If you’ve ever launched Activity Monitor or the command line utility ‘top’ and been confused at some of what you see, you aren’t alone. Much of the output is self explanatory (like percentage of CPU usage), but some of it is meaningless without a little explanation, such as the specifics of the System Memory tab. A good read on the Bits About Bytes blog offers an explanation of wired, active, inactive, and free memory, and what all this means for your Mac and its performance.

Bits About Bytes: Is my Mac using too much memory?

Hello all you loyal OS X Daily readers! Recently we have been receiving a large number of Mac OS X related questions in our inbox. Normally our staff would try and respond with an answer to the best of our knowledge. However, sometimes we get a question we think would be better sourced to the wisdom of our brilliant readers, and this one in particular we think would be fun to run some of these by the many regulars who stop by the site. We’ll offer a few of our own suggestions for password protecting various elements of a Mac, but please help us with the following question and give your own opinions:

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This is a list of eleven startup key commands that every Intel Mac owner should make note of. From reseting your NVRAM, starting up in safe mode, booting your Mac from a CD or DVD, switching bootable volumes and drives on system start, to forcing media to eject from a superdrive, this list has you covered.

While some of these commands are the same as what worked for PPC Macs, others are slightly different or completely new, and so even longtime Apple users should find something helpful. Great for troubleshooting, system administration, and just furthering your general knowledge about Mac’s.

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According to this Security update, eight dangerous security flaws have been discovered and squashed inside Apple’s QuickTime product.

Some of these holes in QuickTime can give a hacker full control of your computer.

According to Apple, the problems lie in the way QuickTime handles MOV, MIDI, 3GP, PICT and QTIF files.

Security is the number one topic these days when it comes to operating systems and its refreshing to see Apple “on top” of these potentially disastrous bugs.

Be sure to run the Software Update utility on your Mac and get the latest!

Copy and Paste are absolute necessities for virtually all computer users, and if you find yourself working in the command line frequently, you’ll want to know how to manipulate the clipboard of Mac OS X directly from the terminal prompt. That’s what the Mac commands pbcopy and pbpaste are for, and as you may have guessed the two commmands do exactly what they sound like, pbcopy is to copy, and pbpaste is to paste through the command line. They’re actually quite powerful and you’ll be sure to find them useful the next time you’re hanging out with your bash, tcsh, zsh, or whatever is your preferred shell prompt.

We will cover a quick explanation on how to use pbcopy and pbpaste to manipulate clipboard data, with some examples indicating how to redirect the output of terminal commands as input into the clipboard, and of course, how to expel the contents of the clipboard into the command line with pbpaste.

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Despite the recent news that Mac OS X 10.5 will be released a bit later than hoped for, development of Leopard is still chugging along just fine. Thanks to the Mac rumor site ThinkSecret, we are presented with a gallery of screenshots to show us more of what to expect. New features and improvements are showing up in each new release, with 9a377 bringing us a new airport utility, a new screensaver, improvements to preference panes, Spotlight modifications, and more. Check out ThinkSecret’s latest screenshot gallery for more:

Update: ThinkSecret’s servers seem to be getting pounded. We managed to pull a few screenshots out of cache and reproduced them below.

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Computing is all too often a serious thing, so it’s good to laugh every now and then about the subject. I stumbled upon a humorous read today regarding the troubles that new Mac users often run into. Personally I’ve been using Mac’s since the 80’s but I know there are many that are new to Apple hardware out there so these may ring true to yourself or someone you know. You’ll be sure to find some things in this list entertaining, like #14. Thinking it’ll be easy to get a stuck CD out and #16. Where’s “the internet”?

