You can adjust your Mac’s sound volume level silently by holding down the Shift key and then pressing the volume up or volume down keys. This complete silences the audio feedback of quacking and beeping as the sound goes up and down, allowing you to change the volume without creating a bunch of noise.

Remember, you have to hold down the Shift key each time you adjust volume to gain a result from this, it’s not a permanent change. This per-adjustment approach is really handy when you’re in a quiet office or library and don’t want the beep sounds blaring as you adjust system volume.

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You can easily resize any disk partition in Mac OS X using the included Disk Utility app, located in /Applications/Utilities, and you can even resize a mounted volume. In fact, you can grow or shrink HFS+ (Mac OS X) Partitions on the fly, with the resizing done live regardless of whether the drive is internal or an external drive, or even the boot volume.

A word of advice: Resizing mounted boot volumes isn’t always the best idea in the world because there’s a tiny potential something could go wrong. Before you go messing around and resizing your partitions, be sure to backup your data using Time Machine or whatever other backup service you prefer and make a recent back up.

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If you’re a GeekTool user and you’re looking for a bunch of awesome GeekTool scripts, look no further. Geeklets is a site run by the UK based MacOSXTips, and it allows for users to submit their own GeekTool scripts and rate others. It’s newly launched so there’s a limited supply of scripts and vote data to work with, but this is definitely going to be a great repository for all us GeekTool fans. Each script listed includes a screenshot of it running on the Mac desktop within GeekTool, information on the script itself, and of course the ability to download the scripts. Definitely check this out!

MacOSXTips: Geeklets

The above screenshot is pulled from the site showing a couple GeekTool scripts running, there’s a ton to choose from, so poke around and see what you find.

Aliases are wildly useful on the Mac, offering quick access to anything in the file system.

Most Mac users make aliases through the File menu, but did you know there’s a fast trick for dragging and dropping to create an alias of anything?

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Update: Apple has fixed the exploit, the below link is preserved for posterity but no longer works to display anything abnormal.

A few weeks ago, there was an active XSS Exploit on Apple.com with their iTunes site. Well, a tipster sent us the exact same cross site scripting exploit found again on the Apple iTunes site (UK in this case). As a result, there are some rather amusing variations of the Apple iTunes page appearing, and again some very frightening ones, as the above screenshot demonstrates a login page that accepts username and password information, stores this login data on a foreign server, then sends you back to Apple.com. The most annoying variation sent to us tried to stuff about 100 cookies onto my machine, initiated an endless loop of javascript pop-ups with Flash files embedded in each of them, and iframed about 20 other iframes, all while playing some really awful music.

Here’s a relatively harmless variation of the XSS capable URL, it iframes Google.com:

http://www.apple.com/uk/itunes/affiliates/download/?artistName=Apple%20%3Cbr/%3E%20%3Ciframe%20src=http%3A//www.google.com/%20width=600%20height=200%3E%3C/iframe%3E&thumbnailUrl=http%3A//images.apple.com/home/images/promo_mac_ads_20091022.jpg&itmsUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fitunes.apple.com%2FWebObjects%2FMZStore.woa%2Fwa%2FviewAlbum%3Fid%3D330407877%26s%3D143444%26ign-mscache%3D1&albumName=a%20wide-open%20HTML%20injection%20hole

It doesn’t take much effort to do your own version. Anyway, let’s hope Apple fixes this quick.

Attached are a few more screenshots of links sent in by tipster “WhaleNinja” (great name by the way)

If you regularly use Spotlight (or Services) to access the dictionary app in Mac OS X, you may have noticed that with each definition a new window is spawned. This can quickly lead to clutter, which annoyed TUAW enough to ask MacOSXHints for a solution. Like magic, MacOSXHints provided one and that’s what we’re sharing here. Basically, this causes Dictionary to only use a single window on the Mac.

This is accomplished with a defaults command string, so you need to have some command line experience or just copy and past the pertinent text below.

To force Dictionary to use only one window, launch the Terminal and type the following:

defaults write com.apple.Dictionary ProhibitNewWindowForRequest -bool TRUE

You can reverse this by changing TRUE to FALSE and re-executing the command.

Relaunch Dictionary, and the change will take effect. Cool!

