MacTricksAndTips.com

A while ago I mentioned about monitoring your Internet connections with Little Snitch. Little Snitch is quite a complex application which allows you to block and allow certain connections, it also allows you to see which applications are connection to theInternet . Since the application does cost money after the demo you may be looking for a “free” version. Today I am going to explain a cool Terminal command which you can use to see which applications have connected to the Internet or your local connection in the last few minutes.

Within Preview there are two options when you come to print that you usually take notice of. These are the “Auto-Rotate” and “Scale To Fit”, most of the time these options are sufficient for normal work. However, if you work with documents that are always the same or with documents that you don’t want to “Auto-Rotate” and scale, since they may be in the correction orientation and anything added just causes problem, you can disable these options. Normally the options preferences are remember throughout the day, and when you open and close Preview. However if you restart your computer you may find that these options reset. This can be a pain, especially if you have to keep removing these options and sometimes forget.

Yesterday I wrote a post on the calendar function in Terminal, its designed as a two part series, with the second part being about the date function. I found in bash scripts the two functions sort of work hand in hand. This post is going to show you some of the main features of the date function. The date function is more versatile in that you can easily pick out the piece of information you want, the week of the year, day of the year etc, the calendar function is more graphical. The date function can be used to set the date in your Mac, however I will not be going into this today as I prefer to use System Preferences (to find out more about setting the date use the man help page).

Today and tomorrows post will be a two part mini-series on the date and calendar function within Terminal on your Mac. If you are ever into scripting or working with GeekTool (I have an old post about GeekTool here) it may be very useful to learn how to work with the calendar function in various scripts or what ever you decide to use it with. The calendar function is very useful for producing graphical representations (in text) of any month of any year. Tomorrows post will feature the date function which complements the calendar function nicely. The commands talked about in post can be found (along with more commands) in a variety of books such as Mac OS X Toolbox. Any basic Unix book will feature these basic commands.

A couple of days ago I received an email asking me to explain Terminal’s welcome screen. For new users this can be quite confusing and many wonder what each parts mean. This post is going to be a quick introduction on what each line means and way it is there. I will also have a couple of links to posts explaining each part in more detail. If you have any questions please leave a comment below.

The title is a little bit confusing, however I wanted to convey a meaning title for this post. If you are ever into using the Fast User Switch, located under your name on the right hand side of the menu bar you will notice that there is no short cut associated with it. If you are mindful about security of your account while at home or at work, switching to the log in menu is a great way to stop people from accessing your account, since people need a password to log in to do some damage. This post will show you a Terminal command to Fast User switch and how you can apply this code to a Services menu (to allow you at attach a keyboard short cut) and a Terminal script.

I quite like time lapse movies. They are a cool way of generating movies over a period of time. I wondered if it was possible if you could make such movies of your screen with Terminal. I know there are various applications out there, but they cost money and are not as fun as doing it yourself. I want to create a very simple script in Terminal that would take a picture of my screen every n seconds. That way I could import those images and create a time lapse movie of my progress. It turns out, after a bit of trial and error, a simple script could be made and the results are very good. Since it is a script you can modify the code to your suiting and adjust it as you see fit.

This will be the first post back in what seems like a year. Due to the amount of work Uni piles on you I had to cut back the amount I could write on this site. Anyway I have a cool post to kick off the holidays and I should be able to write every day till at least February. As the title implies this post is all about pausing an application using Terminal. If you have an app that is running that you want to give up its CPU time but not quit the app, this trick may come in handy. It takes a little bit of work to figure out what is happening, but it is really useful.