Secrets is a pretty nifty system preference panel add-on that lets you access all sorts of hidden ‘secret’ preference options. Instead of typing a bunch of default write commands you can basically just click checkboxes or change dropdown options to easily enable some pretty cool stuff.

It’s pretty comprehensive, with a bunch of options for Safari, Dock, Finder, Xcode, and so much more. There’s really too much to list, so if you like tweaking with your Mac’s settings, install secrets to make your life easier.

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Knowing how to clear cookies is pretty important for any number of reasons, be it for personal preference or troubleshooting issues with websites. You may be wondering how to remove cookies on a Mac running the Safari web browser, and that is exactly what we’ll show how to do. There are actually a few ways to delete cookies in Safari on Mac OS X, we’ll show you how to delete all cookies from Safari, and how to delete specific site cookies from Safari on Mac too.

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With the pbcopy and pbpaste commands, you can use the command line to manipulate clipboard contents but also access your Mac OS X clipboard directly through the Terminal. Yes, that means you can access what you copied in a GUI app and use it in the command line seamlessly, and vice versa. We’ve shown a brief introduction on how to use both pbcopy and pbpaste from the command line before, but we wanted to demonstrate a few additional methods to use these incredibly useful tools on the Mac, like how to directly access whatever is currently stored in the Macs clipboard from the terminal prompt.

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Google Chrome is out in beta for Mac OS X and although it’s relatively barebones, it seems pretty stable and certainly is fast. I still prefer Safari overall but I am glad Google Chrome is finally on the Mac platform in a usable release. Google also announced their public Chrome Extensions set today, which was previously closed off just to developers. The Gmail extension is a nice addition but I’m really hoping for something like Firebug for Chrome so that I can finally ditch my Firefox bloatware, and then I’ll be able to just run Safari and Chrome… one can dream!

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Google Chrome Extensions

If you’re having trouble installing Chrome Extensions on your Mac, check out this guide on TechCrunch for a workaround.

One of the quickest ways to get your external IP address in Mac OS X or unix is by launching the Terminal and typing one of the following commands with curl. To be perfectly clear here, we’re looking for the external public IP address of the hardware in use, this is what broadcasts to the world, this is not the same as a LAN IP or local IP, which is usually not public.

To get started open the command line and choose one of the syntax approaches below to retrieve an external IP.

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With a little bit of hacking and modification, you can add up to 24 additional visual effects to iChat video conferencing and Photo Booth! A reader pointed out this very cool Mac OS X mod and if you like to play around with Photo Booth or iChat effects it’s worth the effort, since it gives you some new nifty options.

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You can quickly clear all of the text from the Spotlight menu without closing the window by hitting Command-Delete, I discovered the use in this after my cat walked across my keyboard entering in a lengthy mishmash string of characters. Try it out!

You can schedule your Mac to sleep, wake, shutdown, or boot up at any time or any regular interval using the Mac System Preference ‘Energy Saver’ schedule settings. This provides for an excellent option for work Macs that you want to be awake or boot when you arrive in the morning, and to sleep or shut down at a provided time when you leave in evening. Of course there are tons of other uses for the overlooked scheduling feature, so let’s learn how to set up this up.

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The Mac OS X Preview application has a a few little known image adjustment features for rapid image orientation flipping or rotation that are quite powerful, and if you’re looking to make quick adjustments to rotate a picture or mirror vertically or horizontally the general orientation of any image file, a great Mac app to do so is bundled on every MacOS and Mac OS X machine from the get go with Preview.

Using the app to complete these tasks is quick and easy, here’s how to adjust orientation of either a single picture or multiple pictures at the same time.

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You can convert m4a music files to mp3 format very easily by using the same program that creates m4a files… iTunes! Yes that’s right, iTunes can double as a music file conversion program, and in this case it’s one of the easiest ways known to convert m4a to mp3 that doesn’t require any additional software downloads.

This audio format conversion trick works in all versions of iTunes on any computer whether it’s an OS X Mac or Windows PC.

