May 20th 2008
nce as you get to know your Mac and you are more confident in how it works, and what everything does, you may want to starting playing with the system files. Usually I strongly suggest you don’t play with any of them to be on the safe side. But every so often you may need to edit a certain file to achieve a specific task. For example if you are using the web server built into a Mac and you want to edit the httpd.conf file. Normally you would have to give yourself permission to edit the file, and then open up it up. Or you could use vim or pico, a Terminal file editing program. Both of these take a while to learn (especially vim and pico) or take a long time to implement (changing file permissions). What we want is the ability to give TextEdit root powers to edit these files, while still using the GUI of TextEdit. Its rather simple.
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Apr 4th 2008
This is just a quick tip, but it is really fun. Usually when you open up Terminal you will see the date and time of your last Terminal login. That is a bit boring. As a result there is a cool little command that you can use to give your self a custom welcome message, that is a lot more interesting. This tip using a sudo command so you will have to be careful.
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Mar 17th 2008
This tip comes from messing around with my system and general clues about how screen savers work from various forums. The basic idea behind this trick is to install some cool screen savers that are not in the most obvious positions. Its quick and simple to do. As well as this there are some really cool effects that should really be installed by default. There are two sets, the black and white version included on every system and some really amazing screen savers found only on your Leopard disk. These could be found in Tiger you would have to look your self.
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Feb 22nd 2008
The Wii is one of the coolest gaming consoles around. I just love the concept and games on it. So what is better than paring your Wiimote with your Mac. Its doesn’t take long and the results are really fun.
To pair your Wiimote head over to Remote Buddy and download the software. There is a free trial for 15 days. As well as this the final version doesn’t cost the earth, only 20 euros. Anyway once you have downloaded and installed the software your are ready to go. It may take a little way and ask you to install a couple of extra drivers.
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Feb 19th 2008
The sidebar in Finder 10.5 is great, I like how it works and how it is designed. But there is one small problem that could be improved and that is separators. Separators are designed to visually split up your interface. You can usually move these about. They are a great way of simply organizing your workspace.
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Feb 6th 2008
This really isn’t a hidden feature, hence the speech marks, but it is a cool feature of the dictionary application that not many people know about. If you load up dictionary from applications you can access the front and back covers. If you haven’t ever picked up a dictionary before these contain some tables of elements, US presidents, abbreviations and other cool things such as how to use the dictionary.
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