Tips & Tricks

Update – May 2011: We have written an up to date article on exactly how to change a short user name in Mac OS X. Please refer to that for further assistance, it will work on Snow Leopard and prior versions. A while ago I made a typo when creating my short username in a … Read More

Whether you’re a systems administrator or a web developer, or anything in between, chances are you’ll have to flush your DNS cache every once in a while to get things straightened out server-side, or even just for testing certain configurations. Flushing your DNS cache in Mac OS X is actually really easy, but there are … Read More

A MAC address is a unique identifier assigned to your network card, and some networks implement MAC address filtering as a method of security. Spoofing a MAC address can be desired for multiple reasons, and it is very easy to spoof your MAC address in macOS Monterey 12, macOS Big Sur 11, macOS Catalina, macOS … Read More

A little known hidden trick allows for a nice cursor hover effect to follow your mouse as it goes over an application, folder, or item within an opened Dock stack of Mac OS X. This makes navigating within Dock folder items a whole lot easier on the Mac and only takes a moment to turn … Read More

The Mac OS X desktop is attractive, highly functional, and very customizable, but by default the maximum icon size is 128×128 as adjusted through the normal Mac icon size settings. While 128 x 128 pixels is pretty large, if you have a huge monitor, or you’re visually impaired, you may want larger icons so that … Read More

The appearance of the new Dock changed in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard which has caused somewhat of an uproar in the Mac community, some of whom even claim it looks like it belongs in Windows Vista. That change stuck around in later versions of OS X as well. If you’re totally insulted by the … Read More

Quick Look is a nice feature in Mac OS X for quickly previewing documents, images, and other file data before opening it into a designated application. I use Quick Look often for glancing at the content of various documents and it certainly beats launching an application when you just need to take a quick peak … Read More

Here’s a really cool Firefox tip that was just passed along to me that allows you to instantly search on page text. Here’s how this works: You can instantly search for any text on a web page by hitting the forward slash and typing that word. So for example, you want to find “Firefox” on … Read More

Did you know you can navigate Mac OS with only the keyboard? If you’re an avid typer it can be annoying to have to interrupt your flow, lift your hand(s) from the keyboard, simply to use the mouse and navigate around Mac OS X. Instead of dealing with that frustration, try using exclusively the keyboard … Read More

Many of us intel Mac OS X users installed Boot Camp partitions so we could run Windows or Linux on the same machine as our Mac. Boot Camp is great, but it’s annoying when you have to reboot just to access the other operating system, which is why something like VMWare is so useful. If … Read More

Have you ever wished you could see the complete file system path in the titlebar of a Finder file system window? Well you can use a secret setting in Mac OS X to display the path in the titlebars of windows. The geekier Mac users amongst us and those familiar with the unix world should … Read More

Update: The usage of third party tools for NTFS support is no longer necessary, as Mac OS X includes NTFS read & write support natively, here’s how to enable it. While newer versions of the Mac operating system support NTFS without any third party add-ons, older versions of OS X may still find value in … Read More

If you’re a Mac user and you installed the Adobe CS suite for graphic work or web development, you probably aren’t too interested in Adobe SoundBooth, which is fine because you don’t have to install it. Well, I didn’t install Adobe SoundBooth and I discovered that Adobe still decided to install 5GB of SoundBooth bloated … Read More

Adding a user is something easily accomplished using the built in GUI tools that ship with OS X, however any power user can appreciate the possible efficiency gained from using the command line. So in the spirit of efficiency here are the steps necessary to add a user to your Mac OS X system all … Read More

Recently while using the OS X Terminal I noticed that the “Page Up” and “Page Down” keys do not send an actual page up sequence to an active Terminal session. This was discovered with the irssi app, but it actually pertains to the Terminal in general. Instead, it seems that the default behavior is to … Read More

Gmail Notifier is a great little utility that lets you know when you have mail in your Gmail inbox. What I have always disliked about it though is the apparent lack of the ability to use the secure https protocol. If you’re on public networks, this can be a particularly valid concern for privacy and … Read More

Expose is an awesome feature of Mac OS X that functions as sort of like a window manager and app switcher all in one. I use the feature so often it is almost impossible to live without. If you don’t use Expose, you should start, and this simple little list of keyboard shortcuts with each … Read More

Here’s a great Firefox tip that I think you’ll appreciate as much as I do, which allows for a spell checking function in web based input forms. To accomplish this, you’ll start by editing an entry within the about:config configuration menu of Firefox, where you can enable spell checking in text input fields. For example, … Read More