DaisyDisk is a beautiful application that gives you an excellent breakdown of disk space usage on your Mac’s hard drives. Using DaisyDisk is about as easy as it gets, you select the drive you want to scan, let it run, and wait a minute or two until a great looking interactive graphic is presented to … Read More

If you use the command line frequently, chances are you may have some bad command line habits. IBM’s DeveloperWorks site has posted 10 good UNIX usage habit tips, some of them are just pretty handy tricks in general and if you’re new to the Mac OS X Terminal, you’ll probably learn something since practically all … Read More

I came across an excellent alternative to the command line ‘ping’ and ‘traceroute’ tools recently. It’s a utility called mtr, which combines the statistics and prints their functionality into a single network diagnostic tool, reporting details on the network connection between your host machine and whatever the destination host is, determining the address of each … Read More

The Mac firewall has long been based on IPFW, a robust and strong software firewall that comes form the unix world. But managing IPFW usually requires digging around in the command line, so as I was recently looking around for a Mac OS X GUI to IPFW, I came across WaterRoof. If you’re looking for … Read More

I use Synergy to share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple Mac’s and PC’s. Recently I added a new machine to the setup and was frustrated to discover that the Synergy client on the new machine just refused to connect to the server, without any attempts I would immediately get the following error message: … Read More

Long ago in a time far far away, OK really it was just prior to Mac OS X, there used to be a Trash icon on the Desktop. Yup, earlier versions of Mac OS didn’t have a Dock at all, and the Trash was just another item on the desktop, sitting in the bottom right … Read More

If you want to see the difference between two folders on a Mac, or compare two directories contents, you can easily do so with the help of the powerful diff command. This tutorial will show you how to compare two directories, and the contents of those directories, by using the Terminal. This command line approach … Read More

If you’re trying to tweak a wireless router to get the best signal, being able to continuously measure the wi-fi signal strength while you toy with the antennas, placement, and whatever else on the network is really valuable. While most users are best served by using the Mac Wi-Fi Diagnostics app to monitor signal strength … Read More

If you’re having Synergy ‘cannot read configuration’ error problems, try the following: * Get the latest version of Synergy KM from SourceForge * Be sure the clients have the latest version of Synergy installed too (it’s pretty old for Windows clients, but works) * Create a new ‘Location’ and re-add your server, screens, clients, in … Read More

When you have extended information displayed under icons with the Finder from the ‘show item info’ Finder preference, you’ll occasionally run into an annoying truncation with used and available disk space. While one easy solution to this is to expand the spacing to show the full file names of Mac desktop items (the recommended method), … Read More

The networksetup utility allows you to join any available network, whether or not it is a router connected through Ethernet, a wi-fi router that is or is not broadcasting an SSID, and whether or not it has any password encryption required. Since most networking is done with wireless communications these days, we’ll focus on joining … Read More

MagicPrefs is an amazing free utility for Mac that dramatically improves the functionality of your multi-touch Magic Mouse. Other than allowing for increased control over the touch sensitivity and tracking speed, you get practically full access to the multi-touch capabilities of the device. With MagicPrefs you can bind various gestures, swipes, pinches, and taps to … Read More

Want to re-run the last executed command? Or what about re-running the last used command but running it as root? You can do both! Ever typed a nice fancy string command into the terminal and been frustrated to discover that you need to run it all over again? Or perhaps you discovered that the aforementioned … Read More

If you want to discover the last time a specific command was used without actually executing it, follow this format at the command line: !sudo:p The above example will print back the last usage of the ‘sudo’ command without actually executing it, which is very useful in some situations (like the situation below, where the … Read More

“The operation can’t be completed because an unexpected error occured (error code 0).” You’re likely to see this error when you are attempting to copy files to an external hard drive that is formatted as FAT. FAT32 is a Windows file system that can be read and written to by Mac OS X. The problem … Read More

The latest version of VirtualBox allows you to create a Mac OS X guest host, providing the ability to virtualize different versions of Mac OS X. This is the first official support for Mac OS X running as a VM from VirtualBox, and is part of the latest beta.

Upgrading to Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.3 was a painless procedure until I tried to access some SMB mounts… suddenly I had no write access to my samba drives! I was presented with this error message: The operation can’t be completed because you don’t have permission to access some of the items. Thankfully there’s … Read More

Gas Mask is a simple hosts file manager that sits in your menubar and allows you to easily edit and switch between multiple hosts files. With support for syntax highlighting, Growl, and hotkey hosts switching, it’s one of the quickest and easiest ways to deal with multiple hosts files on a Mac. Gas Mask is … Read More