Mac Tricks And Tips » Tip

Zoom In On Windows While Using Exposé

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 17:52:29 +0000

Hey

I stumbled across this little trick by accident, but I think it is rather cool. If you have ever used Exposé with a lot of windows open, you may find that they can get rather small, very small, especially if you have the option to show every window and not ones from a specific application. Instead of trying to search through these small windows using you can press the space bar while hovering over a window to bring into view.

While using the space bar any window you have highlighted will automatically become the biggest thing you see. In a similar manner to how Quicklook works. If you have lots of reports open a quick tap of the space bar will allow you to bring one into view to see its contents. Another quick tap will set it back with the rest of the windows.

Another cool trick with Exposé is to press Command + ` (the tilde or button next to the number one). If you press these keys in a similar manner to scrolling through windows, while Exposé is running, you will scroll through the applications while Exposé is up and running. This is another quick way to gain an overview of what you have open.

If you have any questions or comments, please leave one below using the form.

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Zoom In On Windows While Using Exposé

Mac Tricks And Tips

Make The Color Picker Into A Seperate App

admin — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 19:44:25 +0000

Hey

This is a rather cool little trick that I want to share with you. If you have ever used the colour picker on your Mac (a screenshot is below), that little application window that appears every so often, and you want it up more frequently for what ever reason, it can be quite hard to do this. However with a little work around, and using Apple Script, you can create a small application of just the colour picker.

To start, open up AppleScript Editor under Applications > Utilities. Within the editor type the following:

“choose color”

Make sure it is the American version of the word “color” and not (the correct) English/British version “colour”. Once you have typed that one line, go to File > Save As, and give it an appropriate name. From the options at the bottom of the save dialogue box select “Application”. Then hit save. You are then done. Double click the icon to test the application, and you should notice the colour picker window open up and you have ti running in it’s on application.

If you want to make the app a little bit more authentic, you can set its own icon. This is simple. Find an appropriate image, I think this one is useful. Copy it to your clipboard. Then select the colour picker app you have just created. Right click and Get Info. Then in the top left where the icon is present, press Command + V to paste the image in. voilà, you have finished your app.

A rather simple tutorial for setting up and making your own little app. There is one small problem, to quit the app press the OK or Cancel button at the bottom, this is due to the way the app is normally called and how we have worked around this inital problem. I don’t use the Colour Picker that often, however i’m sure some of you may have a use for it. If you want to learn more about AppleScript I recommend AppleScript: The Definitive Guide or Apple Training Series

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Make The Color Picker Into A Seperate App

Mac Tricks And Tips

Adding Default Alarms To iCal Events

admin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 17:50:54 +0000

Good Evening,

If you use iCal to set up reminders and events it is often useful to add an alarm. This way you know an event is coming up and you wont forget it. That’s the theory anyway. This post is about automatically setting up an iCal alarm for your events. This way you don’t have to manually add an alarm. Its rather simple to implement and can save you a couple of seconds when adding a new event.

To add a default alarm, go to iCal > Preferences >General from the menu bar. This will load the preferences for iCal. Within the options have a look, about half way down, for an option that says “Add a default alarm”. This is the option we are looking for. Check the box and add a time in the text box. The alarms are set in minutes, so if you want an alarm set for the day before enter 1440 minutes.

Now every time you add a new event within iCal it will automatically add an alarm to that event.

Nifty. Saves me having to add one.

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Adding Default Alarms To iCal Events

Mac Tricks And Tips

Merging Directories With Terminal

admin — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 19:08:09 +0000

Hey

If you have a script or command that you are running you may want to merge folders. You could try and do this with the copy command, however you could run into problems. If you want a simple and easy way to merge files you can do this with something called the “ditto” command within Terminal. It doesn’t take very much configuration and is a quick and easy way to merge files.

To use the ditto command, open up Terminal and type something similar to the following:

ditto Folder1 Folder2
Where Folder1 is the path to the first folder, and Folder2 is the path to the folder where you want the files from Folder1 to go. If you want a practise set up some test folders and have a play round. Its a very simple and easy to use command which can be very useful when you have a script where you need to merge plenty of folders together.

