MacTricksAndTips.com

Security should be very important. Although your Mac’s operating system is generally very secure, there are things you can do to make sure you have a locked down system. These tricks and tips are not going to disable you system so you can’t use it. They are every day tips which you should be following to ensure you don’t leave any back doors inadvertently open. If you don’t apply them all it doesn’t matter however the more you apply the more secure your system will be. If you have any addition please leave them in the comments.

CD and DVD drives are becoming rarer in an all digital world. Apple, in fact, has developed an external superdrive because they are not including internal drives within their laptops. However, those people who still use them may want to alter the way CD’s and DVD’s behave when they are inserted into your Mac. There are not many options, however it may help if you find yourself constantly trying to battle against the default settings. This method also alters the way Bluetooth headsets behave.

People have a love hate relationship with Dashboard. I love it, especially since I changed its background. If you want to disable the dashboard so it doesn’t load you can with an simple Terminal command. This means that dashboard will never start so you can’t access it. This allows you to not have it open and save precious CPU cycles. Its only a simple command, and you can turn it back on anytime.

Every so often you Mac will use 100% of it system resources trying to complete a task. This is not normally a problem, however you may want to pause an application or a process so you can quickly complete another task. For example if iTunes is using 100% of our system, you may want to temporarily pause it to free up you system. You can then re-enable it and allow the application to resume. I like to use this trick if I want to quickly run a CPU intensive app while my system is running and I want to give it all of my system resources, but something is taking up the CPU cycles.

One of the popular modes in Safari is Private Browsing. This gives you a bit of privacy in your browsing habits, as it doesn’t record which sites you visit or store any data. However, it doesn’t have it own keyboard shortcut. This post, however will show you a quick way in which you can add a keyboard shortcut. This means you don’t have to select the option from the menu and can access it directly from your keyboard.

When you leave your Mac, in the work place for example, you should lock it and return to the login page. This is an added security measure to stop unwanted usage on your Mac. On a Windows PC this come in the handy short cut Windows Key + L. This feature, however, is not present on your Mac. With a little bit of work and a small automator workflow we can automate this process, and then attach it to a keyboard shortcut. It is a quick way to lock your Mac.

Every time you use your Mac, write to disk, it will alter the state of your hard drive. If it is solid state or a normal magnetic hard drive the magnetic domains or cells will degrade and change. This will slow your Mac down. Every time it encounters a block that has an error, it has to re-write the byte in another place. If you have many bad blocks it will degrade your Mac’s performance. In order to bring it back up to speed we need to repair the disk. We can also repair the disk permissions.

Notification Centre is a new (ish) feature found in the latest version of Mountain Lion. Its a great way of receiving notifications from apps about various updates. Mail uses this system quite elegantly to tell that I have received a new email message. It can, however, be quite annoying especially if an app spams the notification centre, or you just don’t want to receive notifications any more. This tip is going to show you how to turn off the notification centre messages for various apps.