Tips & Tricks

You can easily check the MD5 Hash of any file on your Mac, all you need to do is launch the Terminal and type the ‘md5’ command and point it at the file you wish to check the md5 has for. How to Check MD5 Hash of a File on Mac First launch the Terminal … Read More

You can easily reveal the Finder location of any recently used item from the Apple “Recent Items” menu by holding down the Command key as you access the Apple menu of OS X.

Safari is really settling it’s spot as my preferred web browser. Sure, I miss the plugins in Firefox, but it just can’t beat the speed of Safari. You can make your Safari web browsing experience even better by using Command-Option-F to jump to the Search box, nice! [ via Twitter: AppleSpotlight ]

Have you ever received a movie or video file where the audio and video isn’t synced correctly? This is most obvious when you’re watching people talk, where the lip movements don’t match up with the audio track. Thanks to a handy capability in VLC, you can quickly sync audio to video in VLC by using … Read More

Following the CPU usage on my Mac is a mild obsession, and I usually use the Mac terminal command ‘top’ to do this but I noticed that top itself takes up a fair amount of CPU usage (5% or more). I made this complaint to a friend of mine and they told me to try … Read More

You can see a visual preview of a folders contents by enabling a hidden Quick Look feature. This is a rather nice eye candy improvement but I’m not sure that it’s use goes much further beyond that, see the above screenshot and try it out yourself to judge. To enable the Quick Look X-Ray folders, … Read More

You can use QuickLook from inside ‘Open File’ dialogue boxes in any application! Try it out yourself, go to File -> Open File and hit the Spacebar (or whatever hot-key you assigned QuickLook) on an image or text file, and like magic QuickLook opens the file in preview mode so that you can be sure … Read More

Are you a traveler and flying on an airplane with your iPhone? Then this tip is for you! You can selectively enable WiFi access while your iPhone is in Airplane Mode, meaning you can use a flights wireless internet service without the cell phone itself being turned on. This is really handy since many flights … Read More

Quick Look is one of the many Mac OS X features that make my OS choice cemented, I use it so often that I simply can’t live without it, and here’s a tip that I’ve been using a lot lately. If you want to create an instant slideshow of images, simply select multiple images in … Read More

In what may be the boldest claim ever to hit iTunes users, what is said to be the best iTunes equalizer settings have surfaced on the internet. Now that is quite a proclamation obviously, but after seeing the bold statement, I gave the suggested settings a try with the iTunes equalizer, played some music, and … Read More

Stacks are what list items and folders turn into when pulled into the Dock of OS X. There are several views for Stacks, like a grid, or a fan, or a list in modern OS X versions. But with a little secret defaults string, a list view can be enabled in prior releases of OS … Read More

Recently the LAN at my office had been running slower than usual, and I couldn’t pinpoint what was using up all the extra bandwidth. I had a suspicion that P2P traffic was to blame but I just couldn’t see anything obvious on the offending machine. So the question of course, is how do you see … Read More

There are two ways to enable the root super user account in Snow Leopard, the first is probably the quickest. Launch the Terminal and type the following command: sudo passwd root You’ll be asked for the admin password, then you’ll have to set a password for the root account. When you’re finished, the root account … Read More

If you want to quickly change your sound input device on a Mac, by far the fastest and simplest way to do so is to Option-Click the Sound menu icon at the top of your screen. Option-clicking the sound icon menu bar item enables an alternate pull-down menu including a list of clearly labeled and … Read More

Backing up your iPhone text messages is made extremely easy thanks to a freeware utility called Syphone. Since the iPhone has a limited number of text messages it can store at any one time, Syphone allows you to backup all the text messages and read through the archived text messages yourself on your Mac in … Read More

Want to almost instantaneously put a Mac to sleep from your external keyboard? It’s much easier than you’d think, and you don’t need to pull down the  Apple menu to accomplish this task. Instead, to quickly sleep your Mac just hold down Command + Option + Eject for about two seconds, and the computer … Read More

Someone recently sent me a Nero Image File and I had no idea what to do with it, but after some looking around I discovered you can easily convert a Nero image File to ISO format. Apparently the only difference between a Nero Image File and a typical ISO is that Nero adds a 300k … Read More

I love the web, I hate Flash. I know this isn’t always a popular opinion, but for me it causes a lot of problems. It’s a slow bloated resource hog that makes browsing the web painful, loud, and obnoxious. Really the only time I actually want to use it is on video sharing sites like … Read More