Mac OS

If you’re like me you tend to have 10,000 windows open at once on your Mac while you work and multitask, thanks to Expose this is not a particular problem in Mac OS X. But, there comes a time when you don’t want to use Expose to either clear the screen or select a specific … Read More

If you really want to lock down your Mac from other users, you can set an Open Firmware (PPC) or EFI (Intel) password that will require a firmware level password immediately upon system boot, prior to Mac OS X being loaded. This is somewhat of an advanced trick and if you accidentally mess something up … Read More

The Mac Rumor mill is churning out all sorts of juicy tidbits on Apple’s latest operating system update, known as Snow Leopard. MacRumors has said that 10.6 build 10a432 has gone Golden Master, and Daring Fireball has a short cryptic post saying that 10.6 Snow Leopard will be available as early as Friday, August 28! … Read More

GeekTool is a fun system preference utility for Mac that allows you to really customize your desktop. You can dump log files, system status messages, graphs, CPU usage, and all sorts of things right onto your desktop background. Basically if you can run it in the Terminal, you can have it appear on your desktop. … Read More

The Mac menu bar contains icons for things like the status indicators and toggles of various apps, including a clock, date, time, battery, wi-fi status, sound and volume levels, displays, Time Machine backup status, user account, Spotlight, a Notifications toggle, and much more. There’s a lot of data and status details in those menu bar … Read More

Here’s something that’s bound to be popular. The University of Washington is offering a Certificate program in iPhone Development, the coursework covers Cocoa too but there’s plenty of Cocoa development programs out there so it’s really the iPhone development that makes it stand out. For now the program is only offered at the University of … Read More

I’ve been on a bit of a retro and minimalism kick lately, preferring simplified apps that take me back to the good old days of BBS’s and 2400bps modems (ok maybe not the modems), and when I saw that GLTerminal has a new release I was pleased since I can finally run it in a … Read More

Got an older version of Mac OS X that you want to use Gmail with? While newer versions of Mac OS and Mac OS X allow for simple integration of using Google accounts with a Mac, older versions of Mac OS X don’t necessarily have these capabilities. But not to worry, you can still use … Read More

This is a particularly handy trick for when you have limited screen real estate and want to fit more of a windows display on screen. A perfect example of this are the Hackintosh owners out there that are working with small netbook screen resolutions and some windows just don’t display properly, or won’t even fit … Read More

Paintbrush is a Microsoft Paint clone of sorts for Mac OS X, it’s an absolute joy to use in it’s simplicity and we are pleased that a new version is available with even more MS Paint type functions for your Mac. And we mean it, this thing is awesome at simple pixel drawing and is … Read More

In some trickier network situations, your computer may be assigned an IP but need an entirely different IP address to access certain network resources. You might be wondering, how on earth do you have two IP addresses at once on the same Mac? The answer; Create an IP Alias! Using an IP alias allows your … Read More

I’ve been bored with the standard Mac OS X boot up screen and it’s grey Apple logo, and a few times I have scoured around trying to change it manually to no avail. Today though, I stumbled into a post on my friends blog that makes changing the Mac OS X boot image a snap … Read More

I just found out about Skim and I find it to be wildly useful for personal use, but I can imagine this could be a huge productivity booster for anyone in academia in particular. In short, Skim views any PDF files quickly as expected, but more importantly it allows you to take notes and annotate … Read More

Creating your own cheap Mac Hackintosh out of a PC Netbook is pretty popular right now, so I compiled a list of various how-to guides mostly for myself but figured I would share it with our readers as well. The guides rank from reasonably easy (Dell Mini 9) to an arduous hack, and it’s technically … Read More

Have you ever wanted to have your Mac require a password on waking from system sleep, but not ask for a password when the screensaver is on or the screen was locked? Well, me neither, but someone out there might and it’s kind of a nifty customization tip that has some valid uses in some … Read More

I really enjoy videochatting with friends and family using iChat, so I was pretty frustrated when seemingly out of nowhere iChat video started freezing completely after a video chat session was initiated. I searched around a bit and noticed other people having the same problem and symptoms – iChat video freezes but iChat audio still … Read More

Mac users are largely immune to the world of virus and trojans, but it’s not uncommon for you to be a Mac user in a LAN sea of Windows PC’s. The Conficker Virus is Windows only but it’s garnering a lot of attention, so if you’re on a Windows LAN at home, work, or school, … Read More

It’s very easy to mirror an entire web site on your local machine thanks to the terminal command wget, this tutorial will show you how to do it via the command line. wget is available for Mac OS X, Linux, Unix, and many other popular operating system platforms, thus this is universally applicable assuming you … Read More