The Mac OS X Terminal includes a great feature that lets you quickly access new manual pages from any existing Terminal window.
Screen zoom is a useful feature of Mac OS X that zooms into the screen where ever the cursor is located, making it easier to see parts of the screen, examine pixels, read small fonts, and perform other functions with greater visual clarity. The zoom feature was enabled by default in some earlier versions of Mac OS X whenever the control key was held down, but in modern versions of Mac OS X, the screen zoom feature has been turned off by default, and is now a feature of Accessibility settings.
Mac users who have Windows running in Boot Camp will appreciate this utility which grants complete keyboard access equivalency to Apple keyboards in Windows. The appropriately named “Apple Wireless Keyboard Helper” is a nice free Windows tool that restores many of the Windows-specific functions and keys that are seemingly lost when using an Apple keyboard, including the Delete key, Print Screen, CTRL+ALT+DEL, volume adjustment, function toggle, and more.
FreeSpaceTab is a free utility that lets you manage hard disks and mounted volumes directly from the Mac OS X menu bar.
With an attractive and simple GUI, you can pull the menu down to see all mounted drives and partitions, arranged by volume type (local drives, disk images, network volumes, etc) as well as free space available on each volume. Drives can ejected on a per disk basis, or mass ejected if you want to unmount everything. Also nice, the menubar icon itself can be set to display available disk space on the default boot volume, allowing for an quick way to see available drive capacity.
These menubar apps are especially useful if you hide the Mac OS X desktop to reduce clutter, because they give you information and functionality that you’d otherwise need to access the desktop or a Finder window for.
FreeSpaceTab is a better solution than the recently discussed a hidden eject menu that can be enabled in Mac OS X, containing additional functionality as well as the ability to eject disks. All in all a worthwhile app to download, check it out.
If you’ve maintained old iPhone baseband in order to utilize carrier unlocks, you’ll be pleased to know that you can now upgrade to iOS 5.0.1 and jailbreak untethered the iPhone while preserving the unlockable baseband. The procedure is done by using the newest version of PwnageTool 5.0.1, and if you’re familiar with past versions of pwnage then you should be right at home, but nonetheless we will walk through the entire process.
Note: Only need a jailbreak? If you don’t need a carrier unlock, use this guide to jailbreak iOS 5.0.1 untethered with redsn0w, it’s faster and doesn’t include the baseband preservation.
Before proceeding, make sure you meet the following requirements:
Assuming you meet all those requirements and you understand the risks, continue on. Read carefully or else you can accidentally update your baseband and lose your unlock.
The unlocked iPhone should now be good to use on another carrier. If you have trouble activating, use the original activated SIM card briefly to pass through activation, or run the newest version of redsn0w on top.
Typically we try to just post workstations for Mac setups, but Rejean H sent in pictures of what amounts to a giant collection of Macs built up over the years, and we just had to post it.
Ranging from some of the first Macs to be released, to the Macintosh Portable, Mac Classic, 20th Anniversary Mac, Power Mac 7200, 9500, Performas, eMac, G4 Cube, clamshell iBook, to modern aluminum iMacs and a new MacBook Air, this is a room full of one huge collection of Apple gear.
Check out more pictures below:
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Spotlight is a wonderful feature of Mac OS X that lets you quickly find literally anything on a Mac by search, that includes files, apps, folders, emails, you name it, and Spotlight will find it, but sometimes you don’t want everything to be indexed. Whether that’s an external backup drive, a scratch disk, a directory of temporary items, or just a private folder with files you don’t want easily found through the search function, you’ll find that excluding drives, files, and directories from Spotlight is actually very easy.
This is a classic picture of a young Steve Jobs giving the finger to an IBM sign in 1983, it has been circulating again after all these years thanks to Macintosh co-creator Andy Hertzfeld who posted the high res copy to Google+.
