If you need to know the disk performance of an external drive, you can easily go about testing the read and write speed of any such drive by using several third party apps. We’ll cover two, the first is aptly named Disk Speed Test, and the second is called Xbench. Either will work to determine the read/write speeds of any drive, though we’re going to focus specifically on external devices, including USB flash thumb drives, standard USB external hard drives, a Thunderbolt based external disk, firewire, or even network volumes.

This can be helpful for benchmarking the performance of external volumes for Time Machine backups, RAID setups, or even just to find out if an external USB flash key drive is fast enough to run a game or app from.
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Wondering how to refresh a Finder window in Mac OS? There is no refresh button or keyboard shortcut for the Mac OS X Finder, something which can become a nuisance when a folder window or directory does not refresh contents after something has changed. That may be a fairly rare occurrence with a Mac built-in hard drive, but external drives and particularly network drives used for file sharing can often exhibit this behavior, where adjustments to the file system are not represented in the active Finder window. Thus, there is sometimes a need to refresh a Finder window on the Mac.

Because there isn’t a direct method to refresh Finder windows, you can use one of these tricks we’ll discuss below to go about refreshing Finder window contents instead.
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iOS does not have an Activity Monitor or task manager the way that desktop Macs do within OS X, but if you’d like to see what apps and processes are running in the background of an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you can do so using a few different methods. For most users, simply showing the multitasking bar is sufficient, but the curious can also reveal system-level processes using alternate methods with a third party app or, for users who have jailbroken their devices, the command line.
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It’s time for another roundup of beautiful wallpapers for your computers and iDevices. There’s no particular theme with this roundup, just some great images of scenery and distant space, each of which makes for fantastic background pictures. As usual, these are all offered in high-res HD glory, so whether you’re sporting a 27″ display with a huge resolution or just a retina iPad, they will all look great. Enjoy!

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The Mac OS X Firewall provides an optional ability to block all incoming network connections , offering a significant security boost to Macs that are located in untrusted networks or hostile network environments.

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You can easily configure Google / Gmail contacts to sync with an iOS device like an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. This transfers all Google Contact details onto the iOS device, in addition to keeping all contacts in sync, meaning any changes made in one service will carry over to the other nearly instantaneously. This functions much like how iCloud syncs contacts between Apple devices, except it offers the ability to sync across platforms and between Apple and Google services.

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Removing attachments from an email or everything in Mail app can be useful for a variety of reasons, from ditching a file that is no longer relevant to an email thread, to lowering the file transfer size when sending/replying to a message, or for more extreme cases for individuals with smaller hard drives, for reducing the overall disk space consumed by the Mail attachments directory.

Whatever the case, use some caution when removing attachments this way, as there is no way to retrieve the mail attachment locally after they have been removed from Mail app. For this reason, if you intend on deleting many attachments from many emails you may want to make a manual backup of the attachment directory beforehand, which we will also cover below by showing you where the attachment files are stored in OS X.
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New email arrivals display a small preview of the message itself on the lock screen of iOS devices, which shows the sender, the subject, and part of the actual email message body. Because emails can contain some very private and/or personal details, you may wish to hide those email message previews from showing up on the lock screen completely.

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Got a song, podcast, or another audio track that you want to copy directly to your iPhone, but don’t want to add to your computers general iTunes library? You can skip adding the song to the computer iTunes library completely by using a simple but little known trick, letting you directly transfer music and audio to an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. The end result is that you will have music stored only on the iOS device, without having it kept in iTunes as well, completely bypassing the iTunes libraries on a Mac or Windows PC.

This is a nice trick for some added control when managing very specific music libraries, using alternate computers, and particularly if a computer is running low on disk space and you’re wanting to copy music directly from an external drive to an iPhone or iPod without importing anything into iTunes.
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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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