Tips & Tricks

Using Mac OS X’s powerful built-in media encoding tools, large AIFF audio files can be quickly and easily converted to compressed high quality M4A audio, ready for use on in iTunes or an iPod, iPhone, or elsewhere.

It’s easy to lose track of all the defaults commands used to perform tweaks to Mac OS X, but with the help of the history command it’s easy to list every defaults write and accompanying defaults delete commands ever used on a Mac. Launch the Terminal to get started. See All Defaults Commands Executed To … Read More

Need to quickly encrypt a file from the command line? With OpenSSL, you can encrypt and decrypt files very easily. For the purpose of this walkthrough, we’ll use des3 encryption, which in simple terms means a complex encryption algorithm is applied three times to each data block, making it difficult to crack through brute force … Read More

If you haven’t set up iCloud and Find My iPhone yet, now is a good time to do so. Follow our guide below on how to get this configured on an iPad, iPhone, iPod, and a Mac, then read on for a story about how a police officer used the application to locate an iPhone … Read More

Pacifist is a powerful Mac OS X utility that gives you full access to package and installer files and their contents, without running the installer itself. Using Pacifist, you can open installers and disk images, find out what is in them, discover what is going to be installed and where, and best of all, extract … Read More

If you have a new computer, you’re going to want to authorize it with iTunes and an Apple ID. Authorizing iTunes does quite a bit, it lets you sync apps, books, music, movies, and other content from the iTunes Store, re-download past apps from the App Store, it enables Home Sharing with iTunes, and also … Read More

The iPhone 4S might not be offered officially for T-Mobile use, but if you buy an unlocked device and set it up properly, you can use the iPhone 4S and Siri on the T-Mobile network without incident. In fact, over a million iPhones are already on the T-Mobile network, and the company is going to … Read More

The Mac uses a ‘secondary click’ in lieu of a right-click, this is largely because Macs have long kept things simple by keeping a single mouse button – or even no buttons at all on the mouse or trackpad. While the two finger tap mimics the right-click action on Mac and is very intuitive for … Read More

If you want to stop OS X Lion’s Resume feature from reopening past windows, you can selectively stop Resume during an app launch by holding down the Shift key. This causes the app to launch with a clean slate and preventing any previously opened windows or documents from restoring, but it doesn’t disable the feature … Read More

Preview in Mac OS X Lion brought with it several improvements and new features like digital signatures, but it also removed some very useful abilities like the file size estimator, Save As, and added the sometimes obnoxious Auto-Save. If you miss the old version of Preview from Snow Leopard, and you either have a Mac … Read More

Do you have a huge folder or ten you don’t want to include in Time Machine backups? Maybe just a few files that aren’t necessary to keep, or that you have a different backup solution for? Maybe you just want to slim down the size of a backup, or speed things up by excluding a … Read More

iPhone serial numbers aren’t just randomly generated, they actually contain some interesting information about the device and it’s history, including what factory it was made in and when, the color of the iPhone, and it’s storage capacity.

If you use a traditional mouse with a scroll wheel in Mac OS X and you need to scroll horizontally, all you need to do is hold down the Shift key and then use the scroll wheel. This shifts the normal scrolling motion to go side-to-side rather than the default up-and-down motion, allowing you to … Read More

Macs have always had the classic boot chime that announces the system has begun startup or has rebooted, but if you’re in a quiet place you don’t always want that sound to play. You may know that you can temporarily mute the Mac by holding down the Mute key during boot or reboot, but if … Read More

The default behavior for most command line tools is to show sizes in bytes, for tiny text files that is fine but when you start working with larger items this becomes difficult to read and interpret. The solutions is fairly simple, pass a “human readable” flag with the command, which will convert bytes to a … Read More

We recently showed you how to password protect files and folders using encrypted Disk Images in Mac OS X, but if you have an external drive you can go a step further. By using encrypted disk partitions, any drive, be it a USB key, flash drive, hard disk, or whatever else, can be set to … Read More

Mac OS X Lion introduced automatic file locking for any file that hasn’t been edited recently. You’ll have noticed this when you try and open an older file and make changes to it, a dialog box asks to duplicate the file or to manually unlock it. This is fine for files that you don’t want … Read More

The default behavior for Spotlight is to start indexing any drive as soon as it’s connected to a Mac, a task that can take a very long time with larger volumes. The problem is that for larger external backup drives and Time Machine volumes, you don’t necessarily want it indexed by Spotlight. This is particularly … Read More