Tips & Tricks

Facebook opened Facebook Chat up to third party instant message clients by using the Jabber protocol, which means you can now use Facebook Chat seamlessly from inside iChat. That means if you have a Mac with iChat, you can easily talk to your Facebook friends without being logged into the Facebook site, and instead communicate … Read More

Are you wondering if your Mac is 64-bit architecture or 32-bit architecture? Well you might not be alone. The good news is it’s pretty easy to determine what CPU architecture your Mac is using. You can either focus on the model year of the Mac, or the CPU architecture and processor chip itself. The most … Read More

At its core, the file and folder explorer of OS X known as Finder is essentially an application like any other on the Mac. Accordingly, users can quit the Mac OS X Finder in a few different ways which we’ll cover here, but perhaps the fastest way is to just launch the Terminal app and … Read More

In some situations, you may wish to disable access to the System Preferences on a Mac. Often this is for lab environments or public use workstations, or perhaps for locking down a particular workstation for various reasons. While a common approach is to create a new user account that has limited access to system features … Read More

Spaces is a really nice feature of Mac OS X that lets you place different windows and applications within their own workspace. Dragging a window to a new Space is just a matter of holding onto the window and pulling it towards the end of the screen. You may have noticed that there’s a delay … Read More

Did you know that you can put an iPhone inside a plastic bag and still use the touchscreen? Yes, that’s right, stick your iPhone in an airtight ziplock bag, and you’ll have an instant and amazingly cheap waterproof case for your iPhone. Well, waterproof may be a bit aggressive, and perhaps water resistant is a … Read More

If you need to prevent the Dock icons from changing or being modified on a Mac, you can use defaults command strings to lock down the OS X Dock and prevent any adjustments or changes to how it appears on screen.

You can set Mac OS X to always securely empty the Trash and add a significant layer of security when removing files from the Mac. This is done just by adjusting a preference setting within the Finder, and it’s very easy to configure, here’s what you will want to do to use this option:

This is a very cool feature I had no idea existed but accidentally stumbled across while on a recent flight. If you have an iPhone, you probably know that the earbuds included with it have a button to adjust volume and what not, well guess what, you can control the volume level in iTunes and … Read More

.DS_Store files store folder level metadata information (such as icon placement and background pictures) for Mac OS X to understand, this is fine and dandy and you’re likely to never even notice if you’re a bunch of Macs working together. Unfortunately, these .DS_Store files can be really pesky in a multi-platform network environment, they can … Read More

A colleague of mine is a recent Mac switcher and he was complaining to me that virtual desktops are not included in Mac OS X, the irony is that they are, they just have the name Spaces (coming from a heavy Linux background, I guess the naming convention just threw him off). Virtual Desktops are … Read More

Many Mac users are fond of the Mac startup sound that chimes on system boot, but there are definitely times when booting that you’d rather just be quiet, say a library or coffee shop. Thus, we’re going to show you how to mute that boot up sound on any Mac, MacBook model (Pro, Air), iMac, … Read More

Using the command line tool ‘opensnoop’ you can track any Mac applications (or system process) usage of the file system. This is a very handy tool for administrators and troubleshooting! The simplest way to use it is as follows:

There are times when a user will need to to manually set an IP address in Mac OS X to one which will be compatible with a joined network, either wi-fi or ethernet. Here will cover how to change a Mac IP address to a manual setting, and also how to pick an IP address … Read More

I just came across a really useful QuickLook plugin called SuspiciousPackage that lets you inspect those .pkg package installer files that so many Mac apps and downloads come in. Using this plugin, you can determine if an admin password is required, how many install scripts are in the package file, where the installation locations of … Read More

You can change the Mac OS X login screen background picture using a few different methods. We have covered this tip before but it was based around a few Terminal commands that might not be easy to follow for the average Mac user without command line experience. With that in mind, here are ways to … Read More

You can convert many different image file formats in Mac OS X for free using the included Preview application, there’s no need to download additional tools or do anything overly complex. As of any somewhat modern version of Mac OS X, the Mac Preview app supports the following file types and will convert between any … Read More

If you’re ever wondering how long your Mac has been turned on and running for, you can discover exactly how long the computer has been on since last boot with two different methods available in OS X. Let’s learn a bit more about discovering how long a Mac has been left turned on for, and … Read More