The OS X task management tool Activity Monitor includes an excellent and little known feature that lets you see precisely what files, ports, and IP’s are being interacted with by any single process or application. Here is how to use it:

1. Launch Activity Monitor, found in /Applications/Utilities/
2. Double-click on the process or application name you want to see open files and ports for
3. Click the “Open Files and Ports” tab

The list is scrollable and shows full paths to all files that are being interacted with by the application/process. Much of the data will be unfamiliar to many users, with obscure system files, caches, and plists being accessed, but you’ll also find paths that are easy to identify which can be helpful in resolving system conflicts and troubleshooting certain problems. Similar filesystem access data can be provided with the command line tool opensnoop, but for most Mac users the GUI Activity Monitor will be more friendly to their needs.

Ports are identified as numbers, and you’ll also be able to see the IP’s of any active internet or network connections that have been opened by the application. The data is presented a little rough, if you want an easier to browse version of open network connections take a look at the free GUI tool PrivateEye. IP and port data can also be uncovered through the command line tool lsof if you’re more technically inclined.

Anytime I schedule anything particularly important I use iCal alerts to remind me of the event. But I really only want to receive the alarm on my iPhone which is the device I have with me all the time, rather than coming home and opening my MacBook screen to an outdated alert from earlier in the day. The solution for this is to disable all iCal alerts in Mac OS X, which will not impact the alarms on other synced iOS devices:

• From iCal, pull down the iCal menu and choose “Preferences”
• Click the “Advanced” tab and check the box next to “Turn off all alerts”

Close out of Preferences and the next time an alarm is scheduled to go off it won’t happen on the Mac. This is also a helpful setting to adjust for auxiliary Macs that have iCloud configured where you want access to the Calendar data but don’t want to be annoyed with the popup alarm.

This awesome Mac setup shot was sent in all on its lonesome with very little information, but as you can see it’s a great looking setup so it’s worth a post anyway. Here’s what I can identify in the picture:

• MacBook Air 13″ running the iTunes Screensaver
• White iPad
• White iPhone 4
• Apple Cinema 27″ display
• Third party (Dell?) 27″ display
• Auxiliary 17″ display
• AudioEngine speakers?
• Magic Mouse and Apple wireless keyboard

It doesn’t look like the MacBook Air is driving all three displays, so presumably there is a Mac Pro or Mac Mini somewhere under the desk, and the screen on the far left looks more like a Linux desktop than Mac OS X so there’s probably a PC somewhere in the mix too. A bit of a mystery, but it’s pleasant to look at so thanks to Michael H for sending this in!

Got some great pictures of your Mac setup? Send them in to osxdailycom@gmail.com, include a brief mention of what you use it for and the hardware shown.

The iPhone, iPad, and iPod backups made with iTunes can take up a lot of local disk space on a computer. If you’ve moved the iPhone or iPad to sync with a new computer, sold an iOS device, or just want to potentially free up some disk space, you can easily delete these backups directly from iTunes.

Of course, by removing a local backup you’ll lose the ability to restore from that specific backup, so you’ll want to be selective in what you remove. With this method, you’ll see what devices are backed up to iTunes on a Mac or Windows PC, and then you can choose which one(s) you would like to delete from the computer.

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It can be helpful to configure Mac OS X to automatically mount shared network drives, this is particularly true for those of us who regularly connect to a network drive for file sharing or backups.

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Dictation on the iPad and iPhone converts your words into text, it can make typing in iOS easier but it’s also easy to accidentally activate with an inadvertent touch. It works quite well, you just press the microphone button on the iOS keyboard and it listens to what you say, and then converts your speech into text on the iPhone or iPad.

For a variety of reasons you may want to either turn Dictation on or off, and if you don’t use Dictation it’s simple to disable which also hides the little microphone button from appearing on the keyboard. This tutorial details how to disable or enable Dictation in iOS for iPhone and iPad, so you can toggle this featureoff and on as needed.

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If you’ve ever wished you could check up on your house while you’re away, wish no more because we have a simple solution. We are going to configure a Mac as a home security camera that will open a live video stream on demand which can be watched remotely from anywhere via an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or another Mac. If this sounds potentially complicated, it’s actually not at all, and everything is achieved through a little FaceTime hackery. Read along to get the Mac security cam configured in no time at all with just about any version of Mac OS X and iOS!

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Ever noticed that when you copy an email address from OS X Mail app and paste it elsewhere that you get the addressees full name as well as their email address? Try it yourself by right-clicking on someones email address like someonesname@domain.com and copy it, then paste it elsewhere and it will show up as “Someones Name “, which can be fairly annoying if you just want an address.

