The “uptime” of a computer is how long it has been since it was last rebooted or started up. Since Macs are very stable and generally OS X users rarely have to reboot their machines, the uptime of Macs can reach impressive numbers. You can check the uptime and reboot history of any Mac if … Read More
Bonjour is a great service that runs in the background of your Mac to auto-discover network resources, that is, it’s great until mDNSResponder goes haywire. I was recently in a very creatively crafted network environment that made Bonjour absolutely freak out and tax my CPU with a million processes, so I opted to just disable … Read More
Need a super easy and simple Stopwatch on the Mac, but don’t want to download anything like a third party app or utility? Look no further than the command line. You can create an instant quick and dirty stopwatch via the Mac OS X (or linux) command line by launching the Terminal app and typing … Read More
By default, Mac OS X Snow Leopard boots using a 32 bit kernel. But did you know you can switch between the 64-bit kernel and 32-bit kernel upon boot? This should be useful to advanced users who may need to perform such a feet, though the average Mac use likely has no business forcing one … Read More
Have you ever needed to convert a DMG file to ISO in Mac OS, or wanted to convert an ISO file to DMG on your Mac? Converting image files on your Mac is easy thanks to a command line utility included in Mac OS X called hdiutil.
If you ever want to hide a file or folder, you can quickly make it invisible with a command line utility called setfile. This is a really cool tip that should be particularly useful to those who share their mac with other people.
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, … Read More
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 … Read More
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, … Read More
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 … Read More
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 … Read More
Like many other power users, I’m addicted to the Mac OS X command line, any reason at all for me to launch the terminal I take as an opportunity to learn more about the powerful backend of our favorite operating system. Here I have gathered 5 useful commands that will make your life easier when … Read More
Whether you’re a systems administrator or a web developer, or anything in between, chances are you’ll have to flush your DNS cache every once in a while to get things straightened out server-side, or even just for testing certain configurations. Flushing your DNS cache in Mac OS X is actually really easy, but there are … Read More
Quick Look is a nice feature in Mac OS X for quickly previewing documents, images, and other file data before opening it into a designated application. I use Quick Look often for glancing at the content of various documents and it certainly beats launching an application when you just need to take a quick peak … Read More
Have you ever known that you need to open a specific text file to a specific line number? Perhaps for a code review or adjustment, whatever the reason this is fairly common. Rather than open the text file in nano or vim and then navigate to the line number you want to access, there is … Read More
MacPorts, formerly DarwinPorts, is a free open source app that allows Mac users to easily install command line software and x11 software in Mac OS X by using the ‘ports’ command line tool for package management. MacPorts is probably best for more advanced Mac users who have some experience with the command line, because MacPorts … Read More
Virtual memory serves a crucial task in modern operating systems, essentially how it works is that when you run out of real memory (RAM), the slower hard disk will take over as a temporary memory source. The downside is that the hard disk is slower, so running things in virtual memory is not ideal, one … Read More
I am frequently developing web pages and often times I find it frustrating when I can not restart my browser because I’m in the middle of a download. So when I need to download a large file and I don’t want to have to worry about whether or not Safari, Chrome, or Firefox continues to … Read More