Here’s the text that was posted by Hertzfeld along with the amusing image of a young Mr Jobs, explaining the story behind the photo of Steve Jobs giving IBM the middle finger:
“In memoriam for Steve Jobs as 2011 draws to a close, here’s one more rare photo that illustrates his rebellious spirit. In December 1983, a few weeks before the Mac launch, we made a quick trip to New York City to meet with Newsweek, who was considering doing a cover story on the Mac. The photo was taken spontaneously as we walked around Manhattan by Jean Pigozzi, a wild French jet setter who was hanging out with us at the time. Somehow I ended up with a copy of it. My editor begged me to include it in my book, but I was too timid to ask for permission, especially since IBM was still making CPUs for Apple at the time.“
The book is his “Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made, which tells the story of how the original Macintosh was created. That subject was briefly discussed in the recent Steve Jobs biography as well.
The picture demonstrates the competitive nature of Mr Jobs and early Apple, and although the image has been around a while this is the first higher resolution copy to surface.
In the early days of Apple, IBM was largely considered the companies biggest competitor and enemy of sorts, as is demonstrated in the Ghostbusters spoof and of course the classic 1984 Superbowl commercial that launched the first Mac.
This is obviously a fun part of Apple history, or any fan of the retro computing era. Though looking back now several decades later, Apple is the behemoth, with a market cap significantly larger than IBM.
If you’ve been holding off on the Apple TV 2 4.4.4 update for an untethered jailbreak, you can now update the device without worry. A new version of Seas0npass has been released to to untether the Apple TV’s unique iOS 4.4.4 build, the tool remains extremely easy to use and supports most of the 3rd party plugins, including last.fm, XBMC, RSS feeds, and more.
As you may have guessed, the latest version of Seasonpass uses the same untether from the newest redsn0w iOS 5.0.1 jailbreaks.
Despite many similarities, Apple continues to not label the Apple TV 2 build as iOS 5 for the device, and continues to release builds as version 4. Apple TV OS v 4.4 brought a variety of new features to the device, but most notable are AirPlay mirroring (fun with the iPhone) and the addition of several live video feeds and trailers, along with bug fixes.
Before proceeding, update the Apple TV 2 to the latest 4.4.4 build, update iTunes, and download the appropriate Seas0npass version from above. You’ll also need the aluminum Apple TV remote and a microUSB cable to connect the Apple TV to the computer to perform the jailbreak.
Enjoy the newly jailbroken Apple TV 2, it’s untethered meaning you don’t have to connect it to a computer to boot or do anything funky. If you run into any troubles, check out the support pages of Firecore, the makers of the Seas0npass app.
ClipMenu is an awesome free clipboard history manager for Mac OS X that keeps track of nearly anything copied into the clipboard, ranging from plain and rich text, URLs, images, even files.
In 1984, Apple spoofed the classic Ghostbusters song by Ray Parker Jr, and this outrageously cheesy video is the result.
Have you noticed when you try and move an application out of the /Applications folder in modern versions of Mac OS X, you will end up creating an alias of the app instead?
What if you want to move an application out of the Applications folder of MacOS, and put the app somewhere else?
Another day another version of redsn0w is released… Redsn0w 0.9.10b3 includes a bug fix that caused some apps to not be able to run after the jailbreak was completed. I didn’t run into any problems on an iPhone 4, but if you did encounter any issues with apps crashing with the prior redsn0w jailbreak then you can go ahead and use the latest version to resolve them.
To fix an existing jailbroken device, all you need to do is run the newest 0.9.10b3 version over your existing jailbreak, just be sure to uncheck the “Install Cydia” option.
Nothing else is different about this release, it continues to be an untethered jailbreak for iOS 5.0.1 on iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPod touch 3rd & 4th gen, and iPad 1. If you’re not sure what to do, read our guide to jailbreak iOS 5.0.1 untethered using Redsn0w.
If you are not currently experiencing problems with your jailbreak, this is probably not a necessary download.
