Mac OS

“You are opening the application ScreenSaverEngine.app for the first time. Are you sure you want to open this application?” My Mac’s screensaver was officially not working. That’s the odd message I got out of the blue today, which is rather peculiar since ScreenSaverEngine.app has been activated many times considering it is what drives the screensaver … Read More

Have you ever noticed the Bluetooth menu bar icon on a Mac start flashing or blinking? The blinking Bluetooth icon on the Mac means one thing; the connected Bluetooth device has a low battery.

You can access and type foreign currency symbols in Mac OS X in much the same way that other special characters are typed out. That means you’ll use a keystroke combined with the “Option” key to type the respective character. A few common currency symbols are available on default keyboard layouts, including the $ dollar, … Read More

If you want to change the wallpaper that sits in the background of your Mac’s login screen in OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard, from the Finder hit Command+Shift+G to open the ‘Go to Folder’ screen. Type /System/Library/CoreServices/ and click ‘Go’:

Like many of us, I’m often busy and out of the home, leaving my Mac on a desk. I regularly use my home machine as a local fileserver though and other people in the household are dependent on it being up and running. Now here’s the situation I’m presented with: I leave town earlier than … Read More

You can easily batch resize groups of images within Mac OS X by using the included Preview app, that is, taking a group of pictures set at one or various resolutions, and collectively resize them all together in a group to a new resolution, outputting either as the same file or as a new file … Read More

Finder, the Mac OS X file system browser, is ultimately just a nice looking GUI application, and it can be interacted with fluidly from the command line. This means you can jump to directories and open literally any Mac Finder window directly from the terminal by using a simple command string based upon the ‘open’ … Read More

You can reset a lost Administrator (the original account you created) password in Mac OS X by utilizing a Mac OS X installation DVD, here’s how:

Ever wondered how to type the temperature / degree symbol in Mac OS? Typing the degrees symbol on a Mac, or any computer, may seem like a giant mystery since it’s not immediately visible on any keyboard, but it’s really quite easy if you know the proper keyboard shortcut. There are actually two keyboard shortcuts … Read More

Secrets is a pretty nifty system preference panel add-on that lets you access all sorts of hidden ‘secret’ preference options. Instead of typing a bunch of default write commands you can basically just click checkboxes or change dropdown options to easily enable some pretty cool stuff. It’s pretty comprehensive, with a bunch of options for … Read More

Knowing how to clear cookies is pretty important for any number of reasons, be it for personal preference or troubleshooting issues with websites. You may be wondering how to remove cookies on a Mac running the Safari web browser, and that is exactly what we’ll show how to do. There are actually a few ways … Read More

One of the quickest ways to get your external IP address in Mac OS X or unix is by launching the Terminal and typing one of the following commands with curl. To be perfectly clear here, we’re looking for the external public IP address of the hardware in use, this is what broadcasts to the … Read More

With a little bit of hacking and modification, you can add up to 24 additional visual effects to iChat video conferencing and Photo Booth! A reader pointed out this very cool Mac OS X mod and if you like to play around with Photo Booth or iChat effects it’s worth the effort, since it gives … Read More

You can quickly clear all of the text from the Spotlight menu without closing the window by hitting Command-Delete, I discovered the use in this after my cat walked across my keyboard entering in a lengthy mishmash string of characters. Try it out!

You can schedule your Mac to sleep, wake, shutdown, or boot up at any time or any regular interval using the Mac System Preference ‘Energy Saver’ schedule settings. This provides for an excellent option for work Macs that you want to be awake or boot when you arrive in the morning, and to sleep or … Read More

The Mac OS X Preview application has a a few little known image adjustment features for rapid image orientation flipping or rotation that are quite powerful, and if you’re looking to make quick adjustments to rotate a picture or mirror vertically or horizontally the general orientation of any image file, a great Mac app to … Read More

You can convert m4a music files to mp3 format very easily by using the same program that creates m4a files… iTunes! Yes that’s right, iTunes can double as a music file conversion program, and in this case it’s one of the easiest ways known to convert m4a to mp3 that doesn’t require any additional software … Read More

Want to navigate within a websites directory structure? If you use Safari then you can Command+Click the Title of any website window in Safari and you can pull up a nice navigable drop-down list of the websites directory paths. This is really handy if you’re deep in some archive or if you’re looking at an … Read More