It’s a good idea to check the hard drive health of a Mac as part of a periodic maintenance routine. Doing this is extremely easy with Disk Utility, and we’ll cover exactly how to verify hard disks, how to repair them, and what to do if you encounter any issues or errors in the process. This works for all hard drives, whether it’s an internal drive, an external drive, or a boot disk, though the process is slightly different for boot drives. Let’s begin. Read more »
What do you get when you combine two Apple fans on wedding day? A wedding picture featuring husband and wife using their MacBook Pro’s, of course.
We typically post interesting Mac setups on Saturdays, but Gabor P sent in this cute picture of he and his wife using their Macs on that special day, and we had to put it up.
For those wondering, the Macs are:
Wife: MacBook Pro 13″ Mid 2010 , 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo , 4GB RAM , 320GB HDD
Husband: MacBook Pro 13″ Early 2011 , 2.3GHz i5 , 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 750GB HDD
If you want to use an iPhone or iPad during a plane flight, you’re supposed to turn Airplane mode on to disable the built-in wireless communication aspects of the device. Airplane mode disables cellular and 3G/4g connectivity, GPS, wi-fi, and Bluetooth capabilities, but how are you supposed to use inflight wi-fi service if everything is turned off? The solution is to enable Airplane mode as usual, but then manually turn on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth separately on the iOS device:
Launch Settings and flip “Airplane Mode” to “ON”
Tap on “Wi-Fi” and flip the switch to “ON”, join the wireless network as usual
For Bluetooth use, within Settings tap on “General” and then tap “Bluetooth” to enable separately
Either choice will not reenable the cellular modem or connection, typically keeping you within the realm of acceptable behavior for most flights. You’ll probably want to check with the specific airline before doing this, but chances are if they offer inflight wireless service then it’s acceptable behavior.
Outside of flying, using Airplane mode but turning on wi-fi is an easy way to temporarily turn an iPhone into an iPod touch, letting you use wifi networks but avoid any potentially expensive voice or data roaming charges.
Apple has started to air two new iPhone 4S commercials, this time featuring actor John Malkovich speaking with Siri. The first ad, shown below, is titled “Life” and features Siri getting philosophical in response to a simple inquiry about life, replying with:
“Try and be nice to people. Avoid eating fat. Read a good book every now and then. Get some walking in. And try to live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”
The second commercial, also embedded below, is titled “Joke” and features a more typical Siri interaction, covering weather, appointments, restaurant searches, and a bad joke about two iPhones walking into a bar.
Both commercials are roughly in the same theme as the other recent celebrity spots featuring Samuel L Jackson and Zooey Deschanel, but have otherwise veered away from Apple’s more traditional commercials.
There are so many keyboard shortcuts throughout Mac OS X and it’s myriad of third party apps that it’s easy to forget them or get lost trying to memorize the sea of keystrokes for each app.
This is where CheatSheet will make your life easier, it’s a tiny free application that sits in the background waiting to be summoned from any Mac app to instantly show all keyboard shortcuts for that application.
The iPhone has the Compass app to help show you which direction you are facing, but if you’re in an area with cellular reception a much more practical and useful approach is to use the Maps app. This lets you see which direction you are facing on a map of the area, so you can quickly see landmarks or whatever else you are looking for.
This will work on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with internet connectivity, though it’s likely most useful in the 3G/4G enabled models for obvious reasons.
Launch Maps app and tap the Arrow icon to locate where you are
When Maps has centered on your location, tap the Arrow icon again
The arrow icon will switch to show what looks like a flashlight beam coming out of the point, this orientates the Maps app based on which way you are facing. Use this feature to either quickly find North, South, East, and West, or if you’re in the middle of the nowhere you can use it to find your way to the nearest road or familiar landmark that you find on Google Maps.
The primary weakness with this method is that iOS and Google Maps does not store or cache maps data locally on the device. This means if you’re out of cell range and you use the compass feature of Maps, you’ll just have a direction pointed out on a blank grid, unable to find any meaningful landmarks or points on the Map. This prevents an iOS device from serving as a true GPS replacement for serious outdoor uses, but if you’re in a bind it can be better than nothing.
You can create an image of a Mac hard drive with the help of a free third party utility called Carbon Copy Cloner. The resulting disk image will be saved as the familiar .dmg format, which has a number of potential uses ranging from creating a drive clone for backup purposes, restoring the image elsewhere as a bootable backup, or even for deploying the same Mac OS X installation on multiple machines. Another great usage for making a disk image of an entire hard drive is for upgrading a hard drive, or replacing a hard drive, since you can clone the current drive to the new one.