Need to use a scientific calculator on the iPhone? Instead of downloading a new app, just do the following ot instantly transform your iPhone into a complete scientific calculator:
Wi-Fi Diagnostics is an incredibly useful utility to troubleshoot and optimize any wireless network and the signal strength of computers that are connecting to it. This utility first came bundled in Mac OS X Lion and works with all wireless routers and not only the Apple branded ones, meaning you can improve the performance of just about any wifi network by using it and making some adjustments along the way. It’s easy to use and we’ll walk you through the process of getting the best wireless signal using the app, but first we have to uncover the tool itself.
The Wi-Fi Diagnostics app is buried within Mac OS X 10.7 & OS X 10.8, here’s how to access it:
/System/Library/CoreServices/
With Wi-Fi Diagnostics now in the easier to access Launchpad… open Wi-Fi Diagnostics.app, then:
Why Apple changed the process between OS X 10.7 and 10.8 is a mystery, but the feature remains in the newest versions of Mac OS X regardless. Anyhow…
Now is when the fun begins. The chart you see is a live wireless signal strength and noise meter, you want the yellow signal strength bar to be as high as possible. Pay attention to the green line of noise as well, you want that to be as low as possible in relation to the yellow line of signal strength.
If the signal strength is high and noise is low, you’re already good and you don’t need to change much. For most of us, signal will be lower than we want it to be, depending on where the wireless router is stored in relation to our computer gear.
Here are some tips to try out and to improve signal strength, keep an eye on the signal as you make adjustments:
Once you have arrived at a reasonable compromise to how your hardware is physically configured and the resulting signal strength, enjoy your newly optmized wifi network.
Some important things to remember here: not all internet connections are capable of transferring data at optimum wireless speeds, so you may not notice much of a difference in internet connectivity speed if any at all with these adjustments. This basically means that a weaker wireless signal may be more than adequate to transfer data at your ISP’s maximum bandwidth. Regardless, you’ll want the noise level to be as low as possible, since large amounts of wifi network noise can result in lost packets, reduced speeds, quirky behavior, random wireless connection dropping, and a variety of other problems.
If a wireless network is configured well and you continue to have problems with connectivity, check out some of our past articles on resolving such issues:
Using Wi-Fi Diagnostics I discovered my wireless signal to be much weaker when keeping the wifi router out of sight behind an LCD TV, simply moving the router away from the TV a few feet dramatically boosted signal strength. Run the app yourself and see what kind of performance boost you can get by adjusting your own wifi network.
Need to take a screenshot on the iPad? If the iPad has a Home button, like the iPad, iPad Air, iPad mini, and the first generation iPad Pro models, then taking a screenshot is extremely simple with a simple button press combination.
If you use a lot of DVD’s or CD’s on a regular basis, you may find some use enabling a hidden disk eject menu item. Once enabled, you’ll have a Finder pull down menu that lists discs, and selecting a disk from the menu ejects it:
/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/
To remove the Eject menu, just hold down the Command key and drag it out of the Mac OS X menu bar.
The Disk Eject menu works in OS X Lion but is probably only going to be useful for Mac owners who have a CD or DVD drive, because it doesn’t seem to show external USB devices in testing. It also seems to be connected to the same eject mechanism of just dragging a disk to the Trash, so if you have a stuck disc it’s probably not going to be as effective as a forced eject.
On a side note, once you’re in the Menu Extras folder you will find a variety of other menu bar items you can add by double-clicking. Most of these are also available by enabling various settings in System Preferences, but Eject seems to be unavailable elsewhere.
We recently showed you where iOS apps are stored locally on the computer, but if you just want to quickly access that folder or get to a single app in the Mac OS X Finder, you can do so with a right-click within iTunes:
The Mobile Applications folder will immediately open with the selected app highlighted. These .ipa files can then be backed up manually and copied to other computers that are authorized with the same iTunes account that originally purchased the app.
