Ever needed to eject a disc, cd, DVD, or media from the command line on a Mac? You can do that from the Terminal, as we’ll show here.
To eject a disc or media from the command line on Mac, open up your Terminal and type the following:
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Most new consumer Macs come with a built-in iSight / FaceTime camera which can be used for all sorts of fun, ranging from live video chatting in FaceTime, Skype, and iChat, to horsing around in Photo Booth, to using third party apps like Gawker to capture time lapse photography of whatever is going on. That hardware camera is located at the top of the screen as the little black dot on the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and iMac.
Despite the many fun and harmless uses of the hardware Camera, there are some security concerns with having a built-in camera particularly in academic and institutional settings, and because of this some System Administrators have taped covers over the iSight and even removed them from the machines entirely. Thankfully, there’s a much easier way to disable the built-in iSight camera, all you have to do is move a file.
Booting Mac OS X as usual shows the Apple logo and eventually you’ll wind up at a login screen or desktop, that’s attractive and all, but some users would prefer to see what’s going on behind the scenes. That’s what Verbose Boot Mode does, it shows you what is really happening during system startup on a Mac, and is great for troubleshooting purposes, but it can also just be interesting to see what exactly is going on during the MacOS and Mac OS X booting process.
Typically, if you wanted to boot in verbose mode on a per boot basis you would hit Command-V during startup, which brings up the familiar white on black console looking screen with a lot of scrolling text. On the other hand, some users may prefer to always see the complete verbose booting process on every boot including all kernel extension loading, details, and system messages on boot, and to do that you can adjust the firmware from the Terminal with the nvram command, as we’ll cover here.
Yes we have covered UNO in the past, but todays release of version 1.5 is a complete rewrite, offering even more features and interface improvements. For those that don’t know, UNO offers interface enhancements to Mac OS X to remove the brushed metal interface, thus unifying the appearance of Mac OS X to more closely resemble the sleek iTunes GUI. The new version also finally fixes some interface troubles with iTunes and Quicktime. Useful? Not really, it’s pure eye candy. Check out the screenshot below, and unify your Mac’s GUI!
Anytime you visit a website or do any other kind of DNS lookup, the IP address conveniently gets cached. While what’s convenient for most of us can be a real nuisance for others, particularly administrators who are moving around servers. This set of quick tips that Systems Administrators (and others) will surely appreciate covers flushing DNS caches in early release versions of Mac OS X system software, like 10.4, 10.3, 10.2, 10.1, and 10.0 (!).
Need to create an ultra-fast RAM disk in Mac OS X? We’ve got you covered with a command line trick that will generate a RAM disk of any size of your choosing. These instructions have been updated to support all versions of OS X, from modern releases to older ones too, so no matter what you’re running on the Mac, you’ll get a fast RAM disk running in no time at all.
Do keep in mind that RAM disks are temporary, and a reboot will cause the data on the RAM disk to clear off (just like RAM). Similarly, ejecting the RAM disk will remove it, and remove all data stored on the RAM disk. This makes RAM disks appropriate for temporary situations, caches, and situations where you need very fast disk read and write speeds.
There are some Mac users out there who love to customize and change the appearance of every single thing on their desktop, from the shape of their windows, to fancy wallpapers, to custom icons. Personally, I keep it simple, aside from a custom wallpaper I unify the desktop appearance with UNO, which provides a clean and consistent interface to all of Mac OS X. UNO doesn’t cut it for everyone though, so check out The Apple Blog with their list of 15 customization resources for Mac OS X:
We’re big fans of Spotlight here at OS X Daily, but we realize it’s not everyones cup of tea. If you’re someone who dislikes Spotlight enough to want it disabled completely then this is the guide for you. What you’ll need is some basic knowledge of the command line and a command line text editor (we’ll use nano in this example, perhaps the easiest). Note that some other Mac OS X features and programs are based on Spotlight’s search abilities, therefore some applications could behave abnormally if you disable Spotlight, particularly in search functions.
If you’re tired of waking up every morning to your old fashioned alarm clock, Awaken may be the app for you.
Awaken turns your Mac into a multifunction alarm clock, capable of waking up your Mac (assuming its sleeping) and initiating a user selected alarm of either a sound effect or song selected from your iTunes playlist.
Getting disk usage information on a Mac is often gathered by selecting a file, directory, or hard drive and hitting Command-I for Get Info, then appears a nice GUI interface with extended information about the selected object including disk usage. Command-I isn’t the only way to get disk info however, with the command line there are two useful utilities to gather this data that you should know; df and du. The following is a brief explanation of each command and how you can use them:
Need to quickly see where you are in the Finder by showing the current windows path on a Mac?
There are a few ways to do this in Mac OS X, for example you can use a defaults command to show the full path in Finder window title, and we’ll show you another couple of great tricks that are super easy to display the path itself at all times.