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Merging Directories With Terminal

Mac Tricks And Tips

Turning Off Location Services / Data

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:02:49 +0000

Hey

This is only a quick post, but it may be quite useful to many people, especially if you are interested in your own security and privacy. An eHow article a couple of days ago mentions about your Mac sending your location, and Wi-Fi data back to Apple. This is probably OK and there may be a genuine reason for this to happen. However if you want to be a bit more conscious of what is being sent you can turn this off.

The function is called “Location Services” and is found in System Preferences > Security > General. If you can’t make changes click the lock at the bottom of the screen. On the screen check the box next to “Disable Location Services”, this should turn off the function and stop your Mac send out data back to Apple.

Its only a quick fix. From what I have read this only effects Snow Leopard, however you can check for yourself if the check box is present in previous versions of OS X. I haven’t seen any ill effects.

If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment below.

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Turning Off Location Services / Data

Mac Tricks And Tips

Rotating User Images in Selection Window

admin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:52:20 +0000

Hey

The title of this post is a little simple, possibly confusing and may be deceptive, it should really be called “A little tip to help you rotate images of people within the user picture selection window found in applications such as Address Book”, however that title is too long. When you use applications such as Address book and you want to select a picture for a users details you may want to rotate the image to make sure it fits within the slot. This is rather simple and nifty.

Take the image below (of Mr Bean) if you press the option key and then rotate in a circle you can change the orientation. A useful wheel pops up to help you rotate the image. This is useful in making sure any portrait is suitably aligned.

This option is particularly useful if you insert an image that is up side down or slightly squiffy. This function can be done in any application that uses this pop up picture choosing window.

I hope this little tip helps, I certainly found it quite useful.

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Rotating User Images in Selection Window

Mac Tricks And Tips

Making PDF Files On Your Mac (Any File)

admin — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 20:38:16 +0000

Hey

I’ve been asked this question many times by my friends. How do you make that file, whether it by a word document, html file, image or anything in between, into a PDF. Thankfully Apple has gone to the trouble of adding a PDF creator within your Mac operating system, so you don’t have to install or download anything. I use this little function all the time, when sending files to people over email, or I just want to store them as a PDF file for myself.

Creating a PDF file on your Mac is as simple as hitting print. In fact any application that has a print dialogue box can create a PDF file. For example open your file, it can be anything, you can use this web page as an example. Go to File > Print. Don’t go the usual route of loading up your printer, instead click on the PDF drop down menu and select one of the PDF options. Use the first option “Save as PDF” for the default PDF option.

Let it work away and run. It may take a couple a seconds to mintues for it to work it’s magic. There may be nothing to show while the application is working and you might not be open the file until it has finished. Unfortunatly the save function doesn’t have hundreds of options to choose from unlike a normal PDF creator, however for basic PDF files it should be sufficent.

If you have any questions or tips, please leave a comment below.

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Making PDF Files On Your Mac (Any File)

Mac Tricks And Tips

Setup Mail For A Three Column Layout

admin — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 17:37:37 +0000

Afternoon,

Currently Mail is set up so your Mail messages are at the top of the screen and the contents are at the bottom of the screen. This is fine most of the time, however people with widescreens monitors, or if you want to view a lot of messages at a time you may want to flip the layout into a “three column” layout where your mailboxes are on the far left, the list of emails in the centre and the contents in the third column. This is useful if you have long email messages, and a lot of emails. I prefer it, since I have a widescreen monitor and I want to see a lot of emails. You can’t do this normally within Mail, however there is a quick plugin to solve your problem.

The app is called “Letterbox” from harnly.net. The latest version for Snow Leopard can be found here. To install the app, download the disk image and follow the on screen instructions. Once it is installed your version of Mail will be set up into three columns as shown below.

There is a couple of settings which you can change such as switching between the three column layout and the normal view. As well as changing the slider style.

There isn’t much to the download, however I find that the three columns layout is a lot more useful and this simple plugin is great to use. If you have any other apps or plugins please leave a comment below.

