In some situations, you may wish to disable access to the System Preferences on a Mac. Often this is for lab environments or public use workstations, or perhaps for locking down a particular workstation for various reasons. While a common approach is to create a new user account that has limited access to system features and functionality, another method can be utilized with chmod that changes the access permissions to the System Preferences application itself within Mac OS, and when implemented properly all access to System Preferences on the Mac will be disabled and prevented regardless of how its attempted to be launched.

This approach to disabling access to System Preferences uses the command line and involves changing permissions to a critical system level application that is necessary for the proper functionality of all Macs. Therefore this is only appropriate to be used by advanced Mac users.

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It’s no secret, I hate Flash. It’s the plastic pink flamingos of the web but worse, it’s crass, it’s loud, it’s obnoxious, it will crash your web browser, and on a Mac it is a literal drag on the machine, sucking up the CPU and memory as if there’s no tomorrow. Adobe really laid a pile of dung with Flash on the Mac, which is probably why Apple won’t allow Flash to run on the iPhone or the new iPad. Anyway, enough of my opinions and ranting about the Flash problem, here’s some solutions:

I am a huge fan of ClickToFlash, the Safari plugin that prevents all Flash from loading unless you approve it. But what if you allow a Flash object to load with ClickToFlash and it goes crazy? Now comes BashFlash, a perfect compliment to ClickToFlash. BashFlash is a little menubar extra that automatically warns you if Flash is taking up too many CPU cycles (usually is) and lets you kill the Flash culprit instantly. Hooray! Your web browsing experience is normal again!

The only bad thing about BashFlash is that it requires a 64 bit Mac, but this is because 64-bit Safari forces Flash to run within it’s own process ID on 64 bit systems (interesting, I learn something new every day!), allowing BashFlash to target the resource hogging process and end it instantly.

BashFlash developer home
Download BashFlash now

Spaces is a really nice feature of Mac OS X that lets you place different windows and applications within their own workspace. Dragging a window to a new Space is just a matter of holding onto the window and pulling it towards the end of the screen.

You may have noticed that there’s a delay when dragging a window to a new space, which is handy for not accidentally dragging windows into a new Space but kind of annoying if you are expecting it to enter a new workspace instantly. The instant switching of workspaces is a lot closer to how these workspace managers, or ‘virtual desktops’ work in the Unix world, and if you have a background of using a Linux desktop you may miss that instant desktop switching.

You can change the timing of Spaces switching rather easily though, using the Terminal.

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The application Finder.app can’t be opened. -10810

I ran into the unpleasant 10810 error code recently and couldn’t find any workaround without a reboot. From what I’ve gathered by searching around on the web, Error 10810 occurs when the Launch Services framework has some sort of meltdown, causing the Mac OS X Kernel to run out of available threads for anymore processes to launch. In the event that some process has got errant and is in some infinite loop of launching and hoarding threads, this will cause a rather lovely barrage of error dialog boxes (see screenshot below).

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It’s easy to accidentally change directories to something you weren’t intending to (say, accidentally hitting cd and returning home, thus losing your place in a complicated directory structure seep in the file system somewhere), but thankfully there’s a command that will immediately take you back to the previous directory, regardless of what it was. The jump-back to prior directory command is a simple variation on ‘cd’ followed by a single dash (the minus symbol), the syntax looks like so:

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Did you know that you can put an iPhone inside a plastic bag and still use the touchscreen? Yes, that’s right, stick your iPhone in an airtight ziplock bag, and you’ll have an instant and amazingly cheap waterproof case for your iPhone. Well, waterproof may be a bit aggressive, and perhaps water resistant is a better term assuming you seal it off completely and are fairly delicate with it, but considering the extremely cheap price it’s hard to beat if you’re in a pinch and need some quick splash protection for the iPhone, whether that’s because you’re poking around in the kitchen or bathtub or simply because you’re spending a day at the beach.

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If you need to prevent the Dock icons from changing or being modified on a Mac, you can use defaults command strings to lock down the OS X Dock and prevent any adjustments or changes to how it appears on screen.

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If you’re a Ghostbusters fan you’ll get a kick out of this creative use of the Genie minimization effect in Mac OS X, which was used to re-create scenes from the movie.

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I often forget to empty my Trash, which can grow and grow and grow over time, but this picture shows a bloated trash can being taken it to a whole new level. 489GB!

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You can set Mac OS X to always securely empty the Trash and add a significant layer of security when removing files from the Mac. This is done just by adjusting a preference setting within the Finder, and it’s very easy to configure, here’s what you will want to do to use this option:

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Changing the iPhone root password is a good idea if you have Jailbroken your iPhone, it will prevent unauthorized users and applications from doing things you certainly don’t want them to do since the password is universal on all Jailbroken phones (unless it’s changed by the user). And yes in case it was not abundantly clear, you can not change the root password on an iPhone or iPad that has not been jailbroken as the user is not accessible, neither is the command line like this.

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This is a very cool feature I had no idea existed but accidentally stumbled across while on a recent flight. If you have an iPhone, you probably know that the earbuds included with it have a button to adjust volume and what not, well guess what, you can control the volume level in iTunes and QuickTime with the iPhone Earbud buttons as well! This works at least on the Unibody MacBook Pro’s, but I’m not sure if it works on the Unibody MacBook. Just plug in the iPhone earbuds to your Mac and launch QuickTime or iTunes to test it out yourself.

It’s also worth mentioning that the iPhone earbuds microphone works fine with Mac OS X too, and it makes a significantly better microphone than the one that is built in. This is particularly handy for VOIP calls through iChat, Google Voice, and Skype.

I’m a big fan of distraction free writing space, and so far WriteRoom has this market cornered pretty well on Mac OS X.

OmmWriter looks like a worthy contender though, it’s got a beautiful unobtrusive interface and is complete with a relaxing background and subtle peaceful sound effects… if that sounds a little cheesy it sort of is, but it’s actually pretty nice to write in!
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.DS_Store files store folder level metadata information (such as icon placement and background pictures) for Mac OS X to understand, this is fine and dandy and you’re likely to never even notice if you’re a bunch of Macs working together. Unfortunately, these .DS_Store files can be really pesky in a multi-platform network environment, they can basically just lead to unnecessary filesystem clutter that Windows & Linux users receive no benefit from.

Thankfully, you can prevent the DS_Store files from being created entirely by executing a simple command in the Terminal.
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I use the OS X Quick Look feature constantly for everything from quickly viewing pictures, movies, text files, and of course, source code. Source can be a pain to view in QuickLook because there’s no syntax highlighting by default though, but this excellent Mac plugin changes that.

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A colleague of mine is a recent Mac switcher and he was complaining to me that virtual desktops are not included in Mac OS X, the irony is that they are, they just have the name Spaces (coming from a heavy Linux background, I guess the naming convention just threw him off). Virtual Desktops are a very common and popular feature in most Unix GUI’s, but as Mac OS X has included virtual desktops within Mac OS X too.

Instead of being called “Virtual Desktops” though, Apple named them “Spaces”, but the concept is identical, multiple virtual workspaces on one machine. Spaces in Mac OS X lets you have up to 16 different workspaces to work within, you can even designate specific applications to run just within a particular space, which is very handy for creating a tidy work environment.

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Hey look it’s raining out of the snow! That’s something I don’t see everyday. But the Dashboard Weather widget in OS X has plenty of unique weather conditions that can be shown, and if you want to see them all you don’t need to wait until the seasons change.
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Typing the square root symbol in Mac OS X is just a matter of hitting ALT+V

√ – ALT+V

Note that these are Qwerty English specific instructions, other keyboard layouts and languages will likely vary.