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
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
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
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
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
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
There are times when you will find a windows sizing controls have been rendered inaccessible, the most likely cause is from changing the Mac’s resolution by hooking it up and then disconnecting it from an external display, however I have also seen poorly written javascripts resize windows to outrageous proportions as well. Additionally, sometimes a … Read More
Want to turn off all mobile data use on iPhone? The iPhone offers a feature that allows users to easily disable all iPhone data usage when on a cellular network. This means if you’re about to hit your bandwidth cap, you can simply toggle cellular data usage off and avoid any potential overage charges from … Read More
If you need to adjust the brightness of a Mac display precisely, you can turn to two different tricks that offer precision control on just how bright a Macs screen is.
You can easily adjust the search priorities in Spotlight so that other items are listed first in the Mac OS X Spotlight search results. For example, you could adjust the priorities so that files and documents are listed above apps, or so that images are shown above everything else. There are a ton of options … Read More
If you want to make reading a web page a bit easier on the Mac with Safari, you can issue some simple keyboard shortcuts to change the displayed font and text size on a page. To increase the Safari web browsers readable text size, hit the Command key and + key (plus key, it’s located … Read More
