Mac OS

This is a handy Finder tip for those who like to use the Column View of the OS X file manager: you can zoom into the Mac OS X Finder Column View Preview panes. Here’s how this works using either a key modifier or multitouch trackpad:

Your Mac includes a pretty good video player called QuickTime Player, but by default QuickTime won’t play some of the more unique codecs like DivX. You can enable full DivX support by downloading a free QuickTime Player plugin called Perian. Using QuickTime as a Free DiVX Player on the Mac Here’s how to get QuickTime … Read More

You may notice an excessive amount of disk activity and high CPU utilization from a process called “find” that runs randomly in Mac OS X. This process has been a cause of concern by some users because of it’s behavior, but this is not spyware and the process should not cause worry. If you see … Read More

Amazon is offering some huge discounts on the latest version of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac, the Home and Student edition are offered at a full 26% discount at the moment, which saves you $41 on the family pack of three licenses and $31 off the single license. These are by far the cheapest prices … Read More

Civilization 5 for Mac has been released, but before you grab a copy you should check the system requirements to make sure your Mac can run the game. As usual, the better your Mac the better the game will run. Here are the official Mac system requirements:

This is a really cool trick that is not well known; many documents are a bit interactive in the Finder of Mac OS X, without ever having to open the file in another application, or even having to use Quick Look. In this case, a PDF file that is multiple pages long can be flipped … Read More

Knowing your Mac’s IP address is important for setting up a network or sharing files, here’s two different ways to find your IP address in Mac OS X; an easy way through the GUI and a more technical approach with the command line. These methods will be the same whether you are connected via ethernet … Read More

Microsoft has released Windows Phone 7 Connector for Mac, an app that allows any Windows Phone device to sync with a Mac, allowing for copying of movies, music, pictures, podcasts and the other data you’d like to sync to a Windows Phone from OS X. The app is technically in beta but it seems to … Read More

You may have noticed that some Mac models display 3.75GB of RAM in the Activity Monitor when they have 4GB of RAM installed, but why is this? The answer is simple: your Mac has a GPU that uses shared memory. This means that your graphics card borrows some of the systems memory and uses it … Read More

Want to time stamp a conversation or a message in the iChat messaging client? You can do that quickly with a keystroke on the iChat app in Mac OS X.

LittleIpsum is a handy app that will automatically generate latin text (the famous lorem ipsum dolar) directly from the Mac OS X menubar. It’ll generate full latin sentences, words, and paragraphs, and will even wrap the latin text in HTML tags, which is an extra handy feature for web developers. LittleIpsum is a free download, … Read More

Last week I posted a deal to get an 8GB RAM upgrade kit, the price was too good to resist and I went ahead and bought the upgrade myself. Here’s my review and impressions on upgrading a Mac to 8GB of RAM. If you have ADHD and don’t want to read everything below, here’s the … Read More

Transmission has a built-in IP blocklist for what are determined to be “bad peers” and it should be enabled if you use Transmission with any sort of regularity. The blocklist helps to insure a better experience with torrents and also helps to protect your privacy. How to enable the IP Blocklist for downloading torrents in … Read More

If you need to record screen activity on a Mac, you don’t need to download any additional software because the functionality is built directly into Mac OS X with the QuickTime app. Yes, the same QuickTime video player app that lets you watch videos also lets you record the screen of the Mac, and it’s … Read More

I use TextEdit often for simple text editing and note taking, but you can also use TextEdit as an outliner and avoid downloading another application. Yes seriously, the TextEdit that comes on all versions of Mac OS X can function quite well as a basic outline app.

You can fast forward or quickly rewind any video playing in QuickTime Player in Mac OS X (or Windows if you go that direction) by using a trackpad or magic mouse. This is really easy to use but it’s best followed along and tried out yourself than just reading a tutorial, so launch QuickTime Player … Read More

Resetting your PRAM (or NVRAM) is a common troubleshooting technique when a Mac is misbehaving. We’ll cover how to reset PRAM on any Mac, as well as providing some additional information about PRAM and what it is to better help you understand when and why you’d want to reset it.

This is a neat trick that lets you mute your Mac audio and adjust sound output on a Mac from your iPhone. It’s a little involved so it won’t be for the average user, but it is kind of interesting anyway.