If you’ve ever needed to troubleshoot a network or internet connection, you know how frustrating it can be (particularly when you’re on techsupport with various broadband providers). This quick tip can make the job a little easier on yourself by retrieving all relevant DHCP information, like DHCP server IP, client, subnet mask, router, DNS servers, … Read More

Using your Mac, iPhone, or iPad, and you need to know the meaning of a word, and quick? That’s easy. Just bust open Spotlight with Command + Spacebar on the Mac or iPad, or pulling down from the Home Screen on iPhone, and type in the word you want to get the definition for. One … Read More

I’ve been bored with the standard Mac OS X boot up screen and it’s grey Apple logo, and a few times I have scoured around trying to change it manually to no avail. Today though, I stumbled into a post on my friends blog that makes changing the Mac OS X boot image a snap … Read More

I just found out about Skim and I find it to be wildly useful for personal use, but I can imagine this could be a huge productivity booster for anyone in academia in particular. In short, Skim views any PDF files quickly as expected, but more importantly it allows you to take notes and annotate … Read More

Need to show hidden files on a Mac? This is pretty common if you find yourself needing to access hidden files on your Mac, like an .htaccess file you downloaded, a .bash_profile, a .svn directory, – literally anything preceded with a ‘.’ indicating it is invisible by default – you can run the below command … Read More

A quick way to lock your Mac desktop is to hit Shift-Command-Option-Q to do a fast user log out. This logs the current user out of Mac OS X, which is one way to initiate a login screen when the Mac needs to be used again. Another method is brought to us by inaminit who … Read More

Photo Booth is a really fun app that comes with all macs that have a built in iSight / FaceTime front facing camera. Here are a couple tips that make using Photo Booth on your mac even more enjoyable; the ability to disable the ‘white screen’ flash and the ability to disable the 3 second … Read More

Life is officially easier for front-end web developers, you can now easily test browser compatibility by running Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 concurrently with a great utility called MultiFirefox. Simply install MultiFirefox, then rename one of the Firefox applications (to say, Firefox 3), and upon launch you can select either application version to run. MultiFirefox … Read More

Whether you’re a systems administrator or a web developer, or anything in between, chances are you’ll have to flush your DNS cache every once in a while to get things straightened out server-side, or even just for testing certain configurations. Flushing your DNS cache in Mac OS X is actually really easy, but there are … Read More

Many of us who converted from a Windows PC to a Mac may long for the amazing artistic capabilities allowed within Microsoft Paint. Ok so maybe that’s a bit dramatic, and we all know that Microsoft Paint is pretty crappy in a weirdly lovable way, but that’s also why it was fun. So, if you … Read More

Did you know you can navigate Mac OS with only the keyboard? If you’re an avid typer it can be annoying to have to interrupt your flow, lift your hand(s) from the keyboard, simply to use the mouse and navigate around Mac OS X. Instead of dealing with that frustration, try using exclusively the keyboard … Read More

Have you ever wished you could see the complete file system path in the titlebar of a Finder file system window? Well you can use a secret setting in Mac OS X to display the path in the titlebars of windows. The geekier Mac users amongst us and those familiar with the unix world should … Read More

The appearance of Mac OS X has slowly been drifting away from the old aqua style to a more modern and refined look that closely resembles iTunes. The change in this direction was really made obvious within Leopard with the introduction of the coverflow style finder and the removal of the brushed metal windows. For … Read More

Update: The usage of third party tools for NTFS support is no longer necessary, as Mac OS X includes NTFS read & write support natively, here’s how to enable it. While newer versions of the Mac operating system support NTFS without any third party add-ons, older versions of OS X may still find value in … Read More

People seem to either love or hate the dock in Mac OS X Leopard. Maybe it’s the appearance, the reflection, or something else. If you’re not a fan of the default ‘swoosh’ reflective Dock, there are many options available, and a site has popped up catering to nothing but Leopard Docks. Yes indeed, customized Mac … Read More

If you’re a Mac user and you installed the Adobe CS suite for graphic work or web development, you probably aren’t too interested in Adobe SoundBooth, which is fine because you don’t have to install it. Well, I didn’t install Adobe SoundBooth and I discovered that Adobe still decided to install 5GB of SoundBooth bloated … Read More

Matt Gemmell provides a great list of API’s that have been changed in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. This should be of interest to all Cocoa developers out there, or anyone who’s curious about some of the underpinnings of OS X application development. Take a look: Get rid of your code with Leopard

Welcome to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard! This was my first experience since installing the 10.5 upgrade, let’s hope that was a fluke. I’m super excited for Leopard! – Paul H.