Mac Setups: Audio Production Hackintosh with Triple Displays

Jan 19, 2013 - 12 Comments

Hackintosh setup of an Audio Producer

This weeks awesome Mac setup comes to us from Gil P., it’s used primarily for audio production, and as you’ll see it’s quite a whopper with some amazing hardware with perhaps a tad bit of cheating because the desktop Mac is actually a custom built Hackintosh that dual boots OS X and Windows 7! Everything from left to right (including the beta fish tank):

  • MacBook Pro 13″ (2010) – 4GB RAM, SSD

But now things get very interesting with the hackintosh desktop setup, which consists of the following hardware:

  • Quad-Core Intel i5 3.3 GHz CPU
  • 8GB RAM (16GB coming soon)
  • Dual EVGA GTX 260 video cards
  • Dual 128GB Samsung 830 SSD drives in RAID 0 for OS X and all apps
  • 150GB Western Digital Velociraptor 10k RPM drive for Windows 7 and apps
  • Dual 1.5TB Western Digital green drives, one for audio media and the other for video media
  • Dual 1TB Seagate drives in RAID 1 for OS X backups and personal content storage
  • 3 23″ ASUS 1080p VH236h displays
  • Ergotron LX monitor stands attached to each 23″ display
  • Apple Keyboard
  • X-Clio full ATX tower case
  • Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-ED3 motherboard
  • 1000W PSU
  • The fancy monitor arrangement was found after considerable trial and error, and Gil says it’s the most ergonomic solution that allows for maintaining focus when switching between different displays.

    Mac hackintosh setup

    We haven’t covered any Hackintosh stuff recently, but the movement is still going strong with professionals who need beefy hardware alternatives while the long wait for a revamped Mac Pro continues.

    Show us your Apple gear and Mac desk setups! Send us a good picture or two along with a brief description of hardware and what you use the gear for to osxdailycom@gmail.com

    By William Pearson - Mac Setups - 12 Comments

    How to Change Screen Brightness on iPhone via Settings

    Jan 18, 2013 - 1 Comment

    How to change the iPhone screen brightness

    The iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch displays have precise brightness controls, and thanks to a light sensor, they’re smart enough to automatically adjust brightness depending on environmental lighting conditions. But it’s not always perfect especially if you use it at night, and if you’re in frequently changing lighting conditions that behavior can reduce battery life.

    To put an end to those auto-adjustments of brightness and to change and set the brightness level on iPhone to anything you want, you can head to the iOS Settings app and toggle a switch. You can also use this to change screen brightness to any brightness or dimness setting you want

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    By Paul Horowitz - iPhone, Tips & Tricks - 1 Comment

    Add Weather & Other Dashboard Widgets to the Desktop in Mac OS X

    Jan 18, 2013 - 12 Comments

    A fun way to customize the Mac desktop is to add floating widgets for things like weather, ski conditions, stocks, and time. These widgets are actually from Dashboard, a largely forgotten feature of Mac OS X that can be made useful again by bringing them more to the forefront of your desktop experience. This is different from making Dashboard hover over everything again, because this actually liberates the widgets out of Dashboard turning them into movable objects on the desktop itself.

    Widgets on the Mac desktop

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    By William Pearson - Customize, Mac OS, Tips & Tricks - 12 Comments

    Access the Root Directory in Mac OS X in 4 Ways Quickly

    Jan 17, 2013 - 8 Comments

    Mac Like other forms of unix, the root directory of Mac OS X is simply /, but from the Finder it also takes the name of your primary hard drive. By default that is “Macintosh HD”, and newer versions of Mac OS have started to hide the root folder from users because most users simply don’t need to access the root subdirectories. But of course, some Mac users do need to access and get to the root directory of their Mac, and that’s what we’re going to show you how to do here.

    Note that if you renamed Macintosh HD to something else, you’ll need to replace your name throughout the walkthrough here when necessary.

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    By William Pearson - Mac OS, Tips & Tricks - 8 Comments

    Add & Remove Contacts to VIP Mail Lists in iOS

    Jan 17, 2013 - 4 Comments

    Mail for iOS Effectively filtering the nonstop noise from email can make or break the productivity in your day, and VIP lists are one of the easiest ways to help this in iOS and Mac OS X by emphasizing some senders over others. If you’re new to VIP listing, it’s a very simple to use feature that is practically guaranteed to improve your email workflow.

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    By Paul Horowitz - iPad, iPhone, Tips & Tricks - 4 Comments

    Batch Image Conversion in Mac OS X the Easy Way with Preview

    Jan 16, 2013 - 18 Comments

    Preview in Mac Preview is a greatly under-appreciated app that has been bundled along with Mac OS X since the beginning, getting better and better with each Mac OS release. One quiet feature that has been around for a while is the ability to mass convert a group of pictures from one file type to another, often referred to as batch conversion. This lets you easily take a large amount of JPG files and convert them over to PNG, for example.

