Most new consumer Macs come with a built-in iSight / FaceTime camera which can be used for all sorts of fun, ranging from live video chatting in FaceTime, Skype, and iChat, to horsing around in Photo Booth, to using third party apps like Gawker to capture time lapse photography of whatever is going on. That … Read More

Booting Mac OS X as usual shows the Apple logo and eventually you’ll wind up at a login screen or desktop, that’s attractive and all, but some users would prefer to see what’s going on behind the scenes. That’s what Verbose Boot Mode does, it shows you what is really happening during system startup on … Read More

Need to create an ultra-fast RAM disk in Mac OS X? We’ve got you covered with a command line trick that will generate a RAM disk of any size of your choosing. These instructions have been updated to support all versions of OS X, from modern releases to older ones too, so no matter what … Read More

If you’re tired of waking up every morning to your old fashioned alarm clock, Awaken may be the app for you. Awaken turns your Mac into a multifunction alarm clock, capable of waking up your Mac (assuming its sleeping) and initiating a user selected alarm of either a sound effect or song selected from your … Read More

Getting disk usage information on a Mac is often gathered by selecting a file, directory, or hard drive and hitting Command-I for Get Info, then appears a nice GUI interface with extended information about the selected object including disk usage. Command-I isn’t the only way to get disk info however, with the command line there … Read More

Need to quickly see where you are in the Finder by showing the current windows path on a Mac? There are a few ways to do this in Mac OS X, for example you can use a defaults command to show the full path in Finder window title, and we’ll show you another couple of … Read More

You’ve probably noticed by now that we frequently rave about Spotlight, an invaluable tool and one of the greatest features of Mac OS X. Although it’s main intention is to be an instant search utility for documents, pictures, music, emails, whatever, it also works wonders as a super quick application launcher (often I will use … Read More

Dashboard is the kind of thing you either love or hate, using the widgets constantly or not at all. How much use you get out of Dashboard will probably determine if you want the feature to stick around in Mac OS X or not. As regular readers may recall, we have discussed how unused Dashboard … Read More

Have you ever watched an online video tutorial, or record a screencast of what you’re doing on your Mac screen? Ever wondered how to create one of these yourself? Of course getting the right software is part of the mix, but many users don’t even know where to begin. Fortunately, there are many options available … Read More

Ever wondered how you can get image thumbnails to show up in the Finder of the Mac? You’re not alone, and a good question from one of our readers came in on this very topic. A recent switcher to the Mac, Carol Kavanaugh writes: “I got a Mac a few months ago and love it … Read More

Lingon is one of the more useful apps for advanced Mac users, sysadmins, and network administrators out there. Essentially lingon functions as an easy tool to manage launchd without tinkering with launchd manually from the Terminal, providing a much appreciated GUI to configure the launchd system daemon, which allows you to set schedules for applications … Read More

Chances are if you have a new consumer Mac it has a built-in iSight camera, just waiting to be used. If you’ve ever thought about setting up a webcam but figured it would be too difficult, fear not, because it doesn’t get any easier than this. Cam2Web is a tiny free no frills app that … Read More

This is a list of eleven startup key commands that every Intel Mac owner should make note of. From reseting your NVRAM, starting up in safe mode, booting your Mac from a CD or DVD, switching bootable volumes and drives on system start, to forcing media to eject from a superdrive, this list has you … Read More

Copy and Paste are absolute necessities for virtually all computer users, and if you find yourself working in the command line frequently, you’ll want to know how to manipulate the clipboard of Mac OS X directly from the terminal prompt. That’s what the Mac commands pbcopy and pbpaste are for, and as you may have … Read More

An incredibly useful feature that is built right into Mac OS X is the ability to create an archive instantly of anything, be it a single document, a folder, or multiple files. Creating archives is great for may reasons, they save space, and it’s a polite and easier way to send a group of files … Read More

If you’re new to the Mac, you’ll probably appreciate this handy tip; Apple has released a handy printable cheat sheet for Mac users to fill out with relevant system information, which can be very useful in the event of any trouble, for support, and for other reasons too.

Mac OS X is wonderfully stable as an operating system, and although most software is written well, not all code is created equal. Crashing is just a fact of computing life and it frustrates us all, so it’s helpful to be able to pinpoint the cause of the problem. While the causes of some crashes … Read More

Bash is the default shell in Mac OS X and has been since 10.3, it’s generally considered to be the de facto shell standard in the unix world. That said, there are some people who prefer to use the tcsh shell, or perhaps you just want to break away from the norm. Changing the default … Read More