Tips & Tricks

In Mac OS X, a users short name is what their home folder is named after and it’s also the shorthand name for logging into the Mac either from a lock screen or a network connection with remote access through SSH and SFTP. There’s various reasons that you’d want to change the user short name, … Read More

You can pause any active download from the Mac App Store by right-clicking on the apps icon in the Dock and selecting “Pause” from the menu. Resuming the download is just a matter of right-clicking again and selecting Unpause.

So you already setup your Apple TV2 to run XBMC, and now you’re bored with it. Why not turn the ATV2 into a webserver like the guys at MacMiniVault did? Yes this link opens a web page served from an Apple TV2. You can do this yourself with your own Apple TV without too much … Read More

Migrating from a Windows PC to Mac just got a whole lot easier thanks to an app called Parallels Transporter. It’s actually two apps, one client that runs on the Windows PC and the other runs in Mac OS X, install both and they’ll talk to each other and do almost the entire file migration … Read More

The default setting in Mac OS X Finder is to display no file information, but you can easily set the Finder, Windows, and the Desktop to show image dimensions through a setting in View Options. Basically, you’ll see the complete resolution of a picture highlighted in blue underneath the file name, hugely useful for Mac … Read More

You can increase and decrease the text size of artist and song info when you’re in iTunes Cover Flow view, all you need to do is right-click on the Cover Flow view and select “Use Larger Text” or smaller, if that’s your preference. The text size is fairly adjustable, but annoyingly, you have to repeat … Read More

If you travel with a laptop often, do yourself a favor and install Prey, it’s free theft tracking and recovery software that really works. Prey is basically a tiny daemon that runs in the background on your Mac (or Windows or Linux PC) that does nothing until it receives a signal indicating the hardware is … Read More

You can access two unusual debugging options in the Mac OS X System Preferences for Desktops and Screen Savers panel by using a keystroke while accessing the panel.

Knowing how to clear browser history, cookies, and cache are absolutely essential for all web users, and this is no different for anyone using an iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. This is particularly true when you’re using a someone elses hardware or when you’re testing out iterative changes on websites. Keeping this in mind, here’s … Read More

The top command is a great way to get a quick overview of how your system is performing and how apps are using your resources. If you are unfamiliar with it, it’s basically a command line task manager like Activity Monitor and it shows processor usage, memory usage, disk activity, load average, and other helpful … Read More

Just like you can drag your own folders into the sidebar, you can also drags apps into Finder window sidebars for quick access. Once apps are in the sidebar, if you click on them they will launch, which makes desktop windows serve a dual purpose as both file manager and a quick application launcher.

Don’t want to dig out the Terminal or Activity Monitor to relaunch the Finder? No sweat. Hold down Option and then right-click on the Finder icon in the Dock. You’ll now see an otherwise hidden “Relaunch” option, select it and Finder will quit and relaunch. It only takes a few seconds to reload. Relaunching the … Read More

Whether you’re just trying to update iOS firmware, downgrade, or jailbreak, it’s not terribly unusual for an iPhone to get stuck in Recovery Mode. You’ll know you’re stuck because the phone displays the classic USB to iTunes logo, and iTunes gives you the Recovery Mode detected message. Sometimes you can escape just by hardbooting the … Read More

If you’re video chatting at night or in an area with limited lighting, you can brighten your face by opening up a blank white web browser window. This is obviously a really simple tip, but it’s kind of fun to see how surprisingly useful blank browser windows can be (like speeding up Safari on the … Read More

You can run multiple instances of any application in Mac OS X with a little command line magic. Using the ‘open’ command to launch GUI apps from the Terminal, we can run a new instance of any app, even if it is already running.

TenFourFox is an essential web browser for any Mac OS X user that is still using a PowerPC machine. It’s a fork of Mozilla that is practically identical to Firefox 4, the only difference is that it includes support for PowerPC chips, meaning you’ll get all the CSS3 and HTML5 support that Firefox 4 comes … Read More

While some web ads are unobtrusive, others are really annoying. If you’re tired of seeing web ads, you can install adblock extensions in every major web browser and never see another ad again. Obligatory notice: blocking ads prevents web publishers from supporting themselves, ad revenue is what pays the bills for websites like this one … Read More

Some of the most secure passwords you can use are those that are randomly generated. From the command line, you can randomize potential passwords in a multitude of ways, which can be used as secure passwords of generated characters. We’ll cover several primary methods of generating random sequences and then show you how to combine … Read More