We’ve covered a handful of the best MKV player apps for the Mac before, but what if you have a Blu-Ray disc, DVD, or ISO that you want to make your own MKV file out of? Creating a watchable MKV file on your computer from a Blu-Ray or DVD is commonly called ‘ripping’, and that’s exactly what we’re going to show you how to do with a great app called MakeMKV. Other apps may get the job done as well, but we’re focusing on MakeMKV because it is free, fast, efficient, and extremely easy to use.

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LICEcap is a screen recording app that captures a portion of the Mac OS X (or Windows) desktop and saves it directly as an animated GIF. Incredibly simple to use, the apps functionality should be familiar enough to anyone who has used screen recording with QuickTime before, except that rather than a movie being exported, you wind up with a GIF.

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Did you know that you can unlock an iPad or iPhone using an external keyboard, without ever having to touch the screen or hardware buttons on the device itself?

This trick is particularly great for unlocking an iPad with an external keyboard, but it works with iPhone and iPod touch too.

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With the help of a simple command line function, you can quickly initiate a web search in your GUI web browser of choice right from the Terminal app. We’ll cover a few examples, demonstrating searching the web with Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Wikipedia, and using a variety of different web browsers, including Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Because the command syntax is fairly straightforward, you can further customize the search functions or apps used as you see fit.

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Apple has released the 6th developer preview of OS X Mavericks to Mac developers. No new features are expected in the new build, as typically these updates focus on bug fixes and minor refinements.

The latest version weighs in between 1GB-3GB, depending on hardware, and is recommended to install for all users running OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 5. The quickest way to get the update is from the Mac App Store via Software Update.
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The Mac OS X Disk Utility app provides an ability to erase free space on traditional hard drives, which overwrites vacant disk space on the drive to prevent any potential recovery of deleted files (that is, files that have been removed traditionally, rather than through secure methods). For most users this is an unnecessary procedure, but if you plan on transferring ownership of a traditional hard drive or computer to someone else and you don’t want to securely format the entire hard drive first, this provides an alternative option that instead allows you to securely overwrite and remove only the files that have been deleted.
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If you’re comfortable with the command line and ever in a situation where you need to find and replace a word, phrase, URL, or character across a group of multiple text documents, perl does the job quite well. A simple command string will very quickly perform a group batch find and replace on text, whether in a single document or spanning a group of multiple documents.

Like many things in the command line, there is no confirmation process, so you’ll want to make sure your syntax is set correctly before initiating a command, otherwise you may need to do another find & replace to repair your typo.

The basic command syntax is as follows:
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Visiting a new city, or maybe just a part of town you’re unfamiliar with? If you’re concerned you may forget where you parked your car (or bike, mule, horse, chariot, whatever), just pull out your iPhone at that location and use the Maps app to save the location. This simple trick means you’ll never forget where you have parked ever again, even if you’re in a place you have never been before.

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Dashboard is a largely under appreciated feature of Mac OS X that adds little widgets to the Dashboard space or added directly to the desktop itself. Much of Dashboards lack of use comes down to not having widgets that pertain to interests of the user, and that’s where this trick comes in, which allows you to quickly create your very own custom Dashboard widget from any web page or web site element. Best of all, the widgets created this way maintain their live functionality, meaning a web widget will continue to update live as if it was on the web, even though it is now contained within Dashboard.
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The Calendar (once called iCal) app of Mac OS X has full support for Time Zones for the entire calendar, individual events, shared calendars, and even invitations, but it must be enabled separately within the preferences. If you rely on Calendar app for just about anything and travel or work across time zones with any regularity, this is a worthwhile feature to turn on, particularly for those who also sync the calendars between OS X and iOS.
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A quirky bug in Mac OS X lets you freeze any window half-way through the minimize animation, providing for a completely askew window that retains the intended functionality of that minimized window.

Obviously freezing an animation mid-animation isn’t particularly useful, but it can be fun to use, it looks pretty silly, and maybe it has some hidden purpose that we’re just not aware of. Anyway, freezing the minimize animation is very easy to replicate, here’s how to do it on Mac:
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Apple has pushed iOS 7 Beta 6 to all compatible iOS devices registered with the iOS Developer Program. The 6th beta build is 11A4449d, and is said to include improvements and bug fixes. Arriving as a remarkably small OTA download weighing in between 12-25MB for most hardware, the smaller builds are appearing on the iPhone and iPod touch and slightly larger versions for the iPad.

As usual the simplest way to download iOS 7 beta 6 is with a device already running iOS 7 and using Over-The-Air update, accessible through Settings > General > Software Update.

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PNGcrush is an image optimization utility whose primary function is to reduce the overall file size of the PNG images in a lossless manner. It’s quite popular with developers and designers alike, and though it’s bundled in some versions of linux from the get-go, it’s not included in OS X by default without installing Xcode. We’ll cover four easy ways to get the utility on the Mac, with or without Xcode, and also offer an excellent free GUI alternative which may be more appropriate for many users.
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The command line is usually thought of as serious and we usually only cover useful terminal tricks that are fairly advanced, but not everything in the Terminal has to be useful. To prove that, we have three command strings that when pasted into the OS X Terminal, do nothing but scroll screenfuls of random text, binary, or your very own custom message, making your terminal window look a bit like the computer screens from the 1999 movie The Matrix.

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Ever had a window get lost partially off screen in Mac OS X, where the window titlebars and close/minimize/maximize buttons are no longer accessible? Typically this looks something like the following screen shot:

There a variety of potential causes and even random situations for windows to move offscreen like that, but it often happens with multi-display situations where one display is disconnected, leaving a large window behind where it’s titlebar is inaccessible off screen. The next time you find yourself in such a situation, try these two tricks to move any window back onto the Mac screen and regain access to the title bar and buttons again.

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Don’t you hate it when you misplace your iPhone and can’t find it? Or when it slides between the couch cushions or under a pile of laundry and you spend 20 minutes checking every possible place in the house to no avail? The old trick many of us use is to call the iPhone from another phone, but if you don’t have another phone handy that’s not particularly helpful.

The good news is that if you lost your iPhone at home then just about all of us have a computer or tablet laying around with access to the web, and from there you can use iCloud.com and Find My iPhone to help find your missing iPhone (or iPad and iPod touch).
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Like every other operating system, iOS stores temporary files and app caches locally on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, and these files can build up over time. Generally iOS is pretty good at housekeeping, but if you’ve had a device for a long time and haven’t deleted old unused apps, resynced recently, or restored from a backup, you may have more of these temporary files and caches stored on your iOS device than you think. That’s where PhoneClean comes in, it’s a free app that targets some of the “junk” that can accumulate over time, helping to free up storage space on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch.
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Deleting mail from the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch is a little more cumbersome than it should be, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

By making a quick settings change, we can turn the existing “Archive” function and swipe gesture into a “Delete” button and gesture instead.

This also carries over to the “Edit” options to more easily bulk delete email messages from the iOS Mail app.

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