Tips & Tricks

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

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

The iPhone, iPhone accessories, and iPhone ringtones are all the rage right now, so why not make your own iPhone ringtone? With a Mac or Windows PC it’s pretty straightforward using iTunes, follow these 10 steps and you can easily create your own iPhone Ringtone from whatever song you want. Note that songs with DRM … 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

If you’ve ever needed to troubleshoot a network or internet connection, you know how frustrating it can be (particularly when you’re on techsupport with various broadband providers). This quick tip can make the job a little easier on yourself by retrieving all relevant DHCP information, like DHCP server IP, client, subnet mask, router, DNS servers, … Read More

I like Safari but find myself in Firefox nearly always because of a multitude of reasons. One thing I’ve long missed though is the ability to view PDF’s within the browser within Firefox, which Safari does wonderfully. If you’re tired of Firefox launching the Preview app (or even worse if you’re settings are different: Acrobat), … 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

Using your Mac, iPhone, or iPad, and you need to know the meaning of a word, and quick? That’s easy. Just bust open Spotlight with Command + Spacebar on the Mac or iPad, or pulling down from the Home Screen on iPhone, and type in the word you want to get the definition for. One … 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

Need to show hidden files on a Mac? This is pretty common if you find yourself needing to access hidden files on your Mac, like an .htaccess file you downloaded, a .bash_profile, a .svn directory, – literally anything preceded with a ‘.’ indicating it is invisible by default – you can run the below command … Read More

A quick way to lock your Mac desktop is to hit Shift-Command-Option-Q to do a fast user log out. This logs the current user out of Mac OS X, which is one way to initiate a login screen when the Mac needs to be used again. Another method is brought to us by inaminit who … Read More

Recently I connected my Mac to my linux based NFS server at home. I use NFS to access files from two other Linux boxes and on each server my UID (unique id) is set to 1000. In order for me to easily have full access to my NFS shares from OS X I changed my … Read More

These days there are no shortage of ways to backup your Macintosh. Probably the most popular method available to an end-user is Apple’s Time Machine which is handled automatically after a simple setup through the GUI, or can be triggered to start at any time. Personally, I was very impressed with the ease of use … Read More

Photo Booth is a really fun app that comes with all macs that have a built in iSight / FaceTime front facing camera. Here are a couple tips that make using Photo Booth on your mac even more enjoyable; the ability to disable the ‘white screen’ flash and the ability to disable the 3 second … Read More

This post references software that no longer exists, notably the AIM (AOL Instant Messager) service, and cellular plans that are no longer relevant. Nonetheless we are keeping this post up for posterity sake. Long live AIM! The iPhone 3G is awesome, we all know that, but the rate plans are not necessarily awesome for everyone, … Read More