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Setup Mail For A Three Column Layout

Mac Tricks And Tips

Automatically Start Up & Shut Down Your Mac

admin — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 18:13:38 +0000

Hey

This is going to be a quick, but very useful, tip. In times of increasing power prices having your Mac running constantly (even in Standby) can be a small power drain. The solution to this is to shut it down on an evening. I, however, like my Mac to be up and running in a morning so I can quickly check me emails before the day begins. There is a solution to this problem (hence the post), and best of all it includes settings and functions already present on your Mac, so you are ready to go.

To set the start up and shut down time on your Mac open up System Preferences, located in Applications. Then go to Energy Saver and press Schedule at the bottom of the window. What will appear will be a small box allowing you to change when you Mac will start up and shut down, there is also options for putting your Mac into standby and restarting it as necessary.

The settings are not that complex, and unfortunately you can’t create extensive and complex shut down and start up procedures. However if you want your Mac to start before your wake up and automatically go to sleep at a certain time there are options here. There is also settings to change the times to specific days (such as the end of the week) or weekdays and weekends.

If you want an account to automatically log in. Go to Accounts within System Preferences, select Login Options at the bottom of the left hand list and select Automatic Login to “On”.

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Automatically Start Up & Shut Down Your Mac

Mac Tricks And Tips

Introduction To GeekTool – How To Use It

admin — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 17:59:01 +0000

Good Afternoon,

For a little while I have been playing around and using GeekTool, its a unique app in that it displays Terminal output (from various commands) onto the desktop. This seems a bit geeky, but after playing around with it and customising as you see fit, it is a really useful application. Although the app does need a little bit of fiddling to get working, it can display pretty much anything on your desktop. Its great for seeing your Mac’s inner workings and very useful for getting certain information quickly and easily, most of the time there is no better place to put this than on your desktop. This post is going to show new users how you can get this app up and running and some basic commands to get you on your feet, once you get the hang of how the app works you can spend hours playing and adjusting the settings to get something truly awesome.

Step 1. Download and Install

The best way to start any tutorial is at the beginning. To get GeekTool up and running head over to the download page and download the latest version of the software. Once as the download has finished, install the app by opening the disk image and double clicking the preference pane within the disk image. This application is not an app in the normal sense that it doesn’t have a dock icon etc, it installs itself into the system preferences and runs from there.

Once it is installed open GeekTool from System Preferences.

Step 2. Add Your Command

Commands on your desktop are called “Geeklets” they can take the form of shell commands which include commands that would normally run in Terminal, you can also have images and files that run on your desktop. To make your first Geeklet drag the shell command from Geektool window onto the desktop. Then use, in combination with exposé show desktop, move it to a suitable location. The top left will usually suffice.

When you place the geeklet you will notice a properties window will appear. This is used to change the properties of that specific Geeklet. I’m going to run through it in a slightly different order than top to bottom, because I personally think my method works the best, however it doesn’t really matter how you use the properties editor.

Within the editor we have to add a command that will run. The only command that will work are ones that are not self updating, so Terminal commands such as top, which shows information similar to Activity Monitor will not run. In this example I am going to use the “cal” option to show the calendar. However as you become more experienced with the app and Terminal commands you can put practically anything in the box.

Therefore select the text box labelled command and type “cal”. After a brief moment a calendar will show up on your Desktop in the place of the Geeklet.

At the bottom your will notice two options, Refresh and Timeout. Since GeekTool will only accept static commands you set the refresh option to try the command again to get new information. For commands which will show very static options such as a calendar your can set the refresh option to a long time. Commands which show your CPU usage (which I will post later) you can set to one or two seconds. If you use commands that pings an internet page or pulls a lot of information you can use the Timeout option to stop it taking too long or using up too many resources. Remember the more complex the command and the more you refresh it the greater number of system resources you will take up.

Since the command box is a little small, I recommend you develop your Geeklet command within Terminal. It is a lot quicker to write a command within Terminal than in the command box.

