After you’ve upgraded to OS X Mountain Lion on the primary Mac you bought it from, the installer app deletes itself from your /Applications/ folder. This makes sense for those who only own a single Mac, but if you plan on installing OS X Mountain Lion on multiple Macs or just want to create an … Read More
Safari 6 is bundled with OS X Mountain Lion and it was just released for OS X Lion as well, and though it’s a very worthwhile update with some great features like the single search/url bar, one not-so-great change is the removal of the RSS subscribe button. The good news is a third party developer … Read More
Multi-Mac households can buy OS X Mountain Lion once for $19.99 and use that single purchase to install and upgrade all of their other personal authorized Macs. This is allowed by Apple’s generous Mac App Store licensing agreement that began with Lion, and though most people don’t bother to read the fine print, here’s the … Read More
Though most users are best served by the easy upgrade process to OS X Mountain Lion through the Mac App Store, some people want to perform a clean install and start with a blank slate. A clean install means the drive is completely erased and Mac OS X 10.8 is installed fresh, nothing else is … Read More
Mountain Lion is out! You can upgrade a Mac right out of the App Store, but some people prefer to make a boot disk. If you’re in that group, rather than making a bootable OS X Mountain Lion installer yourself the old fashioned way, you can do it all in a few clicks with the … Read More
The release of OS X Mountain Lion is just around the corner (it’s official: July 25), but before jumping into the latest major Mac system update, you’ll want to do a few things. We’ve broken it down to a few simple essentials that are easy to follow:
Open Wi-Fi networks are everywhere, if you’re stationed in an area with tons of them you’ll probably want to prioritize your own network to be the top wireless network to join so you don’t accidentally end up on someone elses unsecured network. Prioritizing is also a good idea if you use Personal Hotspot in public … Read More
The iPad screen defaults to automatically dim itself and then turn itself off to black after a fairly short amount of time of inactivity. That’s great for preserving battery life of iOS devices, but if you’re like me you keep an iPad or iPhone alongside you full time while working as a control panel for … Read More
Though Mac OS X now includes built-in encoding tools to perform conversions of video to audio, you can also extract an audio track from a movie by using QuickTime Player. The great thing about ripping an audio track from a video this way is that mo downloads are necessary, and there is no enabling any … Read More
If you want to prevent someone from deleting apps on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPhone, all you need to do is flick a Restrictions setting in iOS: Open “Settings” and tap on “General” Go to “Restrictions” and enter your pin code, locate “Deleting Apps” and switch to OFF Exit out of Settings You can … Read More
Sleep can be invoked instantly on any Mac through the command line by running the pmset command or a very simple AppleScript run in Mac OS X. This can be useful for many reasons, whether scripting, system administration, remote management with SSH, or perhaps you just live in the command line. We’ll show you two … Read More
Though you can add anything to Spotlights Privacy list to prevent indexing of that folder or file, the obvious problem with that approach is the file or folder is shown within the Spotlight control panel in Mac OS X, making it easy for someone else to find the excluded items. Another way to hide a … Read More
Though you can usually fix stuck app downloads by double-tapping the stuck icon, that doesn’t work with things downloaded from iTunes like podcasts, music, audio books, and video. If you find yourself forever waiting for a stuck media download from iTunes, the solution is very simple: Launch iTunes and then tap on “Downloads” Find the … Read More
Have a favorite website that you read on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and perhaps you’d like to have faster access to it? You’re probably reading it this very minute, right? Of course you are, but rather than launching Safari first and then going to a web page, you can add this website or … Read More
Having a bunch of Terminal tabs named “bash” “bash” and “bash” isn’t too useful or descriptive. Instead, you can rename each tab individually to something more specific by using the Terminal inspector. Before doing so, keep in mind that tabs default to rename themselves automatically based on the currently running process, thus if the terminal … Read More
Want to quickly hide a file from prying eyes? Just like you can hide folders, you can hide individual files too. Here is how to do this using the command line tool chflags. Launch Terminal from /Applications/Utilities/ and use the following command syntax: chflags nohidden /path/to/hide/file.txt If you know the path to the file just … Read More
We’ve all been in an awkward situation where we wished we could get out of, whether it’s standing around the watercooler listening to Bob discuss too many details of his dermatologist appointment, sitting next to the crazy guy on the train, or you’re just on a horribly bad date that couldn’t end soon enough. Actually, … Read More
Mac OS X can sometimes throw permissions errors when trying to delete files or empty the Trash. The most common variations of the errors are usually “Operation cannot be completed because the item “File” is in use” or “because the file is locked”, sometimes you can get around this by just quitting open applications or … Read More