First, you may be aware that you can show the path bar in Mac Finder windows to always see the current path to folders on the Mac. That method was discussed by Lifehacker, who posted the following Mac tip about including a specific Path button in Finder windows:
“One of my main complaints about Mac’s Finder versus Windows Explorer is the inability to move up and down a folder tree easily. However, Finder’s Path button lets you do just that. The Path button isn’t included on the Finder toolbar by default, but you can add it by Ctrl-clicking and choosing “Customize Toolbar.” Then drag and drop the Path button – which kind of looks like a staircase – onto the toolbar. From there, use it to see where you are in the folder tree, and move up to enclosing folders in a click.”
That will enable a path button and it’s a great tip, but… there is an easier way to see the path details, and even navigate within the file system through the path structure: Just Command-Click on the Finder window’s titlebar to get the same path on the Mac.
You can then select any of the directories within the pulldown path menu to instantly jump to that directory. Keep in mind that you can navigate down to parent directories this way, but not to child directories, which is best handled through the traditional Mac OS X File browser (you know, just double-clicking a folder to open it like usual).
This nifty path trick also works in some other applications too, particularly the ones from Apple, but many third party developers also include the support in their own Mac apps too. Try it out!
Want to learn more? Don’t miss these 9 tricks for improving your Mac file system experience and to help master the Finder in Mac OS X, you’ll be close to power user status in no time.
We’ve received several questions asking how to block specific sites from being accessed directly on the Mac. The frustration seems to lie in how easy it is to circumvent the typical measures, such as setting Parental Controls and blocking sites in Safari, only to have them accessed in Camino or Firefox. Well, a quick and efficient way to block access to specified sites is by editing the /etc/hosts file, which has the added bonus of providing system wide results. Whether it’s children or your roommate who you’re trying to stop from visiting a particular website, here’s how to do it.
Gmail is arguably the best web based mail client, featuring a clean no nonsense interface and a monstrously large mailbox size hovering right under 3gb currently, you really never have to delete emails ever again.
Google Notifier brings Gmail to your Mac’s desktop by putting a convenient icon in the menu bar that alerts you to new mail messages, and like Gmail, it is unobtrusive and simple.
The icon is red if you have new mail, gray if you don’t.
It’s a small and free download and makes a great desktop addition for Mac Gmail users.
It’s long been known that Mac OS X 10.5 is due out sometime this year, but when exactly nobody knows and speculation on the release date has been all over the board. SwitchtoaMac.com uses empirical evidence to suggest that Leopard will be released in May, but they go a step further and predict the exact date: May 11, 2007. How they arrive at that date is interesting, if you enjoy the rumors and speculation game then it’s worth a glance.
Everyone enjoys a cool desktop background and OSXPlanet just might take the cake for its automatically updating planet wallpaper. You can choose any of the nine planets (eight if you’re anti-Pluto) and have them displayed as your background. Perhaps the most impressive is with our very own planet Earth, which you can set to display an automatically updated map showing where the sun is shining, where it’s night time, as well as current weather patterns. It’s an effect you really have to see for yourself, so check out the screenshots below and download OSXPlanet. The app is free so you have nothing to lose.
You’ve probably noticed by now that we frequently rave about Spotlight, an invaluable tool and one of the greatest features of Mac OS X. Although it’s main intention is to be an instant search utility for documents, pictures, music, emails, whatever, it also works wonders as a super quick application launcher (often I will use Spotlight more than the Dock for this purpose).
If you aren’t enjoying Spotlight quite yet, you are really missing out on one of the better features of the Mac operating system. That’s what these six handy little keystrokes are aimed at, they will help get you started to get the most from your Spotlight usage in Mac OS X.
Let’s get started! From opening the search menu, opening a separate search window, launching the first return, revealing items in the Finder, skipping category results, and clearing out the search results to start anew, we have them covered. In no particular order… the six keystrokes are:
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Dashboard is the kind of thing you either love or hate, using the widgets constantly or not at all. How much use you get out of Dashboard will probably determine if you want the feature to stick around in Mac OS X or not. As regular readers may recall, we have discussed how unused Dashboard widgets can take up a lot of memory and slow your systems performance on older Macs running versions of OS X prior to more modern releases with better memory management (think Leopard, not Mavericks), and we also showed you how to reclaim that memory by terminating the individual processes. But of course users can choose to go further, and this is relevant to all versions of OS X, so for those that don’t use Dashboard or its widget features at all, we’ll show you how to disable Dashboard completely (but don’t worry, it is just as easy to enable again should you change your mind).
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Have you ever watched an online video tutorial, or record a screencast of what you’re doing on your Mac screen? Ever wondered how to create one of these yourself? Of course getting the right software is part of the mix, but many users don’t even know where to begin.
Fortunately, there are many options available for capturing screen casts of OS X, one option is even bundled into the Mac! So regardless of what you are planning on doing and what version of software is running on your Mac, you will have options for recording your very own screencasts.
Let’s review a few of the top choices for creating screencasts on Mac.