Step 3. Style Your Geeklet

We now have a small calendar sitting on our Desktop behind our icons. We can now style it to make it look better. At the bottom of the preference pane for the Geeklet you will notice some options to style the text and background. When you click on the button to style the text a window will pop up giving you the options to style the text. If you want to change the text colour, click on the little green button at the top of this popup window. If you haven’t used this window button it can be difficult to find.

Have a play around with the text size and colour. I recommend an transparent background with white text, however adjust it to meet your desktop background and style.

Step 4. Position Your Geeklet

The final step is to fully position your Geeklet. The reason I suggest you do this last is due to the style and size of your command. There is no point in positioning a Geeklet only to have to move it again when you write your command and style it. Within the properties box add a name and use the text box numbers to position it on screen. You can move the Geeklet by hand and then use the number boxes to finalise the position.

A quick tip here, if you ever delete a Geeklet by accident, press Command + Z to get it back. I’ve found this more than useful on a number of occasions.

Step 5. Add More

The last step is to add more Geeklets. The limit here is really your imagination (and Terminal coding skills). You can use the image Geeklet to get images from web cams or other sources. The file Geeklet is very useful if you want to read from a log or a text file. You can use the extra settings to make sure you get the perfect little desktop icon.

If you are looking for stuff to add to your Desktop you can check out Small Little List of Geek Tool Commands, written by myself a while ago. Another great tool is Geeklets on MacOSXTips. These are small little files that contain all of the information needed to run on your desktop. Anything your can do in Terminal will work with Geektool (except the self updating commands, of course).

My Geeklets

To get the inspiration following below is an image of what I have on my desktop. I’m still thinking about adding more, I need to find the time to play around with the commands.

As shown there is a calendar, current disk space, load on my Mac and well as network through put (from the Geeklet website just mentioned). I also have a liveish image of the international space station found from Heavens Above which is set to update every 30 seconds. The following commands were used for load and CPU usage. Although it uses top (which is self updating command and thus not allowed), to actually cuts information out of the top command so it is perfectly OK.

top -l 1 | awk '/Load/ {print $1 " " $2 " " $3 " " $4" " $5}'; top -l 1 | awk '/CPU usage/ {print $1 " " $2" " $3" "$4" "$5" "$6" "$7" "$8}' ;

Conclusion

There are hundreds of ways to play around with this little program. I’ve had it installed over the last couple of days and made many commands and options which i’ve placed on my desktop. It is limitless for what you can do. The best way to use this app is to play around with it and query Google any time you have a problem or need something doing.

If you have found some cool Geeklets or commands, please leave a comment below. Also if you have set up some cool desktops please give a link to an image of what you have done. In the near future I may have a second post of other cool Geeklet commands, so stay tuned. In the mean time if you are stuck for commands either search this site, or visit the Terminal categories page, Google is a good resource as well as Mac OS X Unix Toolbox and The Mac OS X Command Line: Unix Under the Hood from Amazon.

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Introduction To GeekTool – How To Use It

Mac Tricks And Tips

Solve Your Mac Randomly Locking Up

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 10:44:37 +0000

Hey

This is a rather quicker trick that I think I have mentioned before. However it is worth repeating. For the last couple of days my Mac has randomly been locking up. Sometimes it would be straight after boot, some times after a couple of hours. I spent ages seeing if it was a hardware problem, testing my Mac’s memory, doing disk checks etc. However the problem would still persist and it was getting rather annoying. The solution to this problem was to clear my Mac’s cache files. I normally mention to people that this is the first thing you should do if you have an application or system problem, such as lock-ups or freezes.

Clearing your cache files is quite easy. There is two ways to do it. Either through an application or by hand. I prefer to do it through an app called Onyx although there is many applications which can do this sort of thing. The advantage of using an app is that it can clean many places at once, most of the time it is quicker to do so. Within Onyx by going over to the “Cleaning” tab you can run through the various check boxes and delete various different cache files. It will ask you to restart after each time, but you can hold fire until you have finished every option.

I recommend you clean up every option, except Boot and Kernel as well as the options under Logs and Misc, as these options are not needed. When you have finished, restart and hopefully your problems are gone. After you have cleaned your cache files Onyx has a bunch of other options to help you keep your Mac clean.