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A report on the Apple rumor site AppleInsider suggests that the release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is further off than expected. For several months now, rumor sites have been speculating that Apple might be releasing 10.5 as early as late March, but the report from AppleInsider indicates there are too many bugs and quirks for Leopard to be released within the month. The latest build, 9a377, has some minor feature improvements, but also major problems such as crashes when QuickTime is played in Safari, and when the PowerBook G4 is woken up from sleep. Be sure to read the AppleInsider report for more information:

AppleInsider: Latest Leopard build from Apple suggests much work ahead

Here is a great feature that is widely unknown and certainly underused in Mac OS X, the ability to print nearly anything into a PDF document. Well, it’s not so much printing into a document as it is saving one, but you get the idea. I can think of a million uses for this, from ensuring cross platform viewing equality, to saving online tutorials and how-to’s for later reading. If you’ve never done this before, it’s extremely easy to do, and here’s how:

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SeisMac hits high on the cool and innovation scale of Mac Apps, by turning your Mac laptop into a seismometer. OK, some of you are surely asking yourself: what the hell is a seismometer? The short answer: an earthquake detector! Actually it detects all seismic activity, not just earthquakes. SeisMac works by tapping into your Mac laptops Sudden Motion Sensor, and graphing any motion on three axes: up/down, side to side, and back & forth, it does this live, instantly producing several graphs. Be sure to check out the screenshots below, and download SeisMac!

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An incredibly useful feature that is built right into Mac OS X is the ability to create an archive instantly of anything, be it a single document, a folder, or multiple files. Creating archives is great for may reasons, they save space, and it’s a polite and easier way to send a group of files to someone else. Every once in a while we all get emails with a group of files attached that when we save the attachments, suddenly our desktop is littered with a mess of JPG’s, Word documents, and whatever else the sender attached. Spare someone else this annoyance by creating an archive first. Here’s how to complete the process and build a zip archive from any selected documents, files, or folders available in the Mac file system.

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MediaFork is a lot like HandBrake, which is fitting because it is based on it. It allows you to easily rip any DVD or DVD source folder to various movie files that can be played on your Mac, PC, and iPod. MediaFork was created because HandBrake development has stagnated, so it’s really taking off where Handbrake left off. Ripping a full DVD can take upwards of several hours, depending on the speed of your Mac’s processor, but after it’s done you can transfer it to whichever media player you deem fit. It is worth noting that MediaFork is issued under the GPL, meaning free!

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If you’re new to the Mac, you’ll probably appreciate this handy tip;

Apple has released a handy printable cheat sheet for Mac users to fill out with relevant system information, which can be very useful in the event of any trouble, for support, and for other reasons too.

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WriteRoom is founded on a great idea that is hard to find nowadays in the computing world, a distraction free workspace that emphasizes nothing but the task at hand. In this case, the task is writing, which WriteRoom allows you to do easily.

There are few frills other than what you absolutely must need to write, so don’t expect Microsoft Word.

The WriteRoom workspace is attractively presented in a simple retro green on black terminal-like appearance, although you can change the color scheme to whatever you want. Check out the screenshot below.

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Mac OS X is wonderfully stable as an operating system, and although most software is written well, not all code is created equal. Crashing is just a fact of computing life and it frustrates us all, so it’s helpful to be able to pinpoint the cause of the problem. While the causes of some crashes are obvious, others are not, and this is when reading the Mac OS X crash logs can be so useful.

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Bash is the default shell in Mac OS X and has been since 10.3, it’s generally considered to be the de facto shell standard in the unix world. That said, there are some people who prefer to use the tcsh shell, or perhaps you just want to break away from the norm. Changing the default shell is pretty easy, but you will likely run into problems when running bash shell scripts. If you want to experiment with tcsh and use it as your default shell, here’s how to do it from the GUI in three easy steps:

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We’re all anxiously waiting for Apple to release Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, which is due to be out sometime in the next few months. To whet our appetites even more, the Mac rumor website ThinkSecret has posted a series of 28 pictures of various new features, updates, screensavers, and additions to the latest build of Leopard 9a343. How much of what we see here will appear in the final version? Time will tell. Enjoy the screenshots at ThinkSecret:

Leopard 9a343 Gallery

Want to make a portable USB flash drive OS X installer from Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, 10.5 Leopard, or 10.6 Snow Leopard? You can do that! And no, we don’t mean portable as in a laptop, but portable as in a USB flash drive that can install OS X onto Macs.

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