Modern versions of Mac OS X include a great tool called tmutil that lets you interact with with Time Machine from the command line. It’s a powerful utility that has a ton of options, and we’ve used it before to disable local snapshots, but for the purposes here we are going to use tmutil to … Read More
Apple’s free interactive book creation app iBooks Author was just released, allowing for anyone to make multi-touch iBooks for iPad. Unfortunately it’s officially for Mac OS X 10.7 only, and if you try to install it on Snow Leopard, you’ll get an error message. With a little work we can get around that error message … Read More
You can monitor disk activity in Mac OS X by using the Activity Monitor app or several command line tools. Activity Monitor is the easiest and most user friendly, but the Terminal options allow further information to be retrieved.
Stacks are a Dock feature in Mac OS X which allows for an easy way to see the contents of Applications, Documents, Downloads, and whatever other folder placed into the Dock. There are a few different ways to view the Stacks, which appear on the right side of the Mac Dock, like grid, automatic, list, … Read More
Have an older generation iPhone 3G or 2G? If so, you’re stuck on older legacy iOS versions with limited features and sluggish speeds. But not anymore with Whited00r, which installs a custom iOS build on the device to help bring it into the modern age. Whited00r 5.1 is basically an unofficial custom made iOS build … Read More
All versions of Mac OS X from Lion onward (meaning Mountain Lion, Mavericks, etc) can display messages that require acknowledgement prior to the standard login screen appearing on a Mac. For administrators, this allows a user agreement or acceptable use policy to be displayed before users can login, and for personal use it lets users … Read More
SOPA and PIPA are two terrible internet censorship bills that are dangerously close to passage in the USA, and Wikipedia has blacked out their web site in protest. …but what if you really need to use Wikipedia today? What if you’re a student and your paper was due yesterday and you need to do research? … Read More
Do you need to rebuild the entire Spotlight index on a Mac? It’s easy to do, but can take a while. This tutorial will show you how to start the reindexing process of an entire drive in Mac OS X, we’ll do this using the Spotlight control panel, and we’ll cover an alternative method as … Read More
If you’ve tried to take a screenshot of a screen saver before, you’ve noticed that the keyboard shortcuts disturb the screensaver and wake the Mac up. The secret to taking screen shots of a running screen saver is to use the “Test” button while holding down half of the key sequence, here’s how: Open System … Read More
If you want an iPhone to appear as brand new from a software standpoint, you need to reset the device to it’s factory settings. This is ideal if you plan on selling an iPhone or are going to transfer ownership of the device to another individual, and it can also be a very helpful troubleshooting … Read More
FaceTime has long been expected to support video calls over 3G networks, but thus far it hasn’t happened without a jailbreak. Blame it on the carriers, Apple, the rain, maybe 3G is too slow, or maybe it will be a feature for upcoming 4G LTE iPad and iPhone hardware… who knows, but regardless you can … Read More
An excellent feature in Mac OS X are the several built-in media encoding abilities, allowing anyone to encode and convert video and audio files to other formats right on the desktop or from any Finder window. Having covered a tip on how to convert video to audio using these media encoders, we discovered the feature … Read More
Converting a video file to an audio track is made extremely easy with the help of the media encoding abilities of Mac OS X that are built directly into the Finder. With this, you can convert many popular movie formats into audio tracks, including video files of .mov, .m4v, .mpg, and mp4 format. The resulting … Read More
Did you know the iTunes Artwork screensaver in Mac OS X is interactive? By hovering over an album when the screen saver is active, a pop-up play button will appear similar to what is found by hovering over music in the Finder, click it and that album or song will begin to play.
Need to quickly restart the Finder in Mac OS X? Perhaps for a change to take effect with a defaults string, or to resolve a simple error or problem? Restarting the Finder does just what it sounds like, it quits the Finder application and then re-opens it again.
Using the lsof command, we can find out exactly what process or application is using a specified file at that given moment. This is similar to the opensnoop command, but rather than watching the changes to a file over time, lsof can give us a snapshot of this very moment, which can be helpful for … Read More
File extensions (like .jpg, .txt, .pdf, etc) make it easy to see what a specific file type format is, but as many Mac users notice, those file extensions are hidden by default in Mac OS X. While hiding the format suffix makes for a cleaner user experience and is fine for many users, it can … Read More
We have gone through tons of OS X Dock tips before, but with the help of a free Lion compatible app called Docker, we can apply many changes to the Docks behavior and customizations to the Docks appearance easily with just a few clicks. What exactly can you customize? Using Docker, you can: change Dock … Read More
