Mac OS X includes a great built-in utility that helps you test existing password strength, and also generate new strong passwords. If you’re wondering if your password is secure this is a great safe way to test the quality of it, and it’s also a safe way to create new strong passwords that you know … Read More
The new Notes app in OS X features a default font that is kind of hard to read and looks a bit goofy, nearly like Comic Sans. If you want a more professional looking font that’s easier on the eyes, you can easily switch the default font from “Noteworthy” to the always classic Helvetica, or … Read More
Need to edit or modify the hosts file on a Mac? This guide will show you exactly how to edit the hosts file in Mac OS. You’ll find hosts in Mac OS X is stored at /private/etc/hosts but it can also be accessed at the more traditional location of /etc/hosts. That said, if you’re looking … Read More
Ever wondered what it would look like if you ordered 100 MacBook Pro’s? Now you know. These neatly arranged boxes aren’t from the living room of some eccentric Howard Hughes-esque Mac fan though, they’re Kent College’s fresh batch of MacBooks for the incoming student cohort this Fall. Each new student there gets a 13″ MacBook … Read More
Notification Center is a great addition to Mac OS X but not everyone likes it, sometimes just muting the alert sounds and turning banners and alert pop-ups off per-app is just not enough, and you may want to disable the entire notification system completely. Furthermore, if you don’t use Notifications on the Mac then you … Read More
Any Mac fan watching the Mars Curiosity landing last night probably noticed the abundance of glowing Apple logos on the desks of NASA engineers and scientists. Exactly how all the Macs participated in managing Curiosity from millions of miles away is unknown, but the overwhelming presence of MacBook Pro’s should tell you they played an … Read More
Want to open Notification Center with a keystroke on the Mac? It can be done by setting up a custom keyboard shortcut. Typically Notification Center of Mac OS X can be summoned either with a click of the menu bar item in the upper right corner, or a two-fingered swipe left on a trackpad, but … Read More
Safari 6 changed the longstanding behavior of the Delete key, which used to navigate back a page when pressed but now does nothing. Instead, navigating web pages forward and backward is done through Command [ and Command ]. If you’d like to return the back-a-page navigation behavior to the Delete key within Safari, you can … Read More
AirDrop is probably the quickest and easiest way to transfer files between Macs these days, thanks to it’s instant ad-hoc network it lets Macs send files back and forth – without even being connected to the same network. As is, using AirDrop is easy through the Finder, but now with Mac OS X you can … Read More
Microsoft recently unveiled Outlook.com as a free email service, it’s primarily web based as some sort of Hotmail rebranding, but because of the new domain you can still get fairly decent email addresses if you want one. As webmail you can obviously use any browser to check mail, but you can also use it with … Read More
Using an excellent third party tool called terminal-notifier, you can post alerts and messages to Notification Center directly from the command line. This has a myriad of potentially valid uses, but one fantastic use-case is along the same veins of verbally announcing when a command has completed or sending a badge alert, but instead posting … Read More
Pictures can take up a lot of space on an iOS device so it’s a fairly reasonable thing to want to delete them all from an iPhone to clear up some space. We’ll cover a few of the easiest ways to delete all the pictures, some directly on the iPhone itself, and the others you’ll … Read More
Tab completion is a wonderful feature of shells that make power users lives easier, letting you automatically complete commands, paths, file names, and a variety of other things entered into the command line. It works great as is but you can make it even better by enabling a few features; ignore caps lock and casing … Read More
OS X Mountain Lion has been a painless upgrade for most users, but there are a fair amount of people experiencing some unusual wireless connectivity problems and issues. Mainly, the wi-fi connection seems to drop at random, or the Mac simply won’t stay connected to a wireless network for long. Sometimes it automatically reconnects and … Read More
You can now stream a Macs system audio directly over AirPlay without any third party apps or tweaks. The ability to AirPlay audio is really great, and perhaps the best part is that unlike AirPlay mirroring, the system audio stream should work on any Mac that can run a modern version of Mac OS X, … Read More
Mac OS X now lets you rename a file directly from the application it’s opened within. This feature is supported in most bundled Apple applications, including TextEdit, Pages, Preview, and many others, including a fair amount of third party apps too. This is a cool renaming trick that’s easy to use, let’s discuss it further.
The Mac Mail app received a wonderfully understated change with how it handles deleting mail in new versions of Mac OS X, from Mountain Lion, Mavericks, to Yosemite and beyond. With the new version, deleting emails works more like Outlook; you delete an email and it then selects the next oldest email rather than jumping … Read More
If you need to use Java, installing the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) in OS X Mountain Lion is necessary even if you had Java previously installed in OS X Lion or Snow Leopard and just performed an upgrade to 10.8. That’s because Mountain Lion uninstalls Java during the upgrade process, this is to insure the … Read More