We’ll walk through each necessary step to convert m4a files to mp3 format with the iTunes application, let’s begin the tutorial.

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Want to navigate within a websites directory structure? If you use Safari then you can Command+Click the Title of any website window in Safari and you can pull up a nice navigable drop-down list of the websites directory paths.

This is really handy if you’re deep in some archive or if you’re looking at an image and want to cut down to the parent directory.

Note this particular trick only applies to versions of Safari on Mac where the title bar is visible on of a website, which is generally on older versions of Safari for older versions of Mac OS X. Modern Mac OS versions have simplified the Safari interface to show the URL and search bar within the title, and instead page titles are part of tabs or in a tab bar, where command+clicking does not do anything on those versions. There may be a way around that, if you know if it share with us in the comments of course.

Regardless of whether or not a particular Safari version supports this trick, this tip also works in a similar way in the Finder of Mac OS X too and that applies to basically every version of Mac OS released, so try it there too!

I’m a procrastinator with holiday shopping, and anything I can do online makes my life easier. Unfortunately when waiting until the last minute, you often lose out on having things shipped in time, but thankfully Apple has a new service that will help this situation. Between December 15 and December 24, you can order products online with Apple and pick them up at an Apple store, even having them gift wrapped for you. Cool!

Apple.com: Reserve & Pick Up

To list all mounted drives and their accompanying partitions from the Terminal on Mac OS X, you can use the diskutil command with the list flag. This approach will display all disks, drives, volumes, and containers on any drive connected to the Mac, including boot volumes, hidden volumes (like the Recovery partition), empty volumes, unformatted drives, and all other disks.

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Moving your iTunes music library to another location or machine is really easy to do because Apple has made iTunes store and maintain all of your music in one central location. Thus, that directory is fairly transportable, and if need be it can be relocated to a different location with relative ease.

Unless you have changed it has been changed to something else, iTunes music is by default stored in a Mac users home directory located at ~/Music/iTunes/ and that is the basis of what we’ll use to relocate, moving the library elsewhere.

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Want to open a Finder window from the current directory location in Terminal? Mac OS makes this easy!

From the Mac Terminal, you can immediately open whatever folder or directory you are working within into the Finder of MacOS and Mac OS X by simply typing the a short command string and executing it. To try this out yourself, you’ll want to use the following command:

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We have discussed SnowFall just about every holiday season for the past few years because it’s really that great of a screensaver for the winter and holiday season. It is so great that Apple has featured it in their Apple Stores around the holidays on numerous occasions, so if it has Apple’s seal of approval, it has ours.

SnowFall is delightfully simple but absolutely beautiful with it’s 3d rotating snow flakes, you can customize the screen saver in regards to how many snowflakes are falling, how fast they are going, the background color, the background image, and whether you want stripes or no stripes on the background. Here are some screenshots showing the customization and diversity of the screensaver, but I assure you screenshots do this screen saver absolutely no justice, you just need to install it yourself to see how beautiful it really is.

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Installing SnowFall ScreenSaver in Mac OS X:
* Drag the SnowFall.qtz file into ~/Library/Screen Savers/
* Launch System Preferences and under “Desktop & ScreenSavers” you’ll be able select SnowFall
* Adjust settings as you see fit
* Enjoy falling snow on your Mac screen saver!

A few notes: Snowfall works in OS X 10.4 through 10.6, but not 10.7 Lion, 10.8 Mountain Lion, or later.

Most Mac users who want to schedule a Mac to startup at a specific time will use the Energy Saver schedule tool in System Preferences, but for the more technically savvy, another option is to schedule the boot time of a Mac through the command line.

We’ll show you how to use the pmset command to schedule a Mac to boot up (or wake from sleep), this is a great tip and I use it to get my Mac to boot before I get to the office, reducing the time necessary to wait to use the computer.

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With modern versions of Mac OS X you can input Chinese Characters directly into the trackpad! This is an extremely cool feature but requires a newer Mac with a multitouch trackpad as well, so it’s best for Mac laptops and the Magic Trackpad surface.

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