If you’re in IT, or just fixing Grandmas Mac, it’s not too uncommon to get a machine where you don’t have the admin users password. If you find yourself in this situation, you can easily change the Admin password, or any other users, simply by booting into Mac OS X‘s command line Single User Mode. … Read More
You can quickly retrieve any Macs serial number via the command line by using the ioreg or system_profiler command and grep for the serial string. Getting the serial number from the command line like this can be helpful for troubleshooting, Single User Mode, remote management with SSH, or for many other reasons, though most users … Read More
The most common way to access a network share is through the Finder, using the Connect to Server function. But there’s a faster way for quick server connection access: you can summon the Mac OS X server connection window from any app by right-clicking on the Finder icon in the Dock and selecting “Connect to … Read More
The opensnoop utility is an amazing tool for tracking down specifics like what files specific applications are accessing, but you can also use opensnoop to monitor all filesystem access in Mac OS X. To do this, run the utility with no flags attached: sudo opensnoop You’ll be asked for your root password, and then you’ll … Read More
In many Mac OS X apps, you can activate a little-known word completion feature by using a simple keystroke. This is incredibly helpful for word recall and for diversifying the vocabulary while typing, and has so many uses. It’s quite powerful and easy to use.
Increasing the size of the Mac mouse and trackpad pointer is an important ability for those with visual impairments, but it’s also a great way to make a Mac more friendly for newcomers to computers in general, like kids and grandparents. This tutorial will detail how to increase the size of the cursor on a … Read More
Customizing the Mac Finder window toolbars can be a good way to gain quicker access to features you use often, and to help navigate around the file system of OS X , but what if you overdo it and the toolbar becomes cluttered with way too many buttons and doo-dads, resulting in a toolbar that … Read More
If you’re coming to Mac OS X from elsewhere in the unix & x11 world, you might be used to the focus of Terminal windows following your mouse cursor. With a little command line magic, we can enable this hidden feature in the Mac OS X Terminal.app too.
Are you bored with your iPhone ringtones? You probably know by now that you can make iPhone ringtones yourself with iTunes, but instead of chopping up a song, why not get some ringtones that actually sound like they belong to a phone? You’re in luck because there are 932 free iPhone ringtones on your Mac … Read More
IMEI stands for International Mobile Equipment Identity, you can think of IMEI like a serial number in that every iPhone, or other mobile phone for that matter, has a unique IMEI number used to identify it with carriers, manufacturers, and providers. There are several reasons you’d want to know your IMEI, and we’ll get into … Read More
The Finder window sidebar makes navigation in Mac OS X easier, with quick access points to various aspects of a users home directory, as well as throughout the file system. Users can choose to show the Finder sidebar, or to hide the Finder sidebar, depending on their individual preferences.
Using the powerful ‘networksetup’ utility, we can connect to wireless networks directly from the command line of Mac OS X. The syntax you’ll want to use to accomplish joining a network is as follows: networksetup -setairportnetwork [interface] [router SSID] [password]
You can quickly launch a new styled Terminal window through the apps Mac OS X Dock icon. Just right-click (two-finger click for trackpad users) on the Terminal app, navigate to “New Window” select a preconfigured style.
Using curl and pbcopy, we can quickly grab and copy HTML and CSS code from any URL via the command line. This should be a helpful tip for the web developers out there, but for anyone looking to check the source of a web page through this can be an invaluable little trick.
If you want to change the universal equalizer in iTunes for your entire music library and all songs in it, the incredibly adjustable iTunes Equalizer Settings can be accessed quickly in one of two ways:
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Developer Previews 1 and 2 currently do not install on older Macs with unsupported Core Duo and Core Solo hardware, but by performing a simple hack you can get these machines to boot Lion. Apparently the only thing preventing Lion from working on these 32-bit Macs is a single file … Read More
You can find some interesting things in iOS apps that you’ve downloaded from the App Store, all you need to do is extract the file from its container and then you’re free to browse around like any other application package. This works with any iPhone or iPad app, and you’ll obviously need a Mac with … Read More
If you would like to see the folder sizes on the Mac, you can do so easily by enabling a folder size calculation when looking at directories in the List View of Finder in Mac OS X. What this trick does is show folder sizes on the Mac, calculated in megabytes, kilobytes, or gigabytes, depending … Read More
