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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If you are anything like me, you may struggle to keep up with a years worth of Hollywood releases. One easy way to sort through the noise is to focus on what the awards and festivals determine are worthwhile investments for your time, and you can further narrow the movies down by looking at the trailers for them. But Apple and iTunes makes it easier.

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MAMP: It stands for Mac Apache MySql PHP, and it’s a fantastic setup for Mac based web developers. Basically, think LAMP but for Mac OS X users, and in a pre-packaged, simple to use environment, which also indludes PHPMyAdmin, perl, python, and SQL Lite.

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A quick way to lock your Mac desktop is to hit Shift-Command-Option-Q to do a fast user log out. This logs the current user out of Mac OS X, which is one way to initiate a login screen when the Mac needs to be used again.

Another method is brought to us by inaminit who left the following in our comments: “If you have Fast User Switching enabled through the System Preferences/Accounts, you can just click on Login Window in the drop down menu from the menu bar to do the same thing.”

What inaminit is referring to is the Fast User Switching menu bar item, which is in the upper right corner of OS X if you use the feature. Pulling it down and finding “Login Window” is what immediately logs out and password protects the computer.

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Have you ever wanted to listen to Pandora from a Mac, but without opening a web browser like Safari? Some of us just use Pandora on our iPhone or iPad as we work on a Mac, but what if you could stay on the computer entirely? While there is always Pandora.com and there are a few tools out there that allow you to stream Pandora on a Mac, if you want a simple approach to accomplishing this, you may be interested in a tool called PandoraBoy.

Available as a free download, and totally open source, PandoraBoy offers “Pandora.com on your mac … without a web browser.”. If this sounds good to you, then check out the Github project below:

• Check out PandoraBoy on Github here

The PandoraBoy project is available as source code, so you’ll want to build the project yourself in Xcode.

For many, listening to Pandora is as routine as brushing their teeth in the morning, so it’s always nice having additional ways to stream your music.

PandoraBoy vs PandoraMan

PandoraBoy offers a newer solution to another app that has ceased development called “PandoraMan”, which likely doesn’t work on the latest Mac OS X releases. PandoraMan is another option you may have come across by browsing through the the various Mac application downloads related to Pandora.

According to the developer, PandoraMan is “a small Cocoa app to run the Pandora mini player using WebKit. Created so you can quit Safari, Camino, etc. without killing your music stream.”

Excellent! No longer do you need to spawn an entire web browser just to hear your favorite Pandora stations. Place this app in your dock, launch, and you are one click away from listening to Pandora radio!

You can still grab the PandoraMan download by heading over to the IntraArts development studios website for a closer look if you’re interested, just note that that’s a bit more limited in compatibility.

Of course you can always just listen to Pandora on your iPhone, iPad, Android, or other phone or device too, but that’s obviously not going to be on your Mac.

As always, feel free to chime into the comments below with recommendations for your own solutions for alternative methods of listening to Pandora on a Mac or computer!

Update: Different wallpapers for different spaces is now a feature of Mac OS X Lion, here’s how to use it.

Spaces. Personally, it is my favorite addition to Apple’s Leopard operating system. I have become very accustomed to working with Spaces and have long desired the ability to set a different background for each virtual “space”. That is now possible thanks to SpaceSuit. Installation of SpaceSuit is a breeze and setting your backgrounds involves a simple drag and drop. The only downside or complaint I have thus far is that I can not figure out how to set unique backgrounds across my multiple monitors. Maybe a reader out there has figured out how to do this and can chime in. Anyways, Enjoy.

I have been a long time user of Skype and recently some of the features unique to the beta have caught my attention. In particular, I am enjoying the new screen sharing functionality. Frequently, I work remotely and find screen sharing crucial to collaboration. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to cruise over to skype.com and download the new beta. In addition, you can now use your SkypeOut credits to access participating public wifi hotspots across the globe!

Wallsaver is a freeware utility that allows you to easily take a screensaver and make it your desktop background, creating a nifty interactive effect that’s pleasant to look at. Aimed at older versions of OS X however, it’s not going to be for anyone, and furthermore, the Wallsaver app is basically a front-end to the command line tool that turns screen savers into wallpapers. The latter is probably a better approach but because it doesn’t require any additional downloads, but because it uses the command line it’s not going to be ideal for everyone.

Thus you have Wallsaver, which is a free download for those who are interested in going the simple route,

The application makes use of your Mac’s GPU (graphics processor) which leaves plenty of CPU power left over to carry on with your desktop tasks, though if you’re on a slower Mac you will notice a performance hit, so whether or not that is important to you is going to be a matter of personal opinion and what activities you’re participating in on the Mac. For example, you wouldn’t want to run such an app when you’re trying to play a game or maximum battery life.

Using the app is simple and pretty self explanatory. If you get sick of it, removing the screensaver background and reverting to your previous choice of desktop decor is as simple as right clicking and selecting “restore”.

To get WallSaver to work, you will need a Quartz Extreme capable graphics card with at least 32 MB of memory and, obviously, a screensaver to use it with. This covers literally just about any Mac around these days, but again, older Macs may have issues with the requirements and CPU toll on older hardware.

Updated on 12/18/2012 with additional comments and recommendations

Recently I connected my Mac to my linux based NFS server at home. I use NFS to access files from two other Linux boxes and on each server my UID (unique id) is set to 1000. In order for me to easily have full access to my NFS shares from OS X I changed my UID to match:
dscl . -change /Users/will UniqueID 501 1000
chown -R 1000 /Users/will

Remember to run the chown command afterwards, or you will not be able to access your home directory. Finally, log out and log in.

These days there are no shortage of ways to backup your Macintosh. Probably the most popular method available to an end-user is Apple’s Time Machine which is handled automatically after a simple setup through the GUI, or can be triggered to start at any time. Personally, I was very impressed with the ease of use offered by Time Machine, but I am a command line junkie so I must report on the alternatives available, four of which reside in the very command line of Mac OS X.

Read on for a few different methods that you can use at the Terminal to back up your Mac, using the ditto, rsync, asr, and hdiutil.

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Is Windows 7 really the Mac OS X slaying OS that so many claim it to be? Is it the greatest thing since sliced bread? There is all sorts of hooplah in the tech world about Microsofts Windows 7 beta, so why not see what the fuss is all about using your Mac? Rather than get a dual-boot setup going, it’s probably best for most users to run Windows 7 in a virtual environment within Mac OS X, and setting it up really isn’t too difficult. Here are several great walkthroughs on getting Windows 7 installed and running on your Mac.

DownloadSquad: Installing Windows 7 on a Mac – Getting Windows 7 running in Mac OS X using either Parallels, VMWare, or VirtualBox – you decide. Lot’s of screenshots to guide you.

VMWare: Windows 7 on a Mac with VMWare Fusion – An ‘official’ walkthrough created by the VMWare team, this is comprehensive and straight from the source, can’t go wrong here

KristanKenney: Run Windows 7 within Sun VirtualBox – more comprehensive than the AppleInsider article below on setting up Windows 7 in Virtualbox.

AppleInsider: Installing Windows 7 Beta on a Mac with Sun VirtualBox – pretty straightforward install process using Sun VirtualBox (which I’ve never used before prior to reading this article)