    Batch image conversion works with any number of image files and with nearly any image formats. It’s safe to assume that if you can open the image files into Preview app, you can export them to a new file type, including GIF, ICNS, JPEG, JPEG-2000, BMP, Microsoft Icon, OpenEXR, PDF, Photoshop PSD, PNG, SGI, TGA, and TIFF.

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    By William Pearson - Mac OS, Tips & Tricks - 18 Comments

    Change the Browser User Agent in Chrome, Safari, & Firefox

    Jan 16, 2013 - 14 Comments

    Safari icon A web browsers user agent is how a website knows what type of computer, operating system, and browsing app you are using. Some sites serve different themes, CSS, content, or even different sites to different browsers and OS’s, and many developers often need to change their own user agent to be able to test these abilities and build these alternate sites.

    We’ll cover how to change the user agent for all popular modern web browsers available to the desktop user in Mac OS X and Windows, including Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.

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    By William Pearson - Mac OS, Tips & Tricks - 14 Comments

    Get New Email Faster on iPhone by Changing Fetch Settings

    Jan 15, 2013 - 13 Comments

    Faster iPhone email

    Want to get new emails faster on your iPhone or iPad? You can do that with a settings adjustment to how the Mail app works.

    Have you noticed that it can sometimes take a while to get an email notification on to the iPhone? The time it takes to check for new emails from mail servers is actually a simple settings option for some email providers, and this means it’s easy to speed up if you want to get alerts sooner and closer to the time the message was actually received.

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    By Paul Horowitz - iPad, iPhone, Tips & Tricks - 13 Comments

    Get Fast Access to Sleep, Shut Down, and Restart Controls in Mac OS X

    Jan 15, 2013 - 12 Comments

    Finder Many longtime Mac users may know the handful of keyboard shortcuts to instantly reboot, shut down, and sleep Macs, but for those who haven’t memorized the precise keystrokes yet, a much safer option is to instantly summon the power controls for OS X instead. This allows you to choose the power option you need while also providing a measure of safety if you have unsaved documents open or if users are connected to the Mac by networking, and it let’s you review the various power options before just jumping right into one of them with a direct keystroke.

    We’ll cover how to summon the Power Controls instantly, and then how you can interact with them by using only the keyboard.

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    By Paul Horowitz - Mac OS, Tips & Tricks - 12 Comments

    Turn TextEdit Into an HTML Source Viewer with a Simple Settings Change

    Jan 14, 2013 - 2 Comments

    TextEdit icon TextEdit is a reasonably decent text editing app that has been bundled along with just about every version of OS X since the beginning. If you’ve ever opened an HTML file with TextEdit you have probably discovered the app actually renders the HTML code, displaying the formatted text, rather than displaying the source itself. This is actually really simple to adjust, and all it takes is a settings change to turn TextEdit into an HTML code viewer rather, and as a side effect, a simple plain text code editor.

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    By William Pearson - Mac OS, Tips & Tricks - 2 Comments

    Set MTU Size from the Command Line of Mac OS X

    Jan 14, 2013 - 18 Comments

    Set the MTU size in Mac OS X

    MTU stands for Maximum Transmission Unit, and a larger MTU size generally increases efficiency of a network connection because each packet carries more data, but sometimes the default MTU sizes (often 1500) will cause issues with some networks and needs adjusting. If you need to change the MTU size on a Mac, you can do so through the command line, as well as through the System Preference panel. We’ll focus on setting MTU size from the command line in this particular walkthrough.

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    By William Pearson - Command Line, Mac OS, Tips & Tricks - 18 Comments

    6 Amazing High-Resolution Nebula Wallpapers from NASA

    Jan 13, 2013 - 4 Comments

    Nasa Nebula wallpapers

    Like many of you, I’m a sucker for fancy new wallpapers of neat looking stuff, and if there’s one place that routinely cranks out some of the most mind-blowing amazing imagery that is perfect for wallpapers, it’s NASA. This little mini-collection is a handful of freakishly gorgeous pictures of various nebulas around the universe, and because they’re from NASA every image is available to download at extremely high resolution, making them ideal fits for just about any iOS device, PC, or Mac you have. Don’t be stuck with a boring background picture, grab a fancy nebula shot and be amazed every time you look at your desktop.

