This weeks Mac setup comes to us from Mike L., a Masters student in International Relations who uses his Apple gear for coursework, research, photo and video editing, and some fun too. Hardware shown includes:

• MacBook Pro 15″ with Retina display – 2.6GHz Core i7, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD
• Iiyama 22″ Full HD LCD Display
• iPad 2 16GB
• Apple Wireless Keyboard
• Apple Wireless Mouse
• XBox 360
• 1TB Western Digital MyPassport external hard drive
• Logitech speakers

The addition of the secondary display has boosted productivity, and it also provides for a great way to enjoy some downtime as it serves double-duty as a display for the Xbox.

Want your Mac setup featured here? Send in a good picture or two of your Mac setup, a list of hardware, and what you use the Apple gear for to osxdailycom@gmail.com – We’re a little backlogged on the Mac setup posts, but keep them coming!

You can easily skip ahead and rewind in large blocks while listening to podcasts on the iPhone. This is a helpful feature of the Podcasts app in iOS for many reasons, perhaps you missed a section and want to rewind and hear it again, or maybe you want to skip ahead through an uninteresting segment.

I use this podcast skipping trick frequently to listen to a sequence again, and to jump ahead through bumper music, commercials, or boring segments, and it works with just a tap in the podcasts app for iPhone.

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If you need to change a computers MAC address (the unique ID attached to a physical network interface), but aren’t comfortable with the command line approaches that we’ve discussed before, an excellent free preference panel called LinkLiar makes it easy. Not only does LinkLiar make changing MAC addresses remarkably simple for any network interface on the Mac, it also randomly generates new ones, insuring a conflict-free MAC address in the end.

• Get LinkLiar free from GitHub

Download LinkLiar from GitHub, then most users will need to right-click the .prefpane and choose “Open” to get around the GateKeeper security warning. System Preferences will automatically open and give you the option to install it for the current user or all users on the Mac.

Once in LinkLiar, click an available network interface, and either enter an address on your own, or turn the wheel to generate random new addresses on the fly. Click “Apply” and enter the admin password to make the changes.

LinkLiar is without a doubt the easiest way to change MAC addresses in OS X, the only complaint with LinkLiar is there is no ‘revert back to default’ option, so you’ll probably want to find and make note of an interfaces default MAC address before making any changes to it.

If you want to restrict app usage for a particular user on a Mac, there is no easier option than Parental Controls. This is a great solution for parents setting up a limited-access account for a kid, for public usage Macs, Macs in the enterprise, or even just for a restricted Guest account for when someone else is using a computer.

If you haven’t done so yet, you’ll want to have created a separate user account for the user to restrict app access to, that can be done through the “Users & Groups” panel in System Preferences.

• Launch System Preferences from the  Apple menu and choose “Parental Controls”
• Click the unlock icon in the corner to unlock access to Parental Controls
• Choose the username from the left side to restrict app access to, then click “Enable Parental Controls”
• Under the “Apps” tab, check the box for “Limit Applications”, then go through the list of apps and check only the apps you want that user to be able to open and use

When finished, close out of Parental Controls, though you may want to check the box for “Use Simple Finder” as well to even further limit options available to the designated user account.

Upon the next login for the that user, the apps that were not selected will not be accessible. This is an excellent trick when kid-proofing a Mac, or for any other situation where app usage should be limited for certain users. It can even be used as a way to force self control upon yourself, where you could create a separate “work” and “play” user account, each with apps that are only appropriate for the tasks you should be performing with each account.

An additional layer of restriction is possible by creating apps of certain web sites, then restricting general access to the web or web browsers completely. This would allow the account user to access a website like Wikipedia only, but not the general web.

This tip was inspired by a question on the OSXDaily Facebook page, thanks to Yash and Ed!

To compare and list the different contents of two directories without the extra output you get through commands like diff, you can use the comm command instead. To get started, launch Terminal and type the following command, adjusting the directory paths as appropriate:

comm -3 <(ls -1 folder1) <(ls -1 folder2)

The output listed will be the files that are different in each folder, with files unique to folder1 aligning left, and files unique to folder 2 aligning right.

