The startup sound on a Mac is cool and all, but if you’re in a quiet library, office, or classroom, that sound can be a bit obnoxious to yourself and others as it blasts throughout the speakers and into whatever room you’re in. Sure, you can mute the sound by holding down the keyboard Mute button during Mac system boot, or you can stick some headphones into the jack if you’re quick on the draw, but what if you don’t want to do that all the time? What if you forget to do that? What if you would rather it just be a bit quieter, rather than really loud?

A nice solution for this on supported Macs, is a free utility called StartupSound. This is a simple preference pane addition that enables you to adjust the sound level of the startup sound, or even mute it entirely, in much the fashion that you can adjust other system volume, you just have a little slider to move around as you see fit.

Installation is easier than pie, and the interface is as simple as it gets too. So save yourself the embarassment of public boot sounds and check out StartupSound!
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Christmas is here, and what better way to get in the spirit than to make you and your loved ones into Santa! SantaSnaps is a lot like Photo Booth except instead of distortions and color changes, you get elf hats, beards, ears, reindeer horns, glasses, and a few other holiday accessories. There’s also a strange looking nutcracker if you feel the need to transform into one. Certainly not groundbreaking software but it is fun and appropriate for the time of year. Enjoy the holidays and Merry Christmas!

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Mac ownership is largely troublefree, but sooner or later you’ll probably run into some kind of problem with your systems performance. MacOSXHints.com is one of the best sites out there for tips and helpful information for the Mac, and although this article is dated (almost three years now!) it is just as useful as ever. So if you’re having any problems with your Mac or Mac OS X, go over this great list and try out the troubleshooting methods described, you just may fix the problem yourself!

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The Apple Rumor site ThinkSecret obtained the latest release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and put together a nice screenshot gallery for all of us to see. Notably missing is the much anticipated GUI revision that has everyone buzzing, but perhaps Apple is hiding the final GUI until release day. There might be some hints of the new interface in some of the windows that show a dark grey appearance, as you can see below. Also, check out the other screenshots to get an idea of how the development of Leopard is coming along, and to see what we’ll all be using in some months!

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The command line in Mac OS X can be a very powerful and fun tool, so it’s good to know how to maneuver around if you find yourself in it. By default, the Mac OS X Terminal uses the Bash shell, which is what these keyboard shortcuts are intended for.

So if you’re ready to get your feet wet, open up the Terminal and try these shortcuts out, they’re sure to make your command line life easier.

While the keystrokes will perform some incredibly useful tasks, the complexity isn’t too deep or crazy so you should be able to try all these out within a minute or two. Take a moment to do that, learn a bit more about the command line, and have fun.

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Last week I thought I had found the best snow screensaver for Mac OS X with LotsaSnow, but I was wrong. This is the best snow screensaver for Mac OS X, and if you want proof – it is what Apple is using in the Apple Stores this holiday season!

Snowfall is a beautiful screensaver of falling three dimensional snowflakes rendered incredibly smoothly in quartz composer (so it only works in Mac OS X Tiger and newer, tested to work in 10.6.5).

It is a real treat for your Mac desktop and highly recommended to get you in the holiday spirit.

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The World of Apple has reported that the latest build of Apple’s next generation Operating System, “Leopard” will include support for Sun Microsystem’s ZFS filesystem. The ZFS filesystem has been described by Sun as “The last word in filesystems.” It appears that HFS+’s days are numbered, but on that same note, ZFS looks like an excellent alternative. Read on for what to expect from ZFS.

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Now here’s a cool trick: you can take iSight camera captures when an invalid login is detected on a Mac! This is so cool.

Posted verbatim from Mac OS X Hints:

“With the new MacBook Pro’s including built-in iSight cameras, I thought it would be useful to take an iSight snapshot of anyone trying to break into my laptop. This is done by tailing /var/log/asl.log for invalid login attempts (both at the login screen and screen saver). I have created an authsight program (1.5KB download) that provides a monitoring daemon which calls the camera after an invalid login attempt, and also includes a launchd manifest. An iSight command line tool named iSightCapture is also required.

It would not be too difficult to modify this tool to call home and even email photos should a laptop be stolen.”

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Remember the old days, where we’d all be peering at little 10″ fisheyed black screens with green or amber text? Well you can relive the computing 70’s and 80’s with this funky app that emulates the appearance of an old terminal. Complete with display curviture, shoddy colors, and even settings for simulated baudrate lag, you’ll be thinking it’s 1979 in no time. The GLTerminal program is not without error though, and getting it to run properly requires some minor digging around in the preferences.

