You can use Spotlight as a calculator on the Mac, and it actually works impressively well. Yes, the Spotlight search feature can do calculations! While many longtime OS X users probably know this, there are tons who are new to the Mac who aren’t aware that Spotlight is so robust, so the next time you … Read More
The Mac OS X Dock becomes animated when an app is launching, with a continuous bouncing animation, and also when an app wants to get your attention, with a less consistent and more urgent animated bounce. Both of these can be effect alert methods, but they can also annoy some users. Regardless, you can make … Read More
Bootcamp has been around a while, and it makes it pretty easy to install and run other Windows OS’s in conjunction with Mac OS X on the same Mac computer. It’s hard to have missed all the hooplah surrounding the Windows 7 launch, and many Mac users may want to try it out themselves, so … Read More
Rather than disabling the Caps Lock key on your Mac, consider a better idea for many users: simply reassign the key to a new keyboard function. This means that if you press the Caps Lock button, instead of initiating THE SCREAMING CAPS LOCK ALL UPPERCASE function, it could trigger something like the Control button, Command … Read More
Need to migrate all of a Spaces set of windows to another Spaces screen in Mac OS X? Using a simple keystroke you can do just that. To sweep all of your open apps and windows into a group via Spaces, here’s what you need to do and a quick overview of how this great … Read More
If you’re a web developer you probably do a fair amount of development on your local machine using either the built-in Mac OS X Apache server or, in my case, something like MAMP. Because a local web server like this is really handy for testing this, you can make your local development life a bit … Read More
Ever wanted to play music while you’re working in the command line? Maybe you want to play a podcast from the command line on Mac? With the command line tool ‘afplay’ you can do just that, you can play practically any audio file format, whether it’s M4A, AAC, MP3, WAV, AIFF, or whatever else is … Read More
It really drives me nuts when files can be of the same kind but different type open different apps, I want to open all my images in Preview and all my video files in VLC. You can make Mac OS X open every file of a certain format type with a certain application by changing … Read More
Mac users can issue a defaults command string to force Safari to open targeted new window links into new tabs instead of those new windows. This is handy if you open a lot of links that would usually launch a new window but would rather send them into easily managed tabs instead.
Need to get around the boot level Mac firmware password? You can bypass a firmware password by doing a little bit of a hardware hack. There’s many reasons you’d want to get around firmware protection, but here’s why we got the instructions from an anonymous submitter:
I use my MacBook almost exclusively at home and so I frequently forget to discharge and recharge the battery, which is a recommended procedure to have your notebook battery last as long as possible. For people like me who often run with the powercharger attached to their Mac laptop, Apple.com offers a nice simple reminder … Read More
You can easily check the MD5 Hash of any file on your Mac, all you need to do is launch the Terminal and type the ‘md5’ command and point it at the file you wish to check the md5 has for. How to Check MD5 Hash of a File on Mac First launch the Terminal … Read More
You may remember the Oreo MacBook mod from a while back, this is pretty similar except that they swapped out the external case for a black enclosure, and then installed the black MacBook keyboard onto a white MacBook internal case. Looks awesome! The creators of this MacBook mod apparently pieced the machine together from two … Read More
Quick Look is one of the many Mac OS X features that make my OS choice cemented, I use it so often that I simply can’t live without it, and here’s a tip that I’ve been using a lot lately. If you want to create an instant slideshow of images, simply select multiple images in … Read More
Stacks are what list items and folders turn into when pulled into the Dock of OS X. There are several views for Stacks, like a grid, or a fan, or a list in modern OS X versions. But with a little secret defaults string, a list view can be enabled in prior releases of OS … Read More
Recently the LAN at my office had been running slower than usual, and I couldn’t pinpoint what was using up all the extra bandwidth. I had a suspicion that P2P traffic was to blame but I just couldn’t see anything obvious on the offending machine. So the question of course, is how do you see … Read More
If you want to quickly change your sound input device on a Mac, by far the fastest and simplest way to do so is to Option-Click the Sound menu icon at the top of your screen. Option-clicking the sound icon menu bar item enables an alternate pull-down menu including a list of clearly labeled and … Read More
Want to almost instantaneously put a Mac to sleep from your external keyboard? It’s much easier than you’d think, and you don’t need to pull down the  Apple menu to accomplish this task. Instead, to quickly sleep your Mac just hold down Command + Option + Eject for about two seconds, and the computer … Read More