    Read more »

    By Paul Horowitz - Customize - 4 Comments

    Protect an iPad While Cooking By Keeping it Safe in a Plastic Bag

    Jan 13, 2013 - 8 Comments

    Cooking with an iPad, using a zip lock bag as screen protection

    The iPad is a great cooking tool that’s perfect for keeping track of recipes and being the ultimate kitchen resource, but if you’ve ever cooked with an iPad you’ll know the screen can get pretty mucked up with various ingredients, and if you aren’t careful it could even damage the device. Thankfully, another kitchen item can completely prevent the iPad from becoming a mess throughout the cooking process: a clear plastic zip lock bag.

    Read more »

    By Paul Horowitz - Fun, iPad, iPhone - 8 Comments

    Find Out How Much Storage Space Photos Take Up on iPhone

    Jan 12, 2013 - 14 Comments

    How to see how much storage photos take up on iOS

    Want to know exactly how much storage photos are taking up on your iPhone or iPad? Opening the Photos app in iOS will tell you how many total photos are within the different picture albums and Camera Roll, but how much space do the pictures actually take up? If you want to know the actual storage size of all those pictures and camera shots are consuming on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch you’ll need to dig a bit deeper into the device settings to reveal that information, follow along.

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    By Paul Horowitz - iPad, iPhone, Tips & Tricks - 14 Comments

    Mac Setups: Amateur Video Producers Desk

    Jan 12, 2013 - 16 Comments

    MacBook Air - amateur video production setup

    This weeks great Apple setup comes from Fletcher C. in the UK. He’s got a pretty snazzy desk and uses his Mac and other gear for video production and amateur photography, the hardware shown in the shot includes:

    • MacBook Air (2012) – 1.8GHz Core i5, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD
    • Acer 23″ S235HL external display connected to the MacBook Air
    • RainDesign mStand under the MacBook Air
    • iPhone 5 32GB in white
    • GoPro Hero 3 Black Edition
    • Edifier Prisma speakers
    • Apple wireless keyboard
    • Apple Magic Trackpad
    • Bluetooth mouse

    Fletcher gets big bonus points for taking his desk setup shot with OSXDaily.com open in Safari!

    Show us your Apple gear and Mac desk setups! Email us a good picture or two, along with a brief description of hardware and what you use the gear for to osxdailycom@gmail.com

    By William Pearson - Mac Setups - 16 Comments

    Get a New IP Address on iPhone or iPad by Renewing DHCP Lease

    Jan 11, 2013 - 15 Comments

    Renew DHCP lease and get a new IP in iOS

    If you need to get a new IP address from a router that any iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or other iOS device is connected to, you can either set a manual IP address or, what’s likely more relevant to most people, you’ll want to renew the DHCP lease directly from the wi-fi router itself.

    Renewing the lease this way should alleviate any potential conflicts with other devices on the network, and it also fills in everything from subnet mask, router, DNS settings, in addition to the new IP.

    Let’s walk through how to renew DHCP lease from a connected wi-fi router in iOS:
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    By Paul Horowitz - iPad, iPhone, Tips & Tricks - 15 Comments

    The Cheapest Place to Buy an iPhone 5 is Walmart: $127!

    Jan 11, 2013 - 9 Comments

    Cheapest iPhone 5 price

    You may already know that the cheapest place to buy a new iPhone 5 is usually Walmart, but wallyworld is outdoing itself right now and offering a brand new iPhone 5 for only $127! Yes, that’s a whopping $60 cheaper than their already lowest price of $187, and you can pick up that stellar offer with two-year carrier contracts from Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint.

    What’s the catch you ask? There isn’t one really, except that you have to go into a Walmart store to make the purchase and get the additional $60 discount.

    This deal means iPhone 5 is the same price as what they offered during their big holiday idevice sale, and you can find the details in some fine print on their websites product page though there really isn’t much to it:

    “Get a $60 discount off the original price in-stores only. Offer requires new 2-year contract or upgrade. Price before discount: $187.00”

    The deal appears to only be valid for the base 16GB model, for either black or white colors.

    Of all the places where you can buy an iPhone 5, Walmart is quickly becoming the best overall deal for bargain shoppers and for anyone looking for some seriously steep discounts. If you’ve wanted a new iPhone and the price was holding you back, you won’t be able to beat this one. Move quick and find a local Walmart store to lock in the price, the deal probably won’t be active for long.

    By Matt Chan - iPhone, News - 9 Comments

    Converting Image File Formats with the Command Line & sips

    Jan 11, 2013 - 16 Comments

    Convert image files from the command line

    Converting images to new file formats is very easy thanks to a variety of tools built directly into OS X (and most Linux distributions). Though the easiest method uses Preview for converting images, there’s a command line option that uses the same sips tool we’ve discussed before to perform batch resizing from the command line. Using sips, you can convert single images to new image formats, or even perform batch image conversions.
    Read more »

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