Manual Deletion

If you don’t want to download an app you can do it by hand. Although it doesn’t have as many options as using an app such as Oynx, doing it by hand is certainly useful. Your three main cache file locations are found in:

/Users/[name]/Library/Caches /Library/Caches /System/Library/Caches

Delete all of the files within those folders and restart. This should have solved your problem.

The caches files one you Mac are designed to be a quick way for apps to retrieve certain elements needed by the app for fast operation. Sometimes they get corrupted and don’t function as desired, by deleting them you force your Mac to great a new fresh file. When you start your Mac and an app up again after the install it may be a little slower as it has to create the cache file. However once it is created you Mac should be up to full speed.

If your Mac still locks up and freezes it is probably a specific hardware or software problem and you may need to delve deeper. If you want to learn more about your Mac I recommend Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual or Mac OS X Snow Leopard Bible. They are both great books.

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Solve Your Mac Randomly Locking Up

Mac Tricks And Tips

Highlighting Email Messages From Friends

admin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 19:07:56 +0000

Hey

When I get email’s from certain contacts I like to keep track of who is sending them and organise them appropriately. The best way i’ve found to do this is through Smart Mailboxes. This evening i’m going to show you how you can combine the use of Address Book and Mail to pull emails from certain contacts so you can quickly and easily manage them. It takes a little bit of work, however its very useful.

Smart Mailboxes are a way to filter emails. To filters ones from friends or family we are going to create a group within Address Book. Open up Address Book, found in Applications. If you have your contacts all ready imported and within Address Book, great, if you don’t you can skip to the end where I post where I have an alternate solution. Within Address Book, under the Group Column click the small plus icon, or select File > New Group. Then add all your friends or family to the group.

Now you have your group ready we can add it to a Smart Mail box within Mail. Under Mail go to Mailbox > New Smart Mailbox. From the first pop up menu select “Sender is member of group” and then select the new group you have made. Press OK and you are done. The new Smart Mailbox will now contain all of the emails from the people within the group.

If you don’t want to go to the trouble of making a group within Address Book, or you don’t have those contacts listed you can do the following. Instead of adding a group from Address Book you could simply add each individual email message. Select “from” from the first drop down menu and add each email address as needed by clicking the plus button. Make sure the drop down menu is set to “any” and not “all”.

This selection is OK, if you have a couple of email addresses, however if you have plenty of email addresses it can become a bit impractical. The first option, utilising, Address Book, is more useful. Overall you can do some really cool things with Smart Mailboxes and this one is quite useful.

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Highlighting Email Messages From Friends

Mac Tricks And Tips

Control How Your Mouse Scrolls

admin — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 18:16:14 +0000

Hey

This is a quick post for people using external mice (as opposed to track pads) who want to control the scrolling direction of your mouse. With the advent of scrolling balls, instead of wheels you may find your page flying around when using the small tracker ball. I find this really annoying and prefer vertical and horizontal tracking to make things a bit more organised. This is very simple and easy to do. Although settings might be slightly different depending on your mouse, the basic principle is the same.

To change your settings open System Preferences and select Mouse. Depending on your mouse the setting will be slightly different however you are looking for an option called “Scrolling”. Within this drop down you can select how your tracker ball works. You can have either vertical scrolling, horizontal and vertical scrolling or 360 degree where you can scroll in any direction. Change the settings as you please, I prefer just vertical scrolling to stop certain pages flying around when I use the scrolling ball. If you want you can turn the scrolling off completely.

Its only a simple trick, however one that can be easily overlooked. Its also useful if you find pages moving all over the place when you use your might mouse or tracker ball.

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Control How Your Mouse Scrolls

Mac Tricks And Tips

Hiding Hard Drive Icons From Your Desktop

admin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:54:53 +0000

Hey

Here is a quick little trick which I find quite useful. Depending on how you work and organise your desktop, icons such as your Hard Drive and connected servers may never be used by yourself. They could be taken up valuable space. This can be further exasperated if you have a lot of Hard Drives and servers connected. Most of you desktop could be taken up by unused icons which you may never need to use. Its a rather simple method to remove icons such as Hard Drives, Servers and connected iPods from your desktop.

