Mac OS

The MacBook Air just might be the greatest laptop ever made, it’s extremely light, powerful, has an amazing battery life, and somehow packs all of that into an affordable package. To get the absolute most out of this wonderful Mac, you’ll want to run through these four (well, technically six) essential tips, which cover what … Read More

The Mail app bundled with Mac OS X is an excellent email client, but if you have a giant mailbox that has been in use for a long time you may encounter some peculiar problems with sluggishness, message content issues, and searching irregularities. Usually these issues are of distinct types; search errors where some messages … Read More

The excellent curl and wget tools provide for a simple way to test the speed of an internet connection directly from the command line. Curl is bundled with most unix variations, but Mac users who want to use the wget trick will first need to grab wget for OS X in order for this to … Read More

Voice Memos is that ever-useful app that lets you make a quick recording of a voice note, memo, record a conversation, or just generally replace one of those mini-tape recorders that many people use for recording notes while they’re working or driving. While there’s not much wrong with maintaining tons and tons of voice memos … Read More

If you plan on selling a Mac or transferring it to a new owner, you will want to take a few very important steps beforehand rather than just handing the machine off as is. We will walk through exactly what you should do before ever changing ownership of a Mac, including backing up all of … Read More

All modern Macs are pretty fast these days, but sometimes we all need a performance boost to get things done as efficiently as possible. That’s what these simple tricks are aimed at, they will help you speed up any Mac and get the absolute best performance out of the Mac OS X machine by having … Read More

The fourth developer preview of OS X Mavericks has been released for registered developers. The update can be installed directly from the App Store by way of Software Update, and weighs in around 1.5GB, depending on the Mac being installed on.

In an unusual and fairly rare situation, the Mac cursor can randomly disappear from OS X. More accurately, the cursor itself becomes invisible, because you can still click around on the screen but without being able to see what the mouse or trackpad is focused on. This seems to happen out of the blue, and … Read More

Tor is a free anonymity network that aims to conceal a users location and browser usage from snoopers, in addition to allowing access to websites that are otherwise blocked or filtered out through firewalls. The official description of the Tor browser and network is described as follows: The Tor software protects you by bouncing your … Read More

Need to quickly get your external IP address from the command line for SSH or otherwise? No sweat, you can use either the curl command or dig to extract the information quickly from a variety of sources. We’ll focus on two different options that have proven to be reliable over time, the first is quite … Read More

Talking calculators are very useful, whether for accessibility reasons or just for entering a lot of numbers that you want to be sure are correct by hearing the auditory response. Thanks to the Mac’s excellent text-to-speech abilities and a simple settings adjustment, you can transform the bundled Calculator app in Mac OS X into a … Read More

Shuttle is an excellent little Mac app for those who frequently use SSH to connect to remote or local servers. It’s functionality is very simple: you gain a little SSH menu bar item that pulls down to give you super-quick access to whichever servers you have configured. Selecting one of the servers immediately launches terminal … Read More

OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 3 has been released for Mac developers. Those running OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 2 can find the new update available in the Mac App Store, accessible via the Software Update menu. If you are not yet running Mavericks but have a registered developer account, the full installer can be … Read More

You can switch hard drives that Time Machine backs up to easily, but to properly migrate from one Time Machine backup drive to another and preserve the existing archived backups, you’ll want to take a few additional steps to insure that your existing prior backups are safely moved over as well. This is an easy … Read More

Standby mode is a power saving feature that automatically hibernates a Mac after it has been in sleep mode for a while, which it does to further decrease drain on battery. When a Mac using FileVault encryption is placed into standby mode, a FileVault key (yes, this key is encrypted) is stored in EFI (firmware) … Read More

Some Mac users overlook a feature in macOS / Mac OS X that allows them to attach an Apple ID to their actual user account, not just to iCloud and the App Store. It only takes a moment to set, and it provides for an incredibly simple password recovery option at the login and boot … Read More

Different Mac models use different types of RAM, and each also supports a different maximum level of RAM. Unless you spend a lot of time upgrading and repairing Macs yourself, you probably don’t know these exact details off the top of your head, and that’s just fine because the information can be retrieved directly from … Read More

Apple has issued a small security update for all major versions of Mac OS X still in use, including OS X Mountain Lion, Snow Leopard, and Lion. Release notes are extremely brief, noting simply that the update is “recommended for all users and improves the security of OS X.” There is some indication that the … Read More