If you’re a Comcast customer and you’ve entered in an incorrect URL or had a server time out recently, you’ve probably been extremely annoyed when you discovered you were being redirected to a page filled with Comcast ads. Comically, this obnoxious DNS redirect is named the ‘Comcast Domain Helper service’, and was forced on you whether you wanted it or not.

Remove Comcast DNS redirect

Things you’ll need to stop Comcast from redirecting your improper URL’s:

1) Your main Comcast account User ID / email address

2) Your cable modems MAC address

3) Visit the Comcast “Domain Helper” opt-out URL

In typical Comcast style, they altered your service without your consent, and you have to actually opt-out of the DNS hijacking service, thankfully you can do it online. Good grief.

Got an older version of Mac OS X that you want to use Gmail with? While newer versions of Mac OS and Mac OS X allow for simple integration of using Google accounts with a Mac, older versions of Mac OS X don’t necessarily have these capabilities.

But not to worry, you can still use Gmail on older OS X versions with the Mail app on Mac, you just have to know how to set it up!

This is a question you may see from time to time, particularly with people who have older hardware and OS X versions. In this situation, a friend of mine asked me how to setup the Mac OS X Mail.app to use Gmail and just when I was about to write up a detailed how-to for her, I came across an excellent guide on one of OS X Daily’s very own readers sites.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, check out Khürt Williams excellent walk-through, complete with screenshots:

IslandInTheNet.com – How to setup Mail app to use Gmail

Thanks Khürt!

Of course with newer versions of Mac OS X you can simply add the Gmail email account directly to the Mail app or through System Preferences, but the techniques described here apply to older versions of Mac OS X and OS X.

The iPhone, iPhone accessories, and iPhone ringtones are all the rage right now, so why not make your own iPhone ringtone? With a Mac or Windows PC it’s pretty straightforward using iTunes, follow these 10 steps and you can easily create your own iPhone Ringtone from whatever song you want. Note that songs with DRM will not usually work, meaning things purchased from the iTunes Music Store will probably not be able to turn into ringtones if they have DRM protection.

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This is a particularly handy trick for when you have limited screen real estate and want to fit more of a windows display on screen. A perfect example of this are the Hackintosh owners out there that are working with small netbook screen resolutions and some windows just don’t display properly, or won’t even fit on the screen. Instead of changing the actual screen resolution and losing screen real estate, you can scale all windows within OS X up or down by using the Terminal:

defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor 0.8

This will render all displayed elements at 80% of their original size

killall Finder

To set back to the default simply change the Scale Factor to 1.0 like so:

defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1.0

If you want to make things larger and easier to see, scale up to 1.2 or more, just play around until you find what works best for you. Remember to kill the Finder after each change in order to make changes take place.

Note: Virtually scaling up and down GUI elements can lead to some quirky appearance issues with certain apps, so test scale factors to find what works best for you and your apps.

We don’t want it to happen, but there may come a day in all Mac owners lives that their warranty expires, and that date is related to your original date of purchase, give or take the time for any additional AppleCare warranty service you have purchased in addition.

So how do you check your Macs warranty information online? Follow these steps to find your devices serial number, then check for warranty status on the Apple Website.

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Paintbrush is a Microsoft Paint clone of sorts for Mac OS X, it’s an absolute joy to use in it’s simplicity and we are pleased that a new version is available with even more MS Paint type functions for your Mac. And we mean it, this thing is awesome at simple pixel drawing and is sure to remind you of what it was like to use the paint program way back when.

If you’re missing Microsoft Paint for your Mac then Paintbrush will scratch your itch just fine! Check out the screenshots to see just how MSPaint like this app really is, and be sure to download it now.
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If you’ve ever needed to troubleshoot a network or internet connection, you know how frustrating it can be (particularly when you’re on techsupport with various broadband providers). This quick tip can make the job a little easier on yourself by retrieving all relevant DHCP information, like DHCP server IP, client, subnet mask, router, DNS servers, everything – directly from the command line.

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I like Safari but find myself in Firefox nearly always because of a multitude of reasons. One thing I’ve long missed though is the ability to view PDF’s within the browser within Firefox, which Safari does wonderfully. If you’re tired of Firefox launching the Preview app (or even worse if you’re settings are different: Acrobat), then try this great little Firefox extension, which will pop open the PDF file into a new browser tab. Note this requires Firefox 3

Firefox Mac PDF homepage
Download Firefox Mac PDF now

In some trickier network situations, your computer may be assigned an IP but need an entirely different IP address to access certain network resources. You might be wondering, how on earth do you have two IP addresses at once on the same Mac? The answer; Create an IP Alias!

Using an IP alias allows your Mac to have more than one IP address at the same time, this can allow you to have multiple IP addresses that reference the same machine.

While this is fairly advanced topic, you will find that creating an IP alias is easy to do with the powerful Mac OS X command line utility ifconfig.

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Using your Mac, iPhone, or iPad, and you need to know the meaning of a word, and quick?

That’s easy. Just bust open Spotlight with Command + Spacebar on the Mac or iPad, or pulling down from the Home Screen on iPhone, and type in the word you want to get the definition for.

One of the top results will always be the dictionary definition of the word you entered, coming right out of Apple’s built-in Dictionary file.

This feature goes back a long while too, so as long as your Mac, iPhone, or iPad, has Spotlight, you’ll have the ability to use the software dictionary that is included with the operating system.

Remember, you can even edit the dictionary on your Mac too, if you find that a particular word is not defined as you see fit, or not defined at all. Maybe you’re inventing new words, who knows? But it sure is useful to be able to modify the dictionary if you need to, and to be able to add words to spellcheck too.

