Mac OS

Ever had a window get lost partially off screen in Mac OS X, where the window titlebars and close/minimize/maximize buttons are no longer accessible? Typically this looks something like the following screen shot: There a variety of potential causes and even random situations for windows to move offscreen like that, but it often happens with … Read More

Despite Time Machine being a remarkable solution for easy backups, a peculiar issue can arise for some Time Machine users that causes the Mac OS X Trash to not be able to empty when the backup drive is connected to the Mac. This will usually manifest itself as the following; a user attempts to empty … Read More

Having reliable and regular backups of your Mac should be considered a mandatory part of maintenance, and for most users Time Machine provides that with easy and peace of mind. But what if you want multiple backups stored in different places, like a backup at home, and another at the office, or perhaps a backup … Read More

Each file type has a default application that is associated with it on the Mac. This means that when you double-click a file from the Finder it will open a specific application, for example on a fresh Mac OS installation, all image files (png, jpg, gif, pdf, etc) will default to opening in Preview, and … Read More

Apple has released OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 5 for registered Mac devs. The release includes bug fixes and feature enhancements, and all users who are running Developer Preview 4 are recommended to update to the newest version.

Using Disk Utility through Recovery Mode is the preferred and primary tool for repairing disks on the Mac platform, but if Disk Utility is either unavailable or not able to repair a drive, then Single User Mode and the command line tool fsck should be your next choice.

Time Machine is the simplest way to keep a reliable backup of everything on your Mac, but sometimes we don’t want every file or folder saved, or maybe you just no longer need a given directory to be preserved by external backups. In these situations, removing backups of any specific file or folders, or even … Read More

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