Tips & Tricks

Here’s a nifty Mac trick: Do you see the little black dot inside the red ‘close’ window button in that screenshot? That means the file has been modified!

Want to quickly turn off all of your Mac’s displays? Hit Shift+Ctrl+Eject and all screens will go black instantly. Nice huh?

Some iTunes music comes with DRM, but you can use an iTunes trick to remove DRM. Note this should only be used if you own the actual rights to the music, or if you are allowed to remove DRM by the rights-owner. DRM iTunes songs usually have an .m4p file extension. But this trick basically … Read More

On a Windows PC recently I ripped a CD only to find out that it was converted as WMA rather than MP3. In Windows this isn’t a big deal, you just open the files in iTunes as usual, but I wanted them on my Mac, easy right? Well for some reason Apple doesn’t allow Mac … Read More

Mac users can issue a defaults command string to force Safari to open targeted new window links into new tabs instead of those new windows. This is handy if you open a lot of links that would usually launch a new window but would rather send them into easily managed tabs instead.

You can enable MMS on the first gen iPhone 2G (you know, that metal one), but it requires a little bit of hacking. This is pretty great news if you have one of the first iPhones but you feel left out by the MMS intro passing you by. Here are the instructions reposted from Lifehacker.com … Read More

I always put iTunes into mini-player mode to conserve screen real estate, so I was pretty annoyed when iTunes 9 took away this feature when clicking the green resize button in the iTunes window. Thankfully getting it back is very easy but it’s an extra step, option-click the green maximize button to enter into the … Read More

Teleport is undoubtedly one of the single most useful utilities available to anyone that owns more than one Mac. Using Teleport, you can share a single mouse and keyboard across multiple Mac’s, seamlessly! Setup is an absolute breeze, you need to install Teleport on all Mac’s that you want to use, and once it’s all … Read More

Need to get around the boot level Mac firmware password? You can bypass a firmware password by doing a little bit of a hardware hack. There’s many reasons you’d want to get around firmware protection, but here’s why we got the instructions from an anonymous submitter:

I use my MacBook almost exclusively at home and so I frequently forget to discharge and recharge the battery, which is a recommended procedure to have your notebook battery last as long as possible. For people like me who often run with the powercharger attached to their Mac laptop, Apple.com offers a nice simple reminder … Read More

I came across the aptly named AppleSerialNumberInfo.com today and found it very useful for getting information about a Mac. Type in a Mac’s serial number and a whole slew of information will be reported back to you, including the build queue number, production week, extensive hardware information, unit specific repair and support programs, and so … Read More

I have become dependent on many command line applications I have installed through the open source MacPorts effort, and if you have too you’ll really appreciate this guide. When upgrading Mac OS X to a new major OS (say, upgrading Tiger to Snow Leopard) you may notice that some MacPorts installations get screwy and no … Read More

Ever heard of MD5 and not sure what it was or what that meant? You’re likely not alone, but MD5 is important, and, with a little explaining, easy to understand. Let’s explain a bit about MD5, MD5 checksums, what it is, and why you should know about it.

You can easily check the MD5 Hash of any file on your Mac, all you need to do is launch the Terminal and type the ‘md5’ command and point it at the file you wish to check the md5 has for. How to Check MD5 Hash of a File on Mac First launch the Terminal … Read More

You can easily reveal the Finder location of any recently used item from the Apple “Recent Items” menu by holding down the Command key as you access the Apple menu of OS X.

Safari is really settling it’s spot as my preferred web browser. Sure, I miss the plugins in Firefox, but it just can’t beat the speed of Safari. You can make your Safari web browsing experience even better by using Command-Option-F to jump to the Search box, nice! [ via Twitter: AppleSpotlight ]

Have you ever received a movie or video file where the audio and video isn’t synced correctly? This is most obvious when you’re watching people talk, where the lip movements don’t match up with the audio track. Thanks to a handy capability in VLC, you can quickly sync audio to video in VLC by using … Read More

Following the CPU usage on my Mac is a mild obsession, and I usually use the Mac terminal command ‘top’ to do this but I noticed that top itself takes up a fair amount of CPU usage (5% or more). I made this complaint to a friend of mine and they told me to try … Read More