Holy cow. Tim Royer has posted a graph of GeekBench benchmark test suite scores for the iMac 27″ Core i5 and iMac Core i7 models, and the numbers are pretty amazing. The 27″ Core i7 model just barely underperforms a brand new $2999 Mac Pro. So what? Well, the 27″ iMac Core i7 model is only $2199, and it includes a massively beautiful 27″ LCD that doubles as a monitor. Wow. The iMac Core i7 model is a $200 upgrade to the Core i5, which is also lightning fast, but the performance increase from the Core i5 to the i7 is dramatic, so that looks to be money very well spent.

Suddenly my MacBook Pro with a 3300 GeekBench score seems hopelessly inadequate!

The Command-Tab key sequence in Mac OS X works to summon a quick application switcher, it’s an excellent trick that many advanced users frequently use to switch apps and help multitasking, but it seems lesser known amongst Mac users in general. Even if you know of the Command+Tab trick, it turns out there are many more features available within the Command-Tab application switcher than just hitting Command+Tab itself, in fact you can navigate within the app switcher, hide apps, quit apps, and more.

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There are multiple ways to convert AVI video files to MOV video format on the Mac. Perhaps the easiest free ways to convert video from an AVI file to MOV format in Mac OS X is bt using an external app like Miro, VLC, or by using the Perian plugin for QuickTime.

Here’s a step by step guide of what you’ll need to do using one of these apps:
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Did you know you can quickly access Wikipedia from anywhere in OS X by using Spotlight? Yes seriously you can, similar to the Spotlight dictionary feature.

Here’s how Wikipedia access from Mac OS X works:
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Sunday Funday… and now we’re driving cars with iPhones. We all know that texting and driving is distracting, but what about using your iPhone to actually drive a car? Someone actually figured out how to do this, and here’s the video. This seems nice and safe, nothing could possibly go wrong here…

via LifeHacker: Drive a car with your iPhone

Apple’s newest snazzy NYC store got 10,000 job applications and just over 200 were hired, making a 2% acceptance rate. BusinessInsider points out this is lower than the 7% acceptance rate at Harvard University. I imagine the economic situation contributes to the slew of resumes, but even still, those are some pretty remarkable statistics.

Source: BusinessInsider: Harvard is easier than Apple

Listening to a great song that you think everyone should hear? You can easily share music with your friends thanks to iChat and iTunes, just drag a song from iTunes into an iChat window and off it goes! This may be Snow Leopard and iTunes 9 only, I don’t recall this feature working in Leopard.

Adobe Flash cookies are not deleted when you remove your browser cookies, because they are stored independent of your browser, meaning Flash cookies from Safari are accessible via Firefox, and vice versa. The interesting thing about Flash cookies though is that they could technically track your web browsing long after you have left the site that originated the Flash cookie, this is particularly the case with some advertising networks that appear ubiquitously around the web. Flash cookies actually have another name, they are known as Locally Stored Objects, or LSO’s, but whatever you want to call them, here is how to delete and remove Flash cookies, or LSO’s.

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Did you know that iChat and iCal work very well together? If you’re having a conversation in iChat and you or anyone else mentions a date or a day, you can hover over that mentioned date/day and add an iCal event directly from iChat without ever launching iCal! Try it out yourself with any iChat conversation, just throw in a day and see how well it works, it’s quite impressive.

OS X Daily editor Ryan pointed this out to me via Twitter a couple weeks ago, and I was surprised to learn just how well it worked. It’s now part of my daily workflow, it is very handy. Thanks Ryan!

If you have a large iTunes library it’s really easy to inadvertently gather duplicate songs, thankfully cleaning up and removing the duplicates from the iTunes song library is really easy.

Both iTunes for Mac and iTunes for Windows support an ability to easily remove duplicate songs, here’s how to do it:

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Grave, tilde, acute, circumflex, umlaut… all the fun accent codes that you might need to use. So if you need to type an accented letter in Mac OS X, we’ll show you how to quickly type them using the special option key based keystroke modifiers.

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This works in many versions of Mac OS X I’m pretty sure this only works in Snow Leopard, you can right-click/control-click on many App icons in the Dock to do things like:

* Create a New Window in Safari
* Create a New TextEdit Document
* Launch a New Remote Connection in Terminal
* Shuffle iTunes Songs
* Open a new Chat in iChat
* Set your Away Message in iChat

and so much more, right from the Dock! This is a very handy feature that I find myself using more and more, try it out with other apps and see what you get. Some of this may work in Leopard but I no longer have a Leopard machine to test this on, perhaps one of our other writers or readers can double check. Thank you readers for confirming this works in many versions of Mac OS X!