Have you ever tried to run a command line tool to discover that you don’t have the necessary privileges to use it? Or perhaps the command itself actually requires root access to run at all? You’ll typically experience this with a ‘permission denied’ type of error message in terminal. Rather then type out the entire … Read More
You may have known that you can navigate around music, skip songs, go backward to prior songs, pause, and mute music, all from the iTunes Dock icon, but did you know that the iTunes dock item in OS X also includes a list of the ten most recently played songs? To access the recent songs … Read More
Have you ever put your Mac to sleep, only to find it awake seemingly on it’s own when you return to the machine? I’ve run into this mystery of a randomly waking Mac a few times, and with a few terminal commands you can help track down what caused your Mac to wake from sleep. … Read More
If you need to convert FLAC to MP3 in Mac OS X for free, the best way to do so is using a utility called All2MP3*. It’s super easy to use with drag & drop conversion tools and total simplicity, just grab the app and follow along with this tutorial and you’ll have converted your … Read More
If you have young kids there’s a couple things you can do to make your Mac even more friendly and easy to use for them. The focus should be on simplifying the user experience by reducing anything that’s confusing or distracting. Here are my favorite tricks for making the Mac experience extra friendly for young … Read More
Want to open a PDF file and save it to your iPhone or iPad so that you can read it later? The best way to do that is by downloading the PDF file into the Books app, which runs on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. You’ll need Books (once called iBooks) installed to do … Read More
If you want to manually copy or backup iPhone data, you will need to know the locations of the database files on your iPhone. We’ll cover where to find SMS messages, Notes, pictures, videos, call history, voicemail, address book, and the calendar, they are all located within your iPhone /private/var/mobile/Library directory. Remember, you will not … Read More
You can resize, rotate, or flip any image file via the Mac’s Terminal using the powerful command line sips tool. Manipulating images with sips is practically instantaneous, and if you need to quickly resize, rotate, or flip an image file and want to stay within the command line, it can definitely beat firing up a … Read More
If you want to see the difference between two folders on a Mac, or compare two directories contents, you can easily do so with the help of the powerful diff command. This tutorial will show you how to compare two directories, and the contents of those directories, by using the Terminal. This command line approach … Read More
Taking screenshots from the command line is made easy, thanks to a utility included in Mac OS X called screencapture. Here’s how to use it: screencapture test.jpg The screen capture will then appear in the directory that the command was executed. There are more advanced features to the screencapture utility though, here’s a few examples. … Read More
You can easily transfer Photos from your iPhone to your computer, and the process is very similar whether you are on a Mac or PC. The Mac treats the iPhone like a digital camera, and Windows can treat the iPhone as either a digital camera or a file system, depending on how the photos are … Read More
Want to disable iPhone GPS geotagging of photos and the camera? Many users may wish to turn off geotagging on iPhone photos for privacy reasons. In case you didn’t know, the iPhone Camera defaults to storing GPS and geographic tagging information in the EXIF data of your iPhone images. If you don’t want this type … Read More
If you want to access and read the iPhone SMS backup file, you’ve come to the right place. We’ll walk you through how to access this text message file, which contains all of an iPhones text messages, SMS, MMS, and iMessages, and also show you how to read the files contents. This trick works for … Read More
Safari for Mac includes the ability to manually restore your last web browsing session, this is helpful if you want to get back to where you were before a session ended or closed. Unlike Firefox and Chrome, Safari won’t prompt you with the little “restore” button though. While modern versions of OS X will attempt … Read More
Skype launches itself automatically on either user login or system boot of Mac OS X. This is either helpful or annoying, depending on your needs. If you wish to stop Skype from opening itself automatically in OS X, you can do so easily using the methods outlined below.
If you’re trying to tweak a wireless router to get the best signal, being able to continuously measure the wi-fi signal strength while you toy with the antennas, placement, and whatever else on the network is really valuable. While most users are best served by using the Mac Wi-Fi Diagnostics app to monitor signal strength … Read More
Some users who have upgraded to iPhone OS 4.0 (iOS 4) have noted that the proximity sensor behaves differently, sometimes it’s just less sensitive, a bit slow or lagged, and other times it’s just not as responsive. In the worst case scenario, the iPhone is up to your ear and the device doesn’t detect that … Read More
If you want to know exactly where a photo was taken with an iPhone, the actual image file can often tell you that thanks to it’s embedded GPS and geolocation data. This is often referred to as Geotagging, and it’s a little known feature that is used on almost all smartphone cameras by default, including … Read More
