My MacOS X

If Finder is misbehaving you probably think you need to restart your computer. Usually you can fix the problem by relaunching Finder itself. This saves a lot of time since the relaunch only takes seconds to do.

Here 4 ways for relaunching Finder in Snow Leopard

Relaunching with Dock

This is probably the fastest way to relaunch Finder.

1. Hold down control-option and click on the Finder icon stuck onto Dock
2. Choose Relaunch option from appearing contextual menu
3. Finder should be relaunched by then

Relaunching with Terminal

As usual, Terminal lends us a great help in relaunching Finder.

1. Open Terminal
2. Execute command line

   killall Finder
   

3. Finder will be quitted and relaunched after a while

Relaunching with Force Quit Pane

We can use force quit pane to quit any running applications, including relaunching Finder (we can quit Finder).

1. Hit command-option-escape to open Force Quit Pane
2. Select Finder
3. Click on Relaunch button

Relaunching with Quicksilver

Besides using Quicksilver as applications launcher, we can also use it to relaunch applications. This relaunch feature is also applicable to Finder.

1. Download Quicksilver and launch it
2. On the application box type Finder and type Relaunch on action box
3. Hit return key to execute
4. Your Finder should be relaunched by now

To reset your OS X password without an OS X CD you have two ways

First Way “create a new admin account”

1. Reboot
2. Hold apple + s down after you hear the chime.
3. When you get text prompt enter in these terminal commands to create a brand new admin account (hitting return after each line):
   • mount -uw /
   • rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
   • shutdown -h now
4. After rebooting you should have a brand new admin account. When you login as the new admin you can simply delete the old one and you’re good to go again!

Second way “Resetting or changing your existing password”

If you’ve ever forgotten your user account password in OS X, All you need is to remember your username (you do remember that, right?) and then reboot your computer.

1. Hold apple + s down after you hear the chime.
2. sh /etc/rc
3. passwd yourusername
4. reboot

P.S. The only major downside to resetting your password this way is that you’ll lose all keychain passwords,

Requirements:

• Home folder to be encrypted.
• Don’t need my Time Machine disk to be encrypted

First, make sure your Time Machine setup is functioning properly.
The XCode installed, as it uses Property List Editor
(Note: you’ll need to change the process a bit if you use a different property list editor.)

How to do that:

You will need to manually edit the preference file for Time Machine, adding the ID string of your File Vault disk to the list of disks to backup. You can’t do this from within System Preferences or otherwise.
One way of finding the ID string of the disk is to open com.apple.finder.plist, located in your user’s /Library/Preferences folder, and look for the FXRecentFolders item.

One of the entries should contain the name of your home folder (your login name) together with an entry called file-data. If it doesn’t, you need to close the plist and visit your home folder in Finder. This will make it a ‘recent folder,’ and then you can check the file again.

The value of _CFURLAliasData inside file-data is the string we need, including the enclosing < and >. Copy this to the clipboard.

Now, disable Time Machine from within System Preferences, make a back up of com.apple.TimeMachine.plist, located in /Library/Preferences, and then open the original file in Property List Editor. Select IncludedVolumes and click Add Child. Select type Data and paste the string you copied earlier.

(If IncludedVolumes doesn’t exist, select Root and click Add Child. Name the new entry IncludedVolumes and make it type Array. Then do the above.)

Check that the path to your home folder isn’t listed in any of the items ExcludeByPath, ExcludedVolumes, or SkipPaths. Save and quit the editor.

Select Back Up Now from the Time Machine menu bar extra to start an initial backup.
Note: You may already have a backup of your image file (located in the hidden folder /Users/.username), in which case you will have duplicates. You might want to exclude this from your backup.

When browsing your backup, your unencrypted home folder will be on the Computer level, alongside your startup disk. Not where it normally is — under /Users — since it is treated like a regular disk.

View Original hint

The fastest way to browse your directories in OS X is clearly the column view that you access by pressing “Command + 3“.

You probably know that if you double-click the icon at the bottom of a column, it will “right size” that column, so you can see the entire file name.

If you “Option-double-click” that icon, then all columns will be “right sized” to the maximum width necessary to display the longest item in the column.

If you want to change all of them press “Alt” while resizing. This will not only resize all columns at once, but also makes the new width the default setting for all windows.

