Tips & Tricks

You can reset a lost Administrator (the original account you created) password in Mac OS X by utilizing a Mac OS X installation DVD, here’s how:

This is a fantastic tip from Apple regarding your iPhone, particularly if you’re prone to losing your device… set a custom background image on your iPhone with some contact information and an “If Found” note. What does that mean exactly? Basically just create an image with some contact details on it and a message to … Read More

Ever wondered how to type the temperature / degree symbol in Mac OS? Typing the degrees symbol on a Mac, or any computer, may seem like a giant mystery since it’s not immediately visible on any keyboard, but it’s really quite easy if you know the proper keyboard shortcut. There are actually two keyboard shortcuts … Read More

Secrets is a pretty nifty system preference panel add-on that lets you access all sorts of hidden ‘secret’ preference options. Instead of typing a bunch of default write commands you can basically just click checkboxes or change dropdown options to easily enable some pretty cool stuff. It’s pretty comprehensive, with a bunch of options for … Read More

Knowing how to clear cookies is pretty important for any number of reasons, be it for personal preference or troubleshooting issues with websites. You may be wondering how to remove cookies on a Mac running the Safari web browser, and that is exactly what we’ll show how to do. There are actually a few ways … Read More

With the pbcopy and pbpaste commands, you can use the command line to manipulate clipboard contents but also access your Mac OS X clipboard directly through the Terminal. Yes, that means you can access what you copied in a GUI app and use it in the command line seamlessly, and vice versa. We’ve shown a … Read More

You can quickly clear all of the text from the Spotlight menu without closing the window by hitting Command-Delete, I discovered the use in this after my cat walked across my keyboard entering in a lengthy mishmash string of characters. Try it out!

You can schedule your Mac to sleep, wake, shutdown, or boot up at any time or any regular interval using the Mac System Preference ‘Energy Saver’ schedule settings. This provides for an excellent option for work Macs that you want to be awake or boot when you arrive in the morning, and to sleep or … Read More

The Mac OS X Preview application has a a few little known image adjustment features for rapid image orientation flipping or rotation that are quite powerful, and if you’re looking to make quick adjustments to rotate a picture or mirror vertically or horizontally the general orientation of any image file, a great Mac app to … Read More

Want to navigate within a websites directory structure? If you use Safari then you can Command+Click the Title of any website window in Safari and you can pull up a nice navigable drop-down list of the websites directory paths. This is really handy if you’re deep in some archive or if you’re looking at an … Read More

To list all mounted drives and their accompanying partitions from the Terminal on Mac OS X, you can use the diskutil command with the list flag. This approach will display all disks, drives, volumes, and containers on any drive connected to the Mac, including boot volumes, hidden volumes (like the Recovery partition), empty volumes, unformatted … Read More

Moving your iTunes music library to another location or machine is really easy to do because Apple has made iTunes store and maintain all of your music in one central location. Thus, that directory is fairly transportable, and if need be it can be relocated to a different location with relative ease. Unless you have … Read More

Want to open a Finder window from the current directory location in Terminal? Mac OS makes this easy! From the Mac Terminal, you can immediately open whatever folder or directory you are working within into the Finder of MacOS and Mac OS X by simply typing the a short command string and executing it. To … Read More

Most Mac users who want to schedule a Mac to startup at a specific time will use the Energy Saver schedule tool in System Preferences, but for the more technically savvy, another option is to schedule the boot time of a Mac through the command line. We’ll show you how to use the pmset command … Read More

With modern versions of Mac OS X you can input Chinese Characters directly into the trackpad! This is an extremely cool feature but requires a newer Mac with a multitouch trackpad as well, so it’s best for Mac laptops and the Magic Trackpad surface.

You can rate iTunes songs directly from your Dock in Mac OS X! Just right-click (or control-click) the iTunes icon within the Dock, and scroll up to ‘Rating’, this will open up a submenu and from there users can select the Star Rating they want to assign for the song that is playing. This is … Read More

Got a Mac and a PC running Ubuntu and want to control both from one computer? Make your life easier and share a mouse and keyboard between the two machines using Synergy! There’s a nice walkthrough on how to do this at Donncha O Caoimh’s blog, don’t pass it up if you’re an Ubuntu user. … Read More

If you Option-Click the Airport Menu you can get extended information about the wireless network you are connected to (and the ones you’re not as well), including Channel information, MAC address of the access point, signal strength, and the transmission rate. This is Snow Leopard only, if you haven’t upgraded to Snow Leopard yet and … Read More