Mac OS

Whether you just like peace and quiet or you work in an environment that requires audio input and output to be disabled on a computer for security purposes, it’s fairly easy to accomplish in Mac OS X. We’ll cover how to handle turning off audio for both situations, the first uses mute for basic audio … Read More

The Bzip archive format is generally more effective at compressing than zip and gzip, and while the default Archive Utility or the excellent all-purpose Unarchiver tool will handle unarchiving bzip2 files with ease, you will have to venture to the command line if you want to create a bzip archive in Mac OS X. Creating … Read More

With Desktop switching keyboard shortcuts set, you can instantly move windows between different desktops without going through Mission Control of Mac OS X at all. The only requirement is to configure the control keys for switching desktops on the Mac, and you must have multiple desktops or else you won’t have anything to switch the … Read More

The Unarchiver is a one stop shop for extracting and uncompressing virtually any archive file that you’ll come across on a Mac. Easily managing the usual archive formats of zip, sit, gzip, bin, tar, hqx, it’ll also easily tear through less common archive types including rar files, 7z, bzip2, cab, sea, exe, rpm, cpgz, and … Read More

We’ve shown you how to disable the internal display of a Mac laptop running OS X Lion or later with sleep or with the help of a command line trick, those are the recommended approaches but not everyone has gotten them to work on their Macs. An alternate and peculiar option left in our comments … Read More

Setting up passwordless SSH logins is a great way to speed up connections to regularly accessed remote Macs and unix boxes. Because not all versions of Mac OS X include the ssh-copy-id command, you may have to use cat or scp to copy over your ssh key. This is how to set everything up, it … Read More

It’s a good idea to check the hard drive health of a Mac as part of a periodic maintenance routine. Doing this is extremely easy with Disk Utility, and we’ll cover exactly how to verify hard disks, how to repair them, and what to do if you encounter any issues or errors in the process. … Read More

There are so many keyboard shortcuts throughout Mac OS X and it’s myriad of third party apps that it’s easy to forget them or get lost trying to memorize the sea of keystrokes for each app. This is where CheatSheet will make your life easier, it’s a tiny free application that sits in the background … Read More

You can create an image of a Mac hard drive with the help of a free third party utility called Carbon Copy Cloner. The resulting disk image will be saved as the familiar .dmg format, which has a number of potential uses ranging from creating a drive clone for backup purposes, restoring the image elsewhere … Read More

If you want color icons back in your OS X Finder window sidebar but don’t want to deal with the existing procedures of manually installing SIMBL and the other components, grab SideEffects instead. SideEffects is a simple package that includes the three necessary components to add color back to Finder sidebar icons; SIMBL, ColorfulSidebar, and … Read More

Want to have wget on Mac without Homebrew or MacPorts for whatever reason? You can do that by building wget from source at the command line. The command line tool wget lets you retrieve a group of files from FTP and HTTP protocols, it’s a very useful utility for web developers and powerusers to have … Read More

Platypus is an excellent utility that lets you turn virtually any script into a self-contained Mac OS X application. Free and remarkably simple to use, Platypus will support just about any shell script, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Tcl, AppleScript, Expect, and even other scripting languages.

Virtually everyone knows you can click the yellow pill button in the upper left corner of a window to minimize a window in Mac OS X, but there are actually a few other ways minimize windows faster than that. The first is my preferred method which is a quick keystroke, and the other lets you … Read More

Troubleshooting computer problems is never particularly fun, and with so many potential third party add-ons, plugins, extensions, scripts, and whatever else is buried into OS X, how are you supposed to find everything to help determine what’s causing an issue? You need Consultant’s Canary, because whether you’re troubleshooting your own Mac or someone else’s, it’s … Read More

Ever wish you had a system wide equalizer to adjust all audio output in Mac OS X and not just in iTunes? Maybe you want to adjust the way all audio output sounds or maybe you just want to boost the output volume of the built-in Mac speakers. We’ll show you how to do both … Read More

Photo Stream is an excellent iCloud feature that automatically syncs all pictures taken on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch to one anothers Photo libraries, and it will even sync with Mac OS X through the iPhoto app. Not everyone uses iPhoto to manage pictures though, and if you just want quick access to those … Read More

There are tons of interesting pictures posted to Instagram all the time, but unless you’re using the iPhone apps, the website, or Android app you can’t really see what’s going on there. That’s where Screenstagram comes in, it creates an attractive screen saver using an array of images pulled from either public photos or your … Read More

A recent tip covered how to announce when a command line task finished by using OS X’s text-to-speech abilities. The obvious downside to that method is the sound makes it less useful to those who are using Macs in quiet environments like offices, schools, or libraries. An alternate solution is to use growlnotify to create … Read More