Feel like taking another trip down memory lane? With the assistance of an excellent fun free retro terminal emulator fittingly called Cool Retro Term, you can experience the golden yesteryears of cathode display computing and pretend your shiny new Mac is an ancient Apple II or IBM workstation.
Removing a symbolic link is achieved through the command line, and as we’ll show you, there actually two different ways to undo a soft link. This is aimed at users who spend a lot of time at the command line, but for the less familiar, symbolic links are used in Linux, Mac OS X, and … Read More
Many Mac users running a modern version of OS X El Capitan have noticed the Secure Erase Free Space feature has gone missing from Disk Utility. What the “Erase Free Space” feature did (and still does in prior versions of Mac OS X) was overwrite the free space on a drive to prevent file recovery, … Read More
Most command line users know that the “rm” command for removing and deleting files is quite powerful, able to delete just about any file imaginable within the file system – whether it should be removed or not. Once you add in wildcards and sudo, rm and srm because exponentially more potent and potentially dangerous, so … Read More
Many Mac users will download package files of combo updates or other software in order to install them on multiple computers, thereby avoiding updating with the Mac App Store. This is particularly common with Mac systems administrators, where it makes more sense to download a single package update or installer once and distribute it over … Read More
Code signed applications allow security conscious users to verify the creator and hash of a particular app to help confirm it has not been corrupted or tampered with. This is rarely necessary for average Mac users, particularly those who obtain their software from the Mac App Store or other trusted sources since the apps are … Read More
Plist files contain preference specifics and properties relevant to a particular application or portion of Mac OS X system software. Depending on where the plist file is located and what function they serve, they can either be in XML format, binary format, and sometimes even json. For users who need to modify a plist file … Read More
The Mac hosts file is a system level file located at /etc/hosts which maps IP addresses to host names for Mac OS X networking. Many users edit and modify the hosts file so that they can point a domain to a different IP address, whether for the purpose of local development, blocking sites, or simply … Read More
Though just about everyone has our phones glued to us with a dedicated calendar app, for users who spend considerable time in the command line it can be more efficient to stay put rather than stray to another app or pick up a different device to flip around in the calendar and find a given … Read More
There’s no shortage of methods to retrieve a weather report, the web is full of weather resources, everyones iPhone, Apple Watch, and smartphone has a weather app, Siri can tell you the weather, and you can even get the current weather in the menu bar of OS X or from Spotlight on the Mac too. … Read More
Advanced Mac users may find it necessary to view or directly manipulate firmware variables found within NVRAM on the computer. Typically the NVRAM contains specific system data about things like the system audio level, startup disk details, an active user name, screen backlighting and resolution, and other technical details. While most users have no business … Read More
While most Mac laptop users will rely on the battery percentage indicator found in the menu bar of OS X, those who spend a lot of time at the command line may find it useful to know that MacBook battery life and battery charge percentage remaining information can be retrieved directly from the Terminal in … Read More
Users who have enabled the firewall in Mac OS X may find it useful to be view, read, and monitor the associated logs with the system firewall. As you’d expect, the app firewall logs show you what applications and processes have attempted to connect to the Mac, including accepted and refused connections. There are several … Read More
If you adjust DNS settings on a Mac and the changes seemingly haven’t taken effect, or perhaps you discover that a given name server address is not resolving as intended, flushing the DNS cache is often a quick resolution. Flushing DNS cache in OS X El Capitan (10.11 or later) is easily possible with a … Read More
Gatekeeper is a security feature built into Mac OS X which helps to prevent unauthorized applications and code from executing on a Mac. Most users have encountered Gatekeeper before when they go to open an application downloaded from the internet, where you see an “App can’t be opened because it is from an unidentified developer” … Read More
The Disk Utility app has long contained the ability to verify and repair disk permissions on a Mac, but in the latest versions of OS X this ability has been removed. That doesn’t mean you can’t verify permissions and repair permissions in OS X El Capitan 10.11 and later however, you just need to turn … Read More
For Mac users who utilize third party SSD volumes, the new trimforce command allows OS X to forcibly enable the TRIM function on those drives. trimforce is built directly into newer releases of OS X and is really quite easy to enable (or disable), requiring a quick visit to the command line and a reboot … Read More
Many Mac users have noticed that the Secure Empty Trash feature has been removed in OS X El Capitan (10.11 or later), the reason the feature was removed is basically because it did not work all the time, but more on that in a moment. First, let’s cover how you can perform the equivalent of … Read More