Carbon Copy Cloner makes this entire process simple, whatever the reason you need to clone a drive, for both creating and restoring a disk image of an entire Mac hard disk. This tutorial will detail how you can create a disk image of an entire hard drive on a Mac, and then how to restore that cloned disk image to a drive on the Mac as well.
If you want color icons back in your OS X Finder window sidebar but don’t want to deal with the existing procedures of manually installing SIMBL and the other components, grab SideEffects instead. SideEffects is a simple package that includes the three necessary components to add color back to Finder sidebar icons; SIMBL, ColorfulSidebar, and RelaunchFinder, all wrapped into a single easy to use installer to shorten the process considerably. Gone will be the drab grayscale icons, welcome back the color.
Want to have wget on Mac without Homebrew or MacPorts for whatever reason? You can do that by building wget from source at the command line.
The command line tool wget lets you retrieve a group of files from FTP and HTTP protocols, it’s a very useful utility for web developers and powerusers to have around because it lets you do things like perform quick and dirty site backups and even mirror websites locally.
Platypus is an excellent utility that lets you turn virtually any script into a self-contained Mac OS X application. Free and remarkably simple to use, Platypus will support just about any shell script, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Tcl, AppleScript, Expect, and even other scripting languages.
Virtually everyone knows you can click the yellow pill button in the upper left corner of a window to minimize a window in Mac OS X, but there are actually a few other ways minimize windows faster than that. The first is my preferred method which is a quick keystroke, and the other lets you double-click anywhere to send a window hiding.
The Minimize Window Keyboard Shortcut: Command+M
By far the fastest way to minimize windows is the Command+M keystroke, which works anywhere with the currently active window. You can modify it by adding an Option+H as well to minimize and hide everything including the currently active window with Command+Option+H+M
Double-Clicking Title Bars to Minimize Windows in OS X
Longtime Mac users should be familiar with this feature which lets you double-click anywhere in the titlebar to minimize a window. To do this in OS X, you’ll have to enable the feature in preferences:
Open System Preferences and click on “General”
Look under the scroll bar section and check the box next to “Double-click a window’s title bar to minimize”
This feature has been around in various forms since the early days of Mac OS 7, 8, and 9, long before OS X came along.
Running out of iCloud backup capacity happens quick whether you have a single iPhone or a handful of iOS devices. You’ll know this has happened because you get a friendly popup informing you of “Not Enough Storage” and that the automatic backup can not occur as a result. So what to do? There’s really two choices, one is the most obvious and involves upgrading the iCloud account, and the other is free and relies on you more actively managing your backups.
Troubleshooting computer problems is never particularly fun, and with so many potential third party add-ons, plugins, extensions, scripts, and whatever else is buried into OS X, how are you supposed to find everything to help determine what’s causing an issue? You need Consultant’s Canary, because whether you’re troubleshooting your own Mac or someone else’s, it’s going to save you tons of time and hassle.
Consultant’s Canary is a free self-contained python script that lists an absurd amount of information about the OS X installation that it’s launched from, including general system information, all login items, overly privileged processes, and a whole slew of third party system changes and augmentations, including address book plugins, Automator actions, additional frameworks, Safari plugins and extensions, kernel extensions, launchd jobs and launch agents, Mail plugins, third party System Preference panels, screen savers, Spotlight add ons, startup items, and more. Got all that? In other words, virtually every third party add-on that is currently installed on the Mac will be found and reported back in an easy to follow list that even includes the full file paths to the found items. Nothing is modified however, leaving the task of determining what doesn’t belong in the lists up to you.
Using Consultant’s Canary is easy, you can run the standalone Consultant’s Canary app directly on a single Mac which launches Terminal and a python script on it’s own, or you could open the apps package to find the heart of the app “dispatcher.py” which could then be used over a network to remotely diagnose and troubleshoot multiple Macs. The same version of Consultant’s Canary will work on any version of OS X later than 10.5, including Lion.
CC may just be the ultimate troubleshooting aid for Mac OS X, a remarkable feet for a free utility, making it’s an absolute must-have addition to a Mac power users toolkit.