For once we are not going to use any Terminal trick. The answer lies within Finder’s preferences. The preference pane, for me, tends to be the first item I look at hen I use a new application or want something sorted. In Finder however a lot of the settings get changed within System Preferences, so it can get over looked. To open up the Preference pane, either go to Finder > Preferences or press Command + , (comma) with the Finder app selected. A little window similar to the following will open up.

The check boxes at the top of the General tab or the ones we are looking for. De-select an items you don’t want. In a flash they are gone. Unfortunately you can deselect specific items, only groups of items. However if you want to free up some Desktop space, de-selecting any of the four items is recommend. I prefer removing “Connected Servers” from the list, after a good afternoon of moving files around I can have loads of connected servers on my desktop which starts to make things a bit messy.

Its just a simple tip, however I find it very useful. The simple ones tends to be the best.

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Hiding Hard Drive Icons From Your Desktop

Mac Tricks And Tips

Getting Better Sounding Music Out Of ITunes

admin — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 18:40:39 +0000

Hey

If you listen to music in iTunes (or any other music player) sometimes music can sound a bit flat or boring. It could be a problem of the music encoding but more than likely it is a problem due to the equaliser not having the optimal settings. This post was inspired by Richard who contacted me earlier in the week, using his suggestion for a post I am going to show you how to get the best sound possible.

The first step is to open the equaliser in iTunes. In the latest iteration of iTunes it is under the Window Menu Bar option. When you open it up you will see something like the following image. It currently has all of the options a 0DB. We can adjust these values so we have a nice ranging tones within out music. To make sure you get the best results play some music in the background which accurately represents what you listen to. Different music needs slightly different adjustments.

To adjust your music first select the “on” check box in the top left corner. Then to see if it is working ramp up or down one slider to see the effects, I recommend the ones on the far left or right. It normally takes about 2 seconds for the changes to take effect. Most changes won’t be noticeable however if you have keen hearing you may be able to hear the changes. We need to do minor changes, all which can have a large effect.

There is no “perfect” equalizer setting. You can read more on equalising settings here, there are two ways of working either using one of the presents and adjusting the sliders or starting from scratch. Through a bit of trial and error i’ve come up with something in the following image. It sounds pretty good and the music I listen to sounds fuller and a bit louder in the right places. I would generally adjust the end sliders more than the ones in the middle as these effect the bass and treble the most.

Play around with the settings and see what you think sounds best. Different speakers and set ups will produce different results. Note that using the equaliser will use slightly more CPU (not that noticeable), if you have a slow Mac this may slow your computer down, especially if you have a complicated equaliser.

If you want to learn more on this topic I recommend iPod and iTunes For Dummies and How to Do Everything iPod, iPhone & iTunes on Amazon are a good read.

Leave a comment below if you have any questions or comments.

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Getting Better Sounding Music Out Of ITunes

Mac Tricks And Tips

Change The Default Address Book Template

admin — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 17:43:26 +0000

Hey

When you are using Address Book to add contacts you may find that there is limited input options for various bits of information you have about a contact. This may, in some circumstances, be a problem and on the face of it it can be quite difficult to add to a contact. However help is at hand. This post is going to discuss changing the basic template which Address Book operates from so you can add all the fields you want. Its rather simple (and fun) and you can soon change the template to have all the information you want.

To change the template, open Address Book and go to the Preferences, either by press Command + , (comma) or going to Address Book > Preferences. Within the preference pane select the Template option. Here you have a basic template which you can modify. Modifications are made in two ways. Using the drop down or the small green plus arrows by a section.

To add a section select the drop down menu. This is split into two sections. The top half of the drop down menu belongs to the area around the image. This includes name and job. You can’t change how these are displayed. The bottom half is for information where there may be multiple copies. From the drop down select the piece of information you want (eg URL) and it will be displayed in the template.

