Category: Macintosh

  • How to turn Spotlight OFF (and ON Again)….

    UPDATE: Please see this article if you use Leopard (OSX 10.5+). The procedure below, although not damaging, works for 10.4 and below (Tiger). Thanks to Anonymous for pointing this out. Got a new Macbook thru work today and after Firewire targeting my profile over from my personal MBP, I started looking around the blog for…

  • Immediate delete for USB drives under OSX

    Okay so how many times have you “deleted” a file on a USB drive under OSX only to find out later that the storage is still tied up in .Trashes directory. Well there is a easy way to fix this. Open terminal, cd to your USB drives root directory (mounted under /Volumes) and issue the…

  • Find your Mac’s Serial number from CLI

    Okay couple of quick ways to find the serial number of your mac.ioreg -l|grep IOPlatformSerialNumber|awk ‘{print $4}’|cut -d \” -f 2orioreg -l | awk ‘/IOPlatformSerialNumber/ {print $4}’ | sed ‘s/\”//g’Very useful when you’re logged into your Mac remotely and call apple helpdesk with a issue.

  • Install OSX on a external disk without rebooting

    Normally if you wanted to install OSX on a external drive, you’d probably reboot, insert the DVD and boot off the DVD. Well turns out you really don’t have to do that. You can actually attach a external drive to your machine while it’s running OSX, insert the DVD and install OSX to the attached…

  • Quickway to check your DNS settings under OSX

    This is another CLI command, so get your terminal ready. This gives you a quickway to check the DNS settings on OSX. Now one way is to just cat /etc/resolv.conf , but what if you wanted to see what the system is actually using (not just what it was configured for). Well scutil comes to…

  • OSX Directory Services from Command-line

    New day, new command. dscl is the command in question. It gives you access to Mac OSX’s Directory Services Command Line interface. Very powerful stuff for those of us who like the command line and hate to do the same task a million times. A useful example is the ability to grant Administrator privileges to…

  • How to set the Boot Volume from CLI in OSX

    I’ve run into this issue a number of times a year, including today again, and I have to dig up the email I sent to myself last year with the command line in it. If, like us, you have a bunch of headless Xserves and you’re trying to (re)install OSX on them you might have…

  • Quick Tip for OSX Bloggers

    If you use the built-in Dictionary facilities of your Mac while creating content, you probably know about Ctrl-Command-D. You can use this key combo to look up a word in the built-in dictionary. Well, turns out that after you look up the initial word, you can keep holding Ctrl-Command (ie: let go of D key)…

  • So you locked yourself out of your Mac….

    It’s actually quite easy to reset the admin account using the install CD, but what do you do if you don’t have the CD? Well there are two ways of doing it. This is the simple way, but only works in 10.4.x+: Reboot Hold down Apple + s down when you hear the chime (this…

  • Pictures: WWDC bash featuring Ozomatli

    Well it took a little while to get these out the door, but I think you’ll agree, the wait was well worth it. These are 60 of the best (out of a collection of 1228) pictures I took on thursday night (June 14, 2007) during Apple’s WWDC07 bash. I think 5% keepers is a pretty…