Certain Wi-Fi networks require clients to use static IP addresses or manual DHCP information in order for a device to connect properly to that network. Adjusting the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to use a static IP address or manual DHCP settings is easy in iOS, here’s how you can do it with any version of iOS software.
This weeks Mac setup is brimming with hardware for both work and play. Coming to us from Terkel G, this awesome workstation features a couple of decked out Macs, iOS gear, and lots of other hardware for programming and making music. Hardware shown includes:
iMac 27″ top line 2011 model
Apple Cinema Display
MacBook Pro 17″ fully upgraded
iPad 3
iPhone 4S
Dell XPS 22″ Monitor
Akai MPK MIDI Keyboard
Akai MPC5000 Drum Machine
Senheizer Mic
TC Electronick Sound Card
I don’t know a thing about music but this setup looks pretty great. The floating speakers above the desk is a nice touch too.
For anyone else who was wondering about the vi/vim cheat sheet wallpaper, we’ll post a link if we get our hands on it.
Want your Mac setup featured on OSXDaily? Send in a good picture or two with a list of hardware and a brief description of what you use your Apple gear for to osxdailycom@gmail.com
Ever wish you had a system wide equalizer to adjust all audio output in Mac OS X and not just in iTunes? Maybe you want to adjust the way all audio output sounds or maybe you just want to boost the output volume of the built-in Mac speakers. We’ll show you how to do both by creating your own universal EQ using two free tools, follow along:
AU Lab – free download from Apple Developers (requires free Apple Dev ID)
Download and install both Soundflower and AU Lab, you will then need to restart your Mac to have full access to the audio components. Once rebooted, follow along with the instructions below:
Set Up a Universal Audio Equalizer for Mac OS X
Set System Volume to the maximum level, do this either through the menu bar or by hitting the Volume Up key repeatedly
Open System Preferences from the Apple menu and select the “Sound” panel, followed by the “Output” tab. Select “Soundflower (2ch) from the Output list
Now launch AU Lab, found in /Applications/Utilities/
From the “Audio Input Device” pulldown menu, select “Soundflower (2ch)”, and then from “Audio Output Device” menu select “Stereo In/Stereo Out”
Click the “Create Document” button at the bottom of the screen
At the next screen, look for “Output 1” column and click the “Effects” dropdown, selecting “AUGraphicEQ”
This is your new system-wide equalizer, set it how you see fit. Changes here will impact all audio output on the Mac
When satisfied with the EQ settings, hit Command+S to save the EQ settings file and put it somewhere easy to find like the Documents folder
Now open AU Lab preferences from the AU Lab menu, click on the “Document” tab and click the radiobox next to “Open a specific document”, selecting the .trak EQ file you saved in the previous step
Optional final step: If you want the EQ settings to load on every Mac OS X boot, right-click on the AU Lab icon, go to Options, and select “Open at Login”
It’s important to note that AU Lab must be running in order for the equalizer to have an effect, keeping it running will consume a small amount of CPU resources but it’s much less process hungry than some of the third party alternatives available on the market.
A new report from Bloomberg appears to confirm rumors that the next iPhone will have a larger display. Although Bloomberg doesn’t mention a specific screen size, the earlier reports from Wall Street Journal and Reuters claim it will measure 4″ diagonally.
According to Bloomberg, the late Steve Jobs worked closely on the redesigned iPhone project before his death last year, reiterating rumors that surfaced last October that the so-called iPhone 5 was his last big project.
The report goes on to speculate the next iPhone will also include 4G LTE internet access, a longstanding rumor that gained significant strength after Apple released the 4G LTE equipped 3rd generation iPad.
No release date is known for the next iPhone, though most assumptions point to a release on the same Fall schedule set last year by the iPhone 4S, suggesting an announcement sometime around September or October.
Photo Stream is an excellent iCloud feature that automatically syncs all pictures taken on an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch to one anothers Photo libraries, and it will even sync with Mac OS X through the iPhoto app. Not everyone uses iPhoto to manage pictures though, and if you just want quick access to those pictures from the Mac Finder you can use a neat trick to access the entire iOS Photo Stream directly from the Mac desktop.
It’s a good idea to check the hard drive health of a Mac as part of a periodic maintenance routine. Doing this is extremely easy with Disk Utility, and we’ll cover exactly how to verify hard disks, how to repair them, and what to do if you encounter any issues or errors in the process. This works for all hard drives, whether it’s an internal drive, an external drive, or a boot disk, though the process is slightly different for boot drives. Let’s begin.