Within the template you can then choose how many times an option is displayed and the type. For example with Phone, if you click the green plus arrow a second phone option will appear which you can change to “work”, you can do this as many times as you want with each option. Each one can be changed individually to suit your needs, if you don’t use an option when adding a contact it wont be displayed, so add as many as you potentially need.

If you notice the options drop down menu has parts greyed out. To remove an option simply press the red minus arrows within the template until all of the options have been removed. You will then find the option is selectable again within the drop down menu.

After playing around I have come up with something that looks like this. You can do a lot of customisation to the point where you could have every bit of information imaginable added to the template.

There you have it. Changing the template is simple and easy when you know how to do it. If you have any questions or comments please leave a comment below.

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Change The Default Address Book Template

Mac Tricks And Tips

Disable Access to System Preferences-or any App

admin — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 21:01:05 +0000

Good Evening

If you have a Mac which is used by a couple of people in the house, you may want to restrict access to certain apps. This is so people don’t run amok with the settings and screw up your computer. It is rather simple to do this. I am going to show you two ways to do this. The recommended way through System Preferences or the less common way which is harder to revert. This type is focused on System Preferences, since you don’t want people messing around with these settings, but it can be applied to any app.

To disable access to an app open up System Preferences. Go to Parental Controls and select the account you want to limit. The select the System tab if it isn’t already selected and look at the list box at the bottom of the window. Within the search box type “system” and allow the list to populate. Then deselect the application by making sure it doesn’t have a check in box.

If you do this for every account, the users will not have access to the System Preferences app. This is useful for keeping your Mac safe and secure.

The problem (in some respects) is when a users tries to run the app they will be prompted to enter a password. If a user knows this password they can easily circumvent this security and run the app. We need something more secure. This is where Terminal comes in. We are going to change the access settings so no one can access it and disable access.

Open up Terminal and type the following, change the app to one of your choosing. Note that only experienced users should attempt this and you have a backup just in case you break something and can’t revert it back.

sudo chmod 000 /Applications/System\ Preferences.app

The back-slash denotes a space is the next character, you could also encase the path in quotes like so: “/Applications/System Preferences.app”. When you try to run the app, nothing will happen. Perfect. No-one can access the app and your settings are secure. If you want to revert the settings type the following into Terminal again.

sudo chmod 775 /Applications/System\ Preferences.app

If everything goes to plan you should have access to the app again. The numbers (000 and 775) allow you to control access to the app, you can find more information here. If nothing happens, run Repair Permissions in Disk Utility and it should repair the change, if that doesn’t work pull an old copy from a backup.

There you have it, a simple and more complex way to stop access to applications. The second method is more complex and really doesn’t allow an app to be run. It can also be employed (I assume) to files and folders. If you are going to do a change like this I recommend the first option and don’t tell any one the password to allow it to be unlocked.

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Disable Access to System Preferences-or any App

Mac Tricks And Tips

Solve Running 64bit Problems With X11 and Java

admin — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 13:33:58 +0000

Hey

Its quite hard to explain, in a simple title, the cause and solution to this problem. If you have ever run an X11 or Java program (or both at the same time) you may find that the program doesn’t run, or appears with a random error. I have also seen problems where the program in question runs, but all of the text is garbled. I first found this problem when trying to install MATLAB, the program wouldn’t run after the installer. The solution is rather simple and I assume it is transferable to other applications. This post may be very specific and you may not needed it, however if you ever come across a problem which involves X11 and Java keep this post in mind.

The problem occurs with applications for Java. If you try to run an application which only supports the 32-bit mode for Java, it will run into problems. In theory 32-bit applications should run on 64-bit packages fine. However when you are running applications though X11 or the applications in question is a bit picky you may find the application doesn’t run. To solve this problem we need to change how Java runs. This could be done through a really complicated Terminal command and make this post look complicated, but Apple have kindly provided a mini app to do this for us.

Go to Applications > Utilities and open up Java Preferences, this app may seem obvious now, but when I tried to install MATLAB, I had know idea it existed. Within this app you can change which package your OS will run. In the bottom half of the window move the 32-bit option to the top of the list then close the app.

