If you haven’t backed up with Time Machine in a while, the latest backup status will change to ‘Delayed’ and the menubar icon will have an exclamation mark in it reminding you to backup soon. There can be a variety of reasons the backups become delayed, and if you’re curious why this happens we’ll go … Read More
Preview is one of my favorite Mac apps, but recently Preview.app was refusing to open some image files for what seemed like no reason. I wasn’t even able to drag the image file onto the Preview icon to open it, which is usually something that works if the Open menu doesn’t. I know the images … Read More
There’s no shortage of DNS Server options out there, with Google DNS, OpenDNS, your own ISP’s, and the gazillion of others available to use. The question remains though, which of these DNS servers is going to be fastest for you? And how do you know which is fastest? That’s where NameBench comes in. NameBench is … Read More
Want to find out how to see all startup and login app launches and scripts on a Mac? This article will walk through that process. Gone are the days of Mac OS System 9 where all startup items were sitting nicely in a system folder labeled ‘Startup’, now with the Unix undercore of Mac OS … Read More
TTYtter is a rather fun command line based Twitter client. Written in Perl, it’s got all the essential ingredients needed for basic Twitter needs without ever leaving a Terminal window. Running TTYtter is easy enough, it just needs your login information and off it goes. You can either run it through perl with: perl /path/to/ttytter.pl … Read More
Changing the location of your home directory is pretty easy in Mac OS X, and it can be desired for a variety of situations to store a home folder elsewhere on a Mac, or even on another drive. This is valid and works the same in all versions of OS X.
Are you wondering if your Mac is 64-bit architecture or 32-bit architecture? Well you might not be alone. The good news is it’s pretty easy to determine what CPU architecture your Mac is using. You can either focus on the model year of the Mac, or the CPU architecture and processor chip itself. The most … Read More
At its core, the file and folder explorer of OS X known as Finder is essentially an application like any other on the Mac. Accordingly, users can quit the Mac OS X Finder in a few different ways which we’ll cover here, but perhaps the fastest way is to just launch the Terminal app and … Read More
In some situations, you may wish to disable access to the System Preferences on a Mac. Often this is for lab environments or public use workstations, or perhaps for locking down a particular workstation for various reasons. While a common approach is to create a new user account that has limited access to system features … Read More
Spaces is a really nice feature of Mac OS X that lets you place different windows and applications within their own workspace. Dragging a window to a new Space is just a matter of holding onto the window and pulling it towards the end of the screen. You may have noticed that there’s a delay … Read More
The application Finder.app can’t be opened. -10810 I ran into the unpleasant 10810 error code recently and couldn’t find any workaround without a reboot. From what I’ve gathered by searching around on the web, Error 10810 occurs when the Launch Services framework has some sort of meltdown, causing the Mac OS X Kernel to run … Read More
If you need to prevent the Dock icons from changing or being modified on a Mac, you can use defaults command strings to lock down the OS X Dock and prevent any adjustments or changes to how it appears on screen.
You can set Mac OS X to always securely empty the Trash and add a significant layer of security when removing files from the Mac. This is done just by adjusting a preference setting within the Finder, and it’s very easy to configure, here’s what you will want to do to use this option:
.DS_Store files store folder level metadata information (such as icon placement and background pictures) for Mac OS X to understand, this is fine and dandy and you’re likely to never even notice if you’re a bunch of Macs working together. Unfortunately, these .DS_Store files can be really pesky in a multi-platform network environment, they can … Read More
Using the command line tool ‘opensnoop’ you can track any Mac applications (or system process) usage of the file system. This is a very handy tool for administrators and troubleshooting! The simplest way to use it is as follows:
There are times when a user will need to to manually set an IP address in Mac OS X to one which will be compatible with a joined network, either wi-fi or ethernet. Here will cover how to change a Mac IP address to a manual setting, and also how to pick an IP address … Read More
You can convert many different image file formats in Mac OS X for free using the included Preview application, there’s no need to download additional tools or do anything overly complex. As of any somewhat modern version of Mac OS X, the Mac Preview app supports the following file types and will convert between any … Read More
If you’re ever wondering how long your Mac has been turned on and running for, you can discover exactly how long the computer has been on since last boot with two different methods available in OS X. Let’s learn a bit more about discovering how long a Mac has been left turned on for, and … Read More
