performance, which can be extremely helpful for performance testing and tracking down various processes or activities … Read More

Does your Mac Need More Memory? How to Know if you Need a RAM Upgrade

Oct 29, 2010 - 41 Comments

Does your Mac need more memory? How can you tell? Often when a Mac needs more RAM things will start slowing down and you’ll suffer a noticeable performance hit. This can impact everything from the speed of the computer, to how long it takes to launch apps, to sluggishness when interacting with apps, and more. … Read More

How to Check the Mac Processor Speed

Oct 23, 2010 - 7 Comments

Want to know how fast a Mac is? You can check a Macs processor clock speed, chip type, and CPU architecture a few different ways, but we’ll cover two quick methods to determine the clock speed of a given Mac. First, a super easy glance at processor speed through the GUI, and second, a more … Read More

Get MP3 & M4A File Info with afinfo from Command Line of OS X

Oct 19, 2010 - 4 Comments
Terminal in macOS

The fastest way to get MP3 and m4a file info out of Mac OS X is using the Terminal and afinfo command. The command line tool you’ll want to use stands for Audio File Info, rather appropriately. You can try it out yourself with any audio file, though for the purposes here we’re looking at … Read More

Uninstall Akamai Download Manager and com.akamai.client.plist

Oct 7, 2010 - 19 Comments

If you’ve downloaded something from Adobe recently you may have unintentionally installed Akamai Download Manager. Akamai is a helpful content delivery network (at least for the web), but for whatever reason the Akamai Download Manager that is used and packaged with Adobe software often goes haywire on a Mac with usage spikes and random internet … Read More

Monitor How and When a Process Accesses Files with opensnoop

Oct 6, 2010 - Leave a Comment

You can watch what a process is doing with your filesystem by using the opensnoop command. To try this out, launch the Terminal and then follow along to learn how to watch by applications, file usage, process ID, and more.

How to Check Bitrate of MP3, m4a, & Audio Files from Command Line of Mac OS X

Oct 4, 2010 - 10 Comments
Apple Music Icon

Mac users can quickly get the bitrate of any MP3, m4a, or other audio file from the command line of Mac OS X.

Lock your Mac via iPhone and take an iSight picture with login attempts

Sep 29, 2010 - 12 Comments

RedHand is a pretty powerful Mac security app with a creepy icon that locks your computer using a myriad of protection options and scripting support, but I think the two best features by far are these: Bluetooth detection locking & unlocking, and the ability to take iSight pictures on failed login attempts.

Triple boot Mac, Windows, and Linux, with rEFIt without using Boot Camp

Sep 22, 2010 - 3 Comments

If you’re looking for a solution to triple boot Mac OS X with Linux and Windows without using Boot Camp, you can do this using a third party boot menu called rEFIt (get it? re-EFI-it? rEFIt?? Alrighty then). rEFIt works very well and, upon boot, you’ll discover a nice menu like the above screenshot on … Read More

Disable “application downloaded from the internet” Message on a Per-App Basis in Mac OS X

Sep 12, 2010 - 16 Comments

Mac OS X warns users in a variety of different ways if they have downloaded a file from the internet to their Mac, with a popup message that says something along the lines of “[NAME] is an application downloaded from the internet. Are you sure you want to open it?”, or even “this application can’t … Read More

My iPad Buddy – hilarious iPad game ad

Sep 9, 2010 - 2 Comments

If you’re old enough to remember the “My Buddy” doll commercials from the 1980’s, you should be highly amused by this iPad game ad. It’s for an iPad app called Steve Young Football, the commercial doesn’t give you much of an idea of what the game is about but that’s sort of besides the point … Read More

Start, Stop, and Restart Windows Services from Mac OS X

Sep 8, 2010 - Leave a Comment

Mac OS X includes Samba support by default, which allows for communication between OS X and Windows PC hardware. SMB is what enables simple Mac to Windows file sharing, but you can also go further and utilize the command line of OS X or Linux to remotely monitor, start, and stop services running on Windows … Read More

Set IP Address from the Mac Command Line

Sep 1, 2010 - 23 Comments

The quickest way to set your IP address from the command line is to use the versatile and powerful ipconfig utility, which is bundled directly with Mac OS X. We’ll show you how to set an IP address with ipconfig by retrieving one from a DHCP server, and also demonstrate how to set a specific … Read More

Download Android OS to run in a Virtual Machine

Aug 27, 2010 - 16 Comments

If you want to check out Android OS, you can download and run a pre-configured Android OS Virtual Appliance installation within VirtualBox. You’ll need a torrent client to download the virtual machine itself, and of course Virtualbox to run it. You can download Android OS VM here and get VirtualBox here, both are free downloads. … Read More

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