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The next time you’re in desperate need to crack open a beer bottle, reach for your iPad power adapter. Say what? Well, apparently it can double as a bottle opener, not that we’d recommend that.

This may be the ultimate Apple-geek party trick and I’m sure college students the world over are rejoicing in their dorms right now at this exciting new discovery, but that doesn’t mean anyone endorses this practice or that we’d recommend you trying.

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Many people equate productivity with screen size and assume it’s difficult to get much work done on a small screen. That simply isn’t true, I use a MacBook Air with the 11″ display and use the following tips to stay focused and maximize productivity with the small screen.

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We’ve shown you how to generate MAC addresses randomly and then how to go about changing a MAC address in OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion, but why have those be two separate actions? Using the command line, you can combine the two events into a single action to generate a valid MAC and then set it immediately.

Launch the Terminal and paste the following onto a single line:

openssl rand -hex 1 | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' | xargs echo "obase=2;ibase=16;" | bc | cut -c1-6 | sed 's/$/00/' | xargs echo "obase=16;ibase=2;" | bc | sed "s/$/:$(openssl rand -hex 5 | sed 's/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//' | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]')/" | xargs sudo ifconfig en0 ether

There is no confirmation or output, the MAC address is set immediately which you can verify with the following command:

ifconfig en0 |grep ether

You will probably need to reconnect to the wireless router after issuing the command, and in some cases turn wi-fi on and off again.

If you intend on using this often, setting up an alias in .bash_profile would be a good idea to avoid having to cut and paste the massive block of text.

Thanks to osmium for the great tip

Apple has issued an update to OS X Mountain Lion Developer Preview 3. The new build comes as 12A193i and is available through Software Update, which in turn downloads through the Mac App Store, making the update available to all developers with OS X Mountain Lion DP3 currently installed.

Noticeable changes in the new OS X 10.8 build are to Mission Control, Messages, System Preferences, Notifications Center, iCloud integration, and Preview app, but otherwise there do not appear to be significant differences in the Developer Preview 3.1 update. Of course, many bug fixes and resolutions to issues identified in the previous build have also been included, and an update to XCode 4.4 Developer Preview 4 was released alongside the update to build applications for the latest developer release.

OS X Mountain Lion is scheduled to be released to the public in late summer of 2012 and is expected to have more stringent system requirements than OS X Lion.

Full Screen apps in Mac OS X are managed by Mission Control, this means that if switch beween or gesture swipe from one full screen app to a desktop or another app, it follows the order of desktops and apps shown at the top of Mission Control.

This also means that you can rearrange the placement of fullscreened apps easily.

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If you’ve ever tried to do web research with concurrent browser windows from the iPad, you’ve probably found yourself either opening tons of Safari tabs, emailing yourself lots of links, dumping things into Pocket or a similar app, or just giving up and getting on a Mac laptop. A better solution is an iOS app called Dual Browser, which as you may have guessed splits the browser window so you can view two web pages at the same time, side by side.

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Each time you connect an iPhone, iPad, or iPod to a computer, iTunes launches and immediately begins to automatically sync all content between the iOS device and the connected computer.

If you’re annoyed with the auto-syncing aspect of iTunes, or you just want to disable it on an auxiliary Mac or Windows computer, here is how to do so.

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Did you take a great picture with your iPhone, but your iPhone camera orientation was upside-down or sideways? This happens pretty often, and if you ever need to correct the orientation of an image by rotating or flipping a photo, you can easily do so right on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

The image rotation and flipping tools are built directly into the Photos app of iOS, thus there is no need to download additional software for this simple image editing purpose. Here is how to easily correct and rotate a photo directly on iPhone or iPad:

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Do you want to join a group of songs together in iTunes to play together as a compilation even when iTunes on a Mac or Windows PC (or an iPhone, iPad, or iPod) is set to shuffle through a music collection?

For example, let’s say you have a large album you want to shuffle between, but you don’t want to shuffle other songs in iTunes.

That’s easy to accomplish in iTunes on Mac or PC, here is how to set this up:

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Whenever a new Terminal window is launched, a variety of system logs are read to provide information on the last login. One way to speed up launching a new terminal window is to delete those .asl log files, but you can achieve a substantial speed boost by simply setting Terminal to open a shell rather than /usr/bin/login. This is achieved through the same means of changing the shell and is just a few quick steps within Terminal settings.

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