I’ve been bored with the standard Mac OS X boot up screen and it’s grey Apple logo, and a few times I have scoured around trying to change it manually to no avail. Today though, I stumbled into a post on my friends blog that makes changing the Mac OS X boot image a snap with a nice little program fittingly called BootXChanger.

With this free little app you can change the image to basically anything you want as long as the background color is the same shade of grey. The image to the right shows this done with a replaced colorful Apple logo if you want the retro look, it’s easy to get that or whatever else, or if you want to design your own little boot logo that’s fine too.

• BootXChanger homepage

Using the app is super simple, it just requires dragging and dropping another image over the existing one. Then save and reboot to see the difference. Nothing special, but kind of a fun way to customize a Mac a bit more.

Keep in mind this app is limited to OS X 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6, so newer Macs running OS X Lion and OS X 10.9 Mavericks probably aren’t going to be able to use it.

I just found out about Skim and I find it to be wildly useful for personal use, but I can imagine this could be a huge productivity booster for anyone in academia in particular. In short, Skim views any PDF files quickly as expected, but more importantly it allows you to take notes and annotate sections of the PDF file itself, how cool is that? If you’re a student, teacher, researcher, educator, or anyone using PDF files regularly, you absolutely have to try out Skim and you will thank me later.

Developer home
Download Skim 1.2.2 now

Creating your own cheap Mac Hackintosh out of a PC Netbook is pretty popular right now, so I compiled a list of various how-to guides mostly for myself but figured I would share it with our readers as well. The guides rank from reasonably easy (Dell Mini 9) to an arduous hack, and it’s technically against Apple’s OS X EULA agreement, so whether or not it’s worth proceeding with making one of these frankenstein Macs is entirely up to you.

Gizmodo: How to Hackintosh a Dell Mini 9

MyDellMini: Fool proof no hassle Dell Mini 10v Hackintosh guide

MSiWind Forums: How to Install Mac OS X on an MSI Wind

InsanelyMac: Install OS X on an Acer Aspire One

Stuart Shelton: How to install Mac OS X on a Samsung NC10

S10Lenovo: Install Mac OS X on a Lenovo S10

MyHPMini: Install Mac OS X on an HP Mini 1000

Enik: Install Mac OS X 10.5.6 on an EEE 1000h

It’s worth mentioning that BoingBoing has a pretty good OSX/Netbook compatibility chart but much of the info looks out of date (from December of 2008) so it’s worth doing some of your own due diligence before relying 100% on the chart.

Update: A reader has sent this in, saying that these files work for installing Snow Leopard on a Dell Mini 10v but we have not been able to test it… this link was pulled from the MyDellMini Forums. Not for novice users, proceed with caution!

Have you ever wanted to have your Mac require a password on waking from system sleep, but not ask for a password when the screensaver is on or the screen was locked? Well, me neither, but someone out there might and it’s kind of a nifty customization tip that has some valid uses in some environments when a Mac at screensaver mode shouldn’t require a login, but waking from sleep should.

Here’s how to accomplish this rather unique login authentication requirement on a Mac:

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I really enjoy videochatting with friends and family using iChat, so I was pretty frustrated when seemingly out of nowhere iChat video started freezing completely after a video chat session was initiated. I searched around a bit and noticed other people having the same problem and symptoms – iChat video freezes but iChat audio still works, so I know this isn’t a rare thing. While I don’t know the cause, I did manage to find a solution, and here it is:

How to fix iChat video freezing problem

1) Launch System Preferences and click on the QuickTime preferences pane. Under the “Streaming” tab, set streaming speed to “1 Mpbs Cable” and close the System Prefs

2) Now within iChat, open the Preferences and select the Audio/Video pane, set the Bandwidth Limit to “500 kbps” and close the preferences

3) Try starting an iChat Video Chat again – should work fine now!

This seems to work by forcing a slight reduction in the video quality based on available bandwidth, although I can’t tell a difference in quality myself. It’s worth mentioning that I’m on a fast broadband cable connection, so your mileage may vary with DSL or slower networks; you may try reducing the settings even more if you’re on a slow network and still having problems.

Mac users are largely immune to the world of virus and trojans, but it’s not uncommon for you to be a Mac user in a LAN sea of Windows PC’s. The Conficker Virus is Windows only but it’s garnering a lot of attention, so if you’re on a Windows LAN at home, work, or school, you may want to check if the Windows machines are vulnerable or infected with Conficker. You can do this from your immune Mac OS X machine pretty easily with a cool command line utility called nmap. Here are the steps:

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It’s very easy to mirror an entire web site on your local machine thanks to the terminal command wget, this tutorial will show you how to do it via the command line. wget is available for Mac OS X, Linux, Unix, and many other popular operating system platforms, thus this is universally applicable assuming you have wget anyway.

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Need to show hidden files on a Mac? This is pretty common if you find yourself needing to access hidden files on your Mac, like an .htaccess file you downloaded, a .bash_profile, a .svn directory, – literally anything preceded with a ‘.’ indicating it is invisible by default – you can run the below command from the terminal to set hidden files to become visible throughout Mac OS X.

For some quick background to fill in those who don’t know, files that are hidden in Mac OS are determined so by preceding the filename with a single period symbol (.), you can actually make any file hidden by placing a period in front of the name, thus making it invisible to the Finder. Let’s walk through making all hidden files become visible in Mac OS X, regardless of what system software version is on the Mac.

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