macOS

Language and Text ShortcutsShortcuts are always good, particularly when you don’t have to do anything special to take advantage of them once they are set up.  This works primarily in the app TextEdit, but it also works in Mail, iChat among others. Follow these steps for TextEdit. For other apps, choose Text Substitutions from the…

Mr. Grossman, the founder and chief technology officer of White Hat Security, wrote in a blog post that he had found the exploit earlier this year and reported it to Apple on June 17th. Not having heard back from the company, aside from an auto-generated confirmation e-mail, Mr. Grossman published the exploit, a proof-of-concept demonstration…

iTunes 9.2.1 is free and available via the Software Update application, or as a download from the Apple Web site.

— N.J. Rubenking With all the focus on iOS at WWDC and the rollouts of the iPad and iPhone 4, Apple has conspicuously put Mac OS X development on hold. That has caused some to wonder why Apple, with all its financial resources, couldn’t fund both efforts. Here’s why it could have but chose not…

Intego’s OSX/OpenionSpy warning in VirusBarrier In addition to siphoning off personal information and user activity records, the spyware, dubbed OSX/OpinionSpy, monitors activity on all connected drives, opens network port 8254, relaunches itself if quit, and runs with root user-level control. It also adds code to Safari, Firefox and iChat to monitor user activity. The OSX/OpinionSpy…

Just be sure to note that, in a darkened bedroom, the green LED on the AirPort Express stands out like an brilliant green Airport beacon, so place a piece of tape over it before your partner even notices the little white device. Because the iPad has a 10 hour battery life, you won’t need a…

OmniDiskSweeper is a utility that will scan your entire hard drive, and display how much space is being used by both files and directories in an intuitive, hierarchal display that is also color coded to help you zoom in on the largest space wasters. Items that are in light purple are measured in gigabytes, dark…

There are lots of ways to set up a local wireless network and even more ways to go wrong trying to set up complex configurations. This HOWTO is very specific: it deals only with configuring an AirPort Extreme base station in partnership with an Airport Express in order to extend the range of your wireless…

While exploring the island with her monkey, Jep, she comes across Captain Nemo’s old base, along with the ruins of an unknown situation. Soon she learns that Nemo’s ghost haunts the area and a disease threatens the island’s eco-system. Players switch control between Mina and Jep, each of whom has handy abilities, such as Mina’s…

Open the terminal app enter: cd /Volumes enter: ls -la In my case, the internal boot drive, Altair, is owned by root. That’s necessary to enforce UNIX protocols for access and permissions by multiple users.Terminal results for /VolumesIf you’d like to share an external drive with others, however, this UNIX protocol can get in the…

In the process of working with Prosoft Engineering’s Data Backup 3 (for another article) I discovered that several of my volumes had multiplied into a set of volume names with numbered suffixes. I opened a terminal, did a ‘cd /Volumes’ then ‘ls -la’ and saw something alarming — an explosion of suffixes for the volume…

If you are like most Mac users, you have a Mac with one internal hard disk (or maybe an SSD!) and a single external drive used for Time Machine. If this is your configuration, then this article doesn’t apply to you.Time Machine. Credit: Apple, Inc. However, if you have an additional drive attached, either internally (say,…

namebench finds the fastest DNS servers for you DNS, or Domain Name Servers, are the computers that translate Web page addresses like apple.com into their actual Internet addresses. In the case of apple.com, that’s 17.112.152.57. If the DNS servers you’re using can’t make those translations for you quickly, it can take far longer than it…

Sometimes those software update agents are innocuous. But other times, they’ll leave behind remnants of themselves, for example Menu Bar items. Or they’ll constantly pop up in Little Snitch, if you use that, begging for permission. It can get a little annoying. At the very least, it’s messy to leave these persistent messengers around (that…

Apple Remote Desktop Client 3.3.2 and Apple Remote Desktop Admin 3.3.2 are free updates and are available via the Software Update application or as downloadable installers from Apple’s Support Web site. Both require Mac OS X 10.4.11, 10.5.7 or higher, or 10.6 or higher.

Here’s how to add geotag information to your photos if your camera doesn’t handle that for you: Import your images into iPhoto just like you normally would. Click to select the photo you want to geotag. Click the info button in the lower right corner of the image. iPhoto’s info option shows extra image information.…

Access original URLs of saved pages I regularly save Web pages in Safari. I save New York Times articles, Apple Support documents and just about anything else that I might want to re-read at some later time. They are all saved using Safari’s .webarchive format. When I open one of these saved pages, the URL…

To make sure photos that contain faces are properly detected if they were imported with iPhoto 09 8.1, first install then 8.1.1 update, and then do this: Select the imported photos that include faces. I found that the Photos view made it easier for me to find and select the photos I wanted to include.…

When you install a guest OS on your Mac with Parallels Desktop (PD), VMWare Fusion, a disk image file is created. I won’t discuss VirtualBox from Sun, but I believe it works the same way. With Parallels Desktop, the files are in /Users/username/Documents/Parallels. With VMware Fusion, the files are in /Users/username/Documents/VirtualMachines. These files can become…

One forum member at the InsanelyMac Web site posted a patch that lets users install the Mac OS X 10.6.2 update on their netbook PCs. After about a week of testing, intrepid hackers have been reporting that the hack seems to be working fine.Apple doesn’t support Mac OS X running on anything other than its…

The W3 checks Web sites for valid HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML and other markup code. Just enter the URL for your Web site, click Check and the validator lists all of the markup problems it finds.The W3 site markup validator A quick check of my personal blog returned an error list that’s 102 items long.…

The topic of the podcast was first impressions of Snow Leopard. At that point I had been using it about four days. As always with Chuck’s programs, he wanted a well rounded panel discussion. Three of the participants were Mac technical experts and authors who spoke at length about the operational aspects of Snow Leopard…

New in iTunes 9, Home Sharing allows you to access an iTunes library on another Mac, so as to either stream or copy its media (audio and video). “Wait a minute,” you may be saying. “This doesn’t sound all that new. I can already stream media from a shared Library via settings in the Sharing…