Mac OS

Stacks are what list items and folders turn into when pulled into the Dock of OS X. There are several views for Stacks, like a grid, or a fan, or a list in modern OS X versions. But with a little secret defaults string, a list view can be enabled in prior releases of OS … Read More

The Google Chrome for Mac is still very much in Beta, but the latest Dev Channel build is actually pretty decent for web browsing, while other features are still lacking, but overall it’s a great start and a cool new web browser. One of the biggest advantages to Google Chrome is that each Browser Window … Read More

There are two ways to enable the root super user account in Snow Leopard, the first is probably the quickest. Launch the Terminal and type the following command: sudo passwd root You’ll be asked for the admin password, then you’ll have to set a password for the root account. When you’re finished, the root account … Read More

If you want to quickly change your sound input device on a Mac, by far the fastest and simplest way to do so is to Option-Click the Sound menu icon at the top of your screen. Option-clicking the sound icon menu bar item enables an alternate pull-down menu including a list of clearly labeled and … Read More

In a move that has surprised many, Apple has decided to open source their multiprocessor task management technology known as Grand Central Dispatch. This comes as a surprise because the technology has barely gotten into the hands of customers through 10.6 Snow Leopard, and it’s widely considered to be a competitive advantage. So why would … Read More

Want to almost instantaneously put a Mac to sleep from your external keyboard? It’s much easier than you’d think, and you don’t need to pull down the  Apple menu to accomplish this task. Instead, to quickly sleep your Mac just hold down Command + Option + Eject for about two seconds, and the computer … Read More

Ever wondered what shell you are using at the command line? It’s not unusual to want or need to know which shell is running, and though you may hear this question many times, the answer could be different for every user, thus the easiest thing to do is to issue a terminal command which determines … Read More

Do you need to access and mount an SMB share from the command line on a Mac? You may be used to connecting to Windows PC from the Mac networking features to mount a Windows share on Mac, but you can also connect to Samba shares from the Terminal too. This article will show several … Read More

Want to hide all desktop icons on a Mac? Desktop icon clutter can really impact workflow by overwhelming you with files and just too much stuff to look at. Inevitably, it can be hard to avoid since a lot of apps download things to the Desktop by default, we save things there, screenshots go there, … Read More

I have a million different genres in iTunes and not nearly enough album art, which is fine and dandy until you put iTunes 9 into genre ‘grid’ view and then suddenly you have a bunch of boring looking music note icons. Apparently how iTunes sets genre art is by looking for album art set in … Read More

Here’s something you don’t see everyday, Safari in an epic freakout and taxing 7,909.9% CPU usage. WTF?

MouseOver popups, self-starting blasting audio, auto-refreshing webpages, random sound effects, obnoxious flash ads, resizing of your browser window… oh the web is filled with all sorts of things that are sure to annoy web browsers a world over. Lifehacker came up witha great list of fixes that you can implement in Firefox to reduce the … Read More

Though the Mac is fairly error free and tends to run much more stable than some of the competitors out there, many of us will find a bug or two in day to day usage anyway. Sometimes the bugs are minor, sometimes they’re fairly major and can dramatically impact how Mac OS X or iOS … Read More

For anyone looking to have a great desktop Mac without paying a small fortune, creating a Hackintosh is becoming an ever-popular solution, and building a Hackintosh just got even easier. Assuming you have the supported hardware, this awesome tool from LifeHacker makes creating a Hackintosh Mac even easier by eliminating some of the more complex … Read More

We know that Snow Leopard added some features to Mac OS X, but what about the things that Snow Leopard took away? Waffle has an updated list of things known to be removed from Snow Leopard, and there’s some interesting stuff on there. Here’s what I found to be most interesting (and surprising) that was … Read More

Bonjour is a great service that runs in the background of your Mac to auto-discover network resources, that is, it’s great until mDNSResponder goes haywire. I was recently in a very creatively crafted network environment that made Bonjour absolutely freak out and tax my CPU with a million processes, so I opted to just disable … Read More

Squid is a web caching proxy that is wildly useful for those of us on slower internet connections or anyone that has reduced bandwidth availability, it reduces bandwidth by caching and reusing frequently accessed web pages and works with http and https. Squid has been particularly useful to me on business visits to places where … Read More

Need a PDF Editor for Mac? I did too, and this is what I learned. Adobe Acrobat Pro is great software with some killer features, but it’s expensive. Acrobat is hard to beat in it’s functionality, but if all you’re looking to do is make small changes and edits to PDF files, spending $350 for … Read More