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Whether you use the Terminal occasionally or regularly, you might find it appropriate to change the way it looks beyond the color scheme and transparency settings. How about changing the actual command line prompt? It’s quite easy, and can be a fun way to further customize your Macs appearance.

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There are a fair amount of winter themed screensavers for Mac OS X, from talking snowmen, snow storms, and blinking Christmas trees, but I think LotsaSnow is probably the best snow screensaver there is available for Mac.

It is simple and elegant, doesn’t use much CPU, and has some really nice looking flakes. LotsaSnow can also be easily used to put some falling snow on your Macs desktop, so say goodbye to the pixelated xsnow port and hello to LotsaSnow!

If this sounds interesting to you, you can download the screen saver free from the developer:

• Get LotsaSnow from the developer home here



The screensaver by itself is nice and certainly puts a winter tranquil mood to your resting Mac, but one of my favorite things to do is to combine this screensaver with BackLight. BackLight is a small program that allows screensavers to run as the background of your desktop, and this combination creates the best looking falling snow effect I have found for the Mac. If you don’t want to download another app like Backlight, you can get the same effect by using this terminal command to set a screensaver as a Mac desktop wallpaper too. So winterize your Mac and let the snow fall!

Lotsa snow goes great with the other Holiday themed eye-candy apps we went over a few weeks ago too, so check those out.

Updated: 12/21/2018 – LotsaSnow works in MacOS Mojave, High Sierra, and Sierra! Cool!

Update 12/3/2007: Check out other Holiday Mac OS X apps including the SnowFall screensaver from the Apple stores!

This is a rumor as of now, and uncomfirmed. Apple seeded a new version of Leopard (build 9A326) to internal Apple employees yesterday. This latest build is reported to have fixed bugs from the last build (9A303) such as Quicktime crashing, printing problems and issues with .Mac such as iDisk synching. Apple continues to gloss over the interface, refining it even more and there is an overly presence of black gloss. This build is also completely stable on Apple’s latest Core 2 Duo MacBook and MacBook Pro. Apple is trying to gear down development to get this build out to developers before the New Year.

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Many Mac users take screenshots of their desktop for various reasons, be it showing off their setups, post to their blog or flickr, development, whatever. Most of us just use command-shift-3 and command-shift-4, but did you know there’s more options than just those two keyboard shortcuts? I’m not talking about third party apps, but options built right into Mac OS X.

From specifying windows and filetypes, to saving to the desktop or the clipboard, it’s all here. Take a look:

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Think of this program like a Mac encyclopedia. Mactracker provides detailed information on every Apple Macintosh computer ever made, including vitals such as processor speed, memory, optical drives, graphic cards, supported Mac OS versions, and expansion options. Also included is extensive information on Apple mice, keyboards, displays, printers, scanners, digital cameras, iPod, AirPort Base Stations, Newton, and Mac OS versions. This is one of the most useful tools I have seen for system administrators or general Mac geeks, a simple must-have app. And the best part? It’s free!

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Have you ever wished your Mac was as light saber?? Of course you have! Ok maybe you haven’t, but wouldn’t it be cool if you swung your Mac around and it made light saber sound effects? Indeed that would be cool.

MacSaber is a hilarious app that uses your MacBook or MacBook Pro’s SMS controller to create the famous Star Wars Lightsaber sound effects based on movement and motion. It is completely useless for anything but a laugh, and expect to lose some productivity with this thing while you show off to your coworkers and family members that you are now part of the super geeky Mac Jedi order.

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On tuesday, Blizzard released its infamous 2.0 patch to its hit online role playing game, World of Warcraft. This patch is significant as it is the first main stream game to support multi-threaded OpenGL on the Macintosh. Support for multi-threaded OpenGL is limited to Intel users, and if you are a lucky owner of such a machine, people are reporting up to 2x better frame-rates with the new version.

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Gizmo is a cross platform (Linux, Windows and Mac) VoIP client. I’ve enjoyed Gizmo for the six months that I have had it, and suggest you give it a try over at www.gizmoproject.com. Gizmo is free computer to computer, and offers rates as low as one cent a minute to virtually anywhere on the planet. If you don’t own a microphone, do not fret, as it is usable with many of the built-in microphones that come on your Mac. I should note however, that I have always had the best luck (in terms of voice quality) when I use a USB headset. You can usually pick one of these up at a computer store for approximately twenty dollars.

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Spotlight is one of my favorite features of Mac OS X, I probably use it more than even the Dock. Being able to hit command-space to quickly locate documents, emails, and launch Applications is endlessly useful. For some of us, it’s necessary to be in the terminal, and wouldn’t it be cool to have this ultra seach feature in the command line? Well it’s there, open up your Terminal (or iTerm) and explore mdfind, the command line version of Spotlight.

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