Troubleshooting

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 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

Recently the LAN at my office had been running slower than usual, and I couldn’t pinpoint what was using up all the extra bandwidth. I had a suspicion that P2P traffic was to blame but I just couldn’t see anything obvious on the offending machine. So the question of course, is how do you see … Read More

I love the web, I hate Flash. I know this isn’t always a popular opinion, but for me it causes a lot of problems. It’s a slow bloated resource hog that makes browsing the web painful, loud, and obnoxious. Really the only time I actually want to use it is on video sharing sites like … Read More

The “uptime” of a computer is how long it has been since it was last rebooted or started up. Since Macs are very stable and generally OS X users rarely have to reboot their machines, the uptime of Macs can reach impressive numbers. You can check the uptime and reboot history of any Mac if … Read More

Though the Mac is fairly error free and tends to run much more stable than some of the competitors out there, many of us will find a bug or two in day to day usage anyway. Sometimes the bugs are minor, sometimes they’re fairly major and can dramatically impact how Mac OS X or iOS … Read More

The iPhone and iPad are amazingly stable, but every once in a while you may run into an app that misbehaves itself and seems to become stuck in some infinite loop of iPhone-frozen madness. Thankfully, if you find yourself in that situation you can force quit a frozen application on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod … Read More

Bonjour is a great service that runs in the background of your Mac to auto-discover network resources, that is, it’s great until mDNSResponder goes haywire. I was recently in a very creatively crafted network environment that made Bonjour absolutely freak out and tax my CPU with a million processes, so I opted to just disable … Read More

Ever wondered what the ‘mdworker’ process was on a Mac? mdworker is short for ‘metadata server worker’ and if you’re still confused don’t feel bad. mdworker is basically the core technology behind Mac OS X’s awesome search engine Spotlight, it spiders meta data from your Mac and its files and creates a readable index so … Read More

iTunesHelper or iTunes Helper, is a program from Apple that runs in the background and monitors for the connection of any iPod or iPhone to the computer, if an iPod or iPhone is detected it will automatically launch the iTunes application. The functionality is the same on both Mac OS X and Windows PC’s, and … Read More

OS X Daily reader Todd Harris has tipped us off that when installing Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, your /etc/hosts file is reset. If you followed a tip we posted a while back about how to block access to specific websites then this is particularly relevant to you, so be sure to manually adjust … Read More

I don’t know why but when I upgraded to Snow Leopard my wireless internet got all wonky, connections were dropping left and right and I couldn’t maintain any worthwhile airport connection for longer than a few minutes. DHCP was behaving particularly strange and the automatic settings pulled from my router were dropping every few seconds. … Read More

I installed some Software Updates recently on an older Mac Mini and left my house to go on a run, I came back about an hour later to find that nothing was installed yet, my Mac Mini was stuck on “Configuring Installation” – hmm now what? Well, it’s a rare occurrence, but it can happen … Read More

A friend of mine that is new to Macs couldn’t figure out how to get a CD to eject, after some frustration he then complained that his MacBook doesn’t have the paperclip hole to forcibly eject a disc from the superdrive. After some discussion I realized he’s probably not alone in his confusion of how … Read More

I was driving myself up the wall recently trying to figure out why the Mac Preview.app would not save my image rotations when I exported a picture from Preview in OS X, so in looking for a solution I stumbled onto our friend MurphyMac‘s site and found a solution! Basically after you have rotated the … Read More

If you’re a Comcast customer and you’ve entered in an incorrect URL or had a server time out recently, you’ve probably been extremely annoyed when you discovered you were being redirected to a page filled with Comcast ads. Comically, this obnoxious DNS redirect is named the ‘Comcast Domain Helper service’, and was forced on you … Read More

We don’t want it to happen, but there may come a day in all Mac owners lives that their warranty expires, and that date is related to your original date of purchase, give or take the time for any additional AppleCare warranty service you have purchased in addition. So how do you check your Macs … 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