For example, to compare the contents of a folder called “Pictures” and a folder named “OldPictures”, both stored in the user downloads directory, the syntax would be the following:

comm -3 <(ls -1 ~/Downloads/Pictures) <(ls -1 ~/Downloads/OldPictures)

Output may look like the following:

$ comm -3 <(ls -1 ~/Downloads/Pictures) <(ls -1 ~/Downloads/OldPictures)
Folder-1-File.PNG
Folder-2-File copy.PNG
    photo 1 copy.PNG
    photo 3.PNG

Note the indentation, which shows you which files are unique to each folder. In the above example, the file “photo 1 copy.PNG” and “photo 3.png” are aligned right, therefore they are unique to the OldPictures directory, and Folder-1-File.PNG and Folder-2-File copy.PNG are unique to the original Pictures folder.

This works great in Mac OS X, but it’s a generic unix command so you should find it usable in linux and other variants as well. If you do run into any compatibility issues, or find this command to be unnecessarily complex, try using diff to perform the same function.

Great trick found by @climagic on Twitter, @osxdaily is on there too!

The iPhone’s excellent panorama mode allows for easy vertical panoramic shots as well.

Shooting panorama mode in vertical orientation is perfect for taking pictures of tall trees, waterfalls, buildings, or anything else that is taller than the standard range provides.

This guide will show you how to switch Panorama mode into vertical mode, to snap images of tall objects or scenery.

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Fluid is a great Mac app that converts any specified web site into it’s own self-contained application, allowing you to do things like turn Gmail, Facebook, Wikipedia, Soundcloud, and Pandora, into their own dedicated app.

Other than being useful for creating apps exclusively for particular websites, Fluid is also great for those of us who are easily distracted by other things on the web, forcing the usage of only the given site.

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Photo Streams are a great addition to iOS, but thus far seem to be an underused feature. With Photo Stream, you can easily share a collection of images with a select group of people, without having to go through the usual avenues of social networks. Instead, you create an instant gallery right out of the Photos app, select people to share it with, and that’s about it. If you feel like sharing it with a broader audience, you can even get a URL which allows anyone to view the images through the web.

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Everyone loves a good wallpaper, so we’re bringing you another little collection of great images to use as the desktop background on your iPad, Mac, iPhone, or whatever else you’re decorating. Each image is sized at 2048×2048 to accomodate the retina iPad display, but they’ll scale down to just file on virtually any other iOS or OS X device you have, and even slightly stretched on the retina MacBook Pro’s they still look great.

Each of these pictures comes to us from @RetinaiPadWalls on Twitter, give them a follow for a stream of wallpapers, and follow OSXDaily on Twitter too while you’re at it too.

Check out the wallpaper collection below:

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Now that OS X 10.9 is regularly appearing in usage logs, we thought we’d take a stab at the naming convention. How about OS X Longcat?

Yup, we’re bored today and diving straight into the pool of Longcat memes, and there’s nothing better than boredom and some Pixelmator fun to create something totally stupid. Don’t worry, we’ll be back to our normal useful selves soon here.

On a more serious note, what do you think the next version of OS X will be called? There have been some pretty hilarious suggestions on our Facebook page…

Development of the next major release of Mac OS X is well under way, with version OS X 10.9 regularly appearing in web analytics logs of OSXDaily, 9to5mac, AppleInsider, CultofMac, and several other Apple-related websites. This was first brought to light today by 9to5mac, whose graph above shows a handful of visitors from Cupertino California running a new, unreleased version of Mac OS, labeled as “Intel 10.9”. Cupertino is the location of Apple’s corporate campus.

For OSXDaily, the first appearance of OS X 10.9 came in logs from July 2012, around the launch of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. As the graph below demonstrates, there has been a consistent upward trend appearing in our logs as more and more (presumed) Apple engineers use and work on the internal build of OS X.

There is open speculation as to what the next version of OS X will be called, and whether or not Apple will stick with the cat named theme. The number of familiar feline names is running thin, and though it’s unlikely Apple would choose an unfamiliar cat name for 10.9, a name like OS X Andean Mountain Cat or OS X Iberian Lynx could certainly surprise us all.