When you close the app the changes will take effect. Hopefully any old Java and X11 apps should now run (assuming they use Java). Its only a small and simple trick however it helped solve the problem I was having. In the future when you come across an app and it clear isn’t working correctly this may be your solution. You can also change the settings for the plugins for web browsers, if you are having trouble there.

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Solve Running 64bit Problems With X11 and Java

Mac Tricks And Tips

Check Maintenance Scripts On Your Mac

admin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:27:03 +0000

Hey

Sorry for the lack of posts over the last couple of days University has been really busy. Anyway today I am going to take to you about the maintenance scripts that your Mac runs. Every day, week and month your Mac runs a script to keep it healthy and hopefully running. These scripts are quite easy to locate and I am going to take to you about how they run, and if needs be if you need to change the time in which they run.

There are three main scripts that you Mac runs, daily, weekly and monthly. They take care of cleaning out log files, junk files and scratch files. The weekly script takes care of log files which don’t need to be deleted daily. The monthly files runs along the same lines. To check that they have run open up Terminal and type:

ls -al /var/log/*.out

You should see an output similar to the one below.

-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 271239 15 Mar 04:30 /var/log/daily.out -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 906 1 Mar 06:50 /var/log/monthly.out -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 4200 13 Mar 06:50 /var/log/weekly.out

If you have found that they haven’t run you can type (again in Terminal) the following:

sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

or
sudo periodic daily

were you can replace daily with weekly or monthly.

Normally these scripts run at round 3:15 in the morning. However if your Mac is shut down or asleep it wont run. So it may be worth changing this time. To do this you need to edit the LaunchDaemon which is responsible for running the scripts. These are located in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons and are called com.apple.periodic-daily.plist, com.apple.periodic-weekly.plist and com.apple.periodic-monthly.plist if you open up the file you will notice there is a couple of lines or specific code, such as the following found in the daily file.

Hour 3 Minute 15

This sets the daily file to run at 3:15am. You could change this file to something like 17:20, so it runs in the evening. I do however have reason to believe that the LaunchDaemon protocol counter only runs when your Mac is awake. So you may find that the script runs at random time and setting the values differently may cause them not to run at all. A solution to this is to keep your Mac awake (using an app such as Caffeine) on the first day of the month and every Saturday.

Hopefully you have understood the way the maintenance scripts work. The only variable in this little experiment is when they run as the LaunchDaemon process doesn’t run off system time, rather its own time. I will try and do a bit more testing in this area over the next couple of days and if I have anything conclusive i’ll update this post.

If you have any questions or comments, please leave one below.

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Check Maintenance Scripts On Your Mac

Mac Tricks And Tips

Deleting Firefox Preferences On Your Mac

admin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:20:56 +0000

Hey

If you have ever played around with the preferences setting in Firefox (by typing about:config into the address bar), you may find out that you can quickly and easily add them to the list. Deleting them, however seems to be a lot harder. Basic commands such as pressing delete (or any such combination) don’t seem to work, neither is a delete menu present. To combat this you have to go down a different route. Since the preference options are simply saved in a file, we can edit this file and adjust the results as needed. You may need to delete preferences if you know (for certain) that something is wrong, or you have added an incorrect preference file and want to remove it. Most incorrect preference files usually get removed after a while, however its worth making sure.

To delete the preference file open up Finder and find the following path:

/Users/[name]/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/[random letters].default

This stores a lot of your preferences and related files that Firefox uses. Within this list find a file called “pref.js” and open it in TextEdit or your favourite text editor.

Within this file you will find all of the user preferences that you set (not ones by the application itself, these are stored elsewhere). They take the format of:

user_pref(“preference.name”, value);

Look through the list and find the preference file you have added. To remove it, simply remove the line that the preference occupies. Save the file and restart Firefox. The changes should take effect and not be present when you type about:config in the address bar.

Its a simple tip, however I have used it once or twice when I want to delete a preference that I have added. If you have any more Firefox tips, please leave a comment below.

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Deleting Firefox Preferences On Your Mac

Mac Tricks And Tips