Mac OS

PeerGuardian is a free open source tool that allows you to easily block large numbers of IP addresses in Mac OS X. It automatically maintains an internal IP blacklist to block IP’s deemed unsafe or dubious in nature, and also allows for multiple IP lists with the ability to block entire protocols. Other features include … Read More

Updated 11/27/2018: You can easily use the MacBook, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro in what’s commonly called clamshell mode. Clamshell mode is when the laptop lid is closed but the machine is hooked up to an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse, effectively turning your portable Mac into a desktop. Doing this is easy, we’ll cover … Read More

If you need to convert a video to a file format compatible with iPhone, iPad, or ipOd, the VideoMonkey application for Mac can do the job for you. VideoMonkey is a free tool that lets you convert various video types to iPhone, iPad, iPod, and AppleTV compatible formats.

You can really clean up your Mac Desktop by hiding all the hard disk and drive icons that appear by default on it. This is a settings choice that makes it so when you connect a new drive to the Mac, it won’t show up on the desktop, but it will be visible from a … Read More

Not much is known about Mac OS X 10.7, and many in the Mac community have been operating under the assumption that we’d all get a glimpse into the future of Mac OS at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in June. But that may not be so this time around, at least according to the always … Read More

LSO’s are pesky Flash cookies that can potentially track your activity on the web long after you’ve left the site that set the cookie, and unfortunately there’s no easy way to tell what cookies track where. If you are concerned about this, your best bet is to just delete them completely. We’ve discussed ways to … Read More

“I just got a brand new MacBook, what should I do with my old Mac?” This is a very common question I get, and I typically give one of four answers depending on who’s asking the question. I’ll go through each choice and hopefully they’ll give you some ideas: 1) Setup the old Mac next … Read More

If your Mac has a SuperDrive or Disc drive, you can boot the Mac from any bootable DVD or CD by using a special keyboard shortcut. The bootable disc can be an OS X system restore disc, an OS X installation disc, or even a third party OS disc like Linux.

You can precisely adjust the volume levels on a Mac by holding down the Shift+Option keys while pressing the Volume Up / Down keys. This lets you adjust the sound level by 1/4 of each notch (as opposed to a full notch), offering precise incremental control to how loud or soft output is from the … Read More

Look at the above screenshot. See how the icon fades over repeated creation of the alias? I had never noticed this before. Myself and others get a washed out appearance of the icon, while some will see a sepia tint. Try it out yourself, select anything on your Mac then hit Command+L repeatedly to create … Read More

Prior to Mac OS X 10.5, your Mac’s desktop had rounded screen corners. Now you can bring those smooth rounded corners back with Displaperture (say that ten times fast). The developer jokingly notes “enjoy CRT nostalgia” but I think the rounded corners are actually kind of nice looking with the rest of the Mac OS … Read More

Target Disk Mode is a very handy feature available to use with Mac’s that have Thunderbolt or Firewire ports, and it allows you to use one Mac as an external drive on another host machine. This incredibly useful feature makes troubleshooting, installations, large file transfers, and critical backups extremely easy and very fast. Before beginning, … Read More

Using multiple monitors is an easy way to dramatically increase your productivity, but I’ve often heard complaints that when the secondary monitor needs to have the menubar to make it even more useful. SecondBar solves that problem. This nifty little app just duplicates the menubar across multiple displays, letting you have full access to the … Read More

You can open a folder into a new window (or tab) by holding down the Command key when you double-click on the folder to open it within the Finder of Mac OS X.

The recent 10.6.3 update is said to include a few Airport/wireless updates that improve reliability: * general reliability for wireless connections. * improvements to 802.1X reliability, including closed network connections, and WPA2. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case with the update on my machine, my wireless connection started having problems immediately after the 10.6.3 update. If … Read More

Flash on the Mac is broken Steve Jobs is now famously purported to have called Flash a “CPU hog” and “old technology”, something I’d have to agree with based on my experience. Flash is simply broken on the Mac, there is just no denying it. I don’t know what the problem is and I’m not … Read More

Today is April Fools Day in the USA, which makes the internet as a whole generally pretty ridiculous because there’s so many pranks with fake and silly news stories floating around. Keeping with the goofy spirit, here’s some easy and funny pranks to play on a fellow Mac user:

Dock.prefPane “The document ‘Dock.prefPane’ could not be opened. System Preferences cannot open files in the ‘Mac OS X Preference Pane’ format.” Oh that makes perfect sense, a default preference pane can’t be opened by the System Preferences? What?? Maybe this is an April Fools joke from System Preferences… but a reboot fixed it.