Time Machine backups can be triggered remotely thanks to SSH (Remote Login) and the command line. This is an excellent solution to use if you left the home or office without making an important backup, though the SSH requirement does add a potential layer of complexity that may make it more appropriate for advanced users. Those who prefer the GUI might be better served starting a Time Machine backup remotely by using Remote Access from an iPhone or iPad.

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The next time you’re wondering how many grams of sugar are in that donut and if it’s going to cut into your allotted daily calorie intake of junk food, just pull out your iPhone or iPad and ask Siri. Thanks to Siri’s ability to tap into the wealth of knowledge at Wolfram Alpha, you can use Siri to retrieve detailed dietary information.

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If you’re a Mac owner you know that every time the Mac reboots or starts up it makes a startup chime sound. Though you can temporarily mute the chime by holding down the Mute key on any Mac keyboard, you can also choose to disable it completely by turning to the command line.

To be clear, this will turn off the boot chime sound entirely, at least until it has been reversed with another terminal command string on the same Mac. This works in all modern versions of OS X on any modern Mac.

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Apple has started to run a new iPad Mini Piano commercial. Originally debuting during the iPad Mini keynote, the TV advertisement features an iPad 10″ and a new iPad Mini playing the popular piano song “Heart and Soul” together using the app Garageband. Despite appearing at the iPad Mini event weeks ago, it didn’t hit the airwaves until this weekend. If you watch Sunday night primetime television, you’ll probably see the commercial running, as Apple often starts airing new commercials during CBS’s 60 Minutes and NFL Sunday Night Football.

The video is embedded below.

This is also the same ad that Conan O’Brien recently spoofed, adding the lyrics “spend your money” to the beat of “heart and soul”

This weeks featured Mac setup is the home office of Ronny M., a professional photographer and videographer. Hardware shown includes:

• MacBook Air 13″ – 4GB, 128GB SSD
• iMac 27″ – 2.7Ghz Core i5, 16GB RAM, 1 TB HDD and 128 SSD, connected to two external displays
• Benq 17″ display on the left
• Samsung 19″ display on the right
• iPad 2 16GB
• iPhone 4 16GB
• Seagate External HDD 1TB
• Two enormous speakers to rock out with
• Canon MX350 Wireless Printer

The MacBook Air goes on the road for field work, the iMac stays put for Aperture and Photoshop work, and the iPad is used to show photos to his clients.

If you have an interesting Mac setup you want featured here, send us a good picture or two, a list of hardware shown, and a brief description of what the gear is used for to osxdailycom@gmail.com

The next time you’re browsing the web and come across a link that points to Twitter, you can immediately jump to the Twitter app if you want to. This is a new ability included in iOS 6 onward.

To access the feature, pull down from the top of Safari when a Twitter link is opened, and you’ll see a menu item that shows if Twitter is available or not, an option to install the app if it’s not, and the “Open” button shown in the screenshot. Tapping that Open button is what immediately launches Twitter, passing the current link to the Twitter app. This is great if you’ve come across a link to a tweet and decided you want to follow the user, or just explore their timeline more through the official Twitter app.

That type of behavior works with some other apps and content as well in the newest versions of mobile Safari, including PDF’s, ebooks, and epubs.

The history command is a useful way to find specific commands that have been used in the past, and it can also be used to discover what your personal most used commands are with the following command string:

history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head -15

The output strips any flags or parameters, providing only the root commands shown by the most commonly used. Example output may look like the following:

$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn |head -n 15
56 traceroute
35 nslookup
35 ssh
31 ls
28 curl
25 sftp
23 gcc
23 make
18 cd
18 cat
17 round
15 python
13 kill
13 clear
10 defaults

The number to the left indicates how many times the command has been used, per what is listed in bash history. Clearing bash history will obviously change those numbers, as will any adjustments to the length of commands stored in bash_history, and having it disabled completely will obviously cause the entire command to report back nothing.

If you’d rather see the most used complete commands, perhaps to make aliases or for another purpose, simplifying the command string by removing awk will accomplish that;

history | sort -rn | head

Leaving the -n flag off of ‘head’ will default to list 10 items, but any number can be applied by specifying it with -n.

These commands will work in OS X and Linux, and should work in other unix variations as well.