In 10.5, Apple apparently felt these shortcuts were too hidden; there’s now a contextual menu hiding under the column resize widget, too. Just “control-click” on it, and three choices will appear:

Hopefully someday Apple will figure out how to get the “right size all columns” feature into the Finder, where it would be truly useful. Until then, though, at least it works in the Open and Save dialogs

Use the Tab key in user-created keyboard shortcuts in Snow Leopard. In OS X 10.5, pressing the Tab key while creating keyboard shortcuts (in the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences panel) didn’t work; the system would just beep and not accept the Tab key.

In Snow Leopard you can now use the Tab key in any combination with the Shift, Control, Command, and Option keys. For example, you could change the Exposé All Windows activation keystroke to Option-Tab, which might make sense if you’re used to using Command-Tab to switch applications and want to have a similarly-assigned shortcut for Exposé.

• Open the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard System Preferences panel
• Select the Exposé & Spaces entry in the left-hand column
• Click on the All Windows entry below Exposé in the right-hand column.
• Double-click on the right-hand side of that entry
• And just press Option-Tab

and you’re done.

You can now use the Tab key in your user-defined shortcuts, which opens up a number of additional keyboard combinations.

if you have your desktop wallpaper set to shuffle

between a number of images, and you don’t like the currently-selected picture, you can manually skip it:

• Just type the following into Terminal killall Dock When the Dock restarts, it will change to another desktop picture.
• If you find yourself doing this regularly, you could turn it into a simple Automator application

  tell application "System Events"
  set rotinterval to change interval of current desktop
  set change interval of current desktop to 1
  delay 1
  set change interval of current desktop to rotinterval
  end tell
  

  You can assign this script to a hotkey (using QuickSilver).

After update up 10.6.2 I’ve noticed that my menu bar had all of it’s icons missing, including clock, istat, etc. Re-downloaded the update from Apple  is not helps…

The problem in spotlight fix – If you are disabled the spotlight icon by modifying the Search.bundle in /System/Library/CoreServices

Here  instructions how to fix it:

• Replace Search.bundle from your backup in  /System/Library/CoreServices ( click here to download a default version ).
  Note: Maybe you have to delete a current file and then copy a new one.

  Launch Activity Monitor and kill the SystemUIServer.
  

• MacOS 10.6.2 Menu Bar is working again
  

Advanced OS X users know that Darwin comes with ipfw, which can be used to set up a custom firewall. IPFW’s flexibility, very targeted bandwidth limiting rules can be made in only a few lines. This same service however can be used to also limit bandwidth on specific ports.

The following ipfw rules will limit connections from Mac to ISP’s mail server to 100K per second only for outgoing smtp connections:

sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 100Kbit/s
sudo ipfw pipe 1 tcp from me to smtp.west.cox.net 25

Obviously, the rate can be tailored to anything you like, and the rule is specific enough not to get in the way of any other connections going on.
to remove the pipe from the port

sudo ipfw delete 1

Another example could be for webdevelopers

You should see how long it takes modern sites to load on 56k…

Create a pipe that only allows up to 15KB/s

sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 15KByte/s

Attach that pipe to the outgoing traffic on port 80

sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80

Delete the pipe when finished

sudo ipfw delete 1

A dark scary place full of text. That’s how it feels at first anyway. This is a selection of Terminal Commands that I have found particularly useful. Change settings for Spaces, Spotlight, Dock, Finder, Time Machine, System, etc that aren’t accessible through the application or system preferences. If you are just making your first forays into OS X Terminal land hopefully they will help you out.

Here are some very useful terminal commands and tips for hidden Mac OS X settings.

All subjects

• Finder
• Dock
• Spaces
• Desktop
• Time Machine
• Spotlight
• ISO CD/DVD
• Remote Desktop
• Network
• System commands
• Applications and processes
• Files management

In Mac OS X 10.5, the AirPort icon in the menu bar had a trick up its sleeve—hold down Option when clicking the icon, and you’d see more information about the various available AirPort networks -
The hardware (MAC) address of the wireless station, which channel is in use, the signal strength (RSSI), and finally an indication of the data transmission rate.

In Snow Leopard, this feature has been expanded, you can also see what mode your connected network is using (802.11n, for instance), security (WPA2 Personal), MCS Index, which appears to be related to the 802.11n standard.

One of the oddities of my computer use style is that I don’t like to have my system go into screensaver or lock automatically very quickly. When I leave the keyboard, I like to be able to activate the screensaver/lock manually. Since I’m also not a fan of active screen corners, I want to be able to do so by keystroke.

Annoyingly, OS X doesn’t let me bind a key to activate the screensaver. There used to be a couple utilities that enabled this, but they haven’t been updated since 10.3.

The screensaver engine itself is an application, but we still need a convenient wayto activate it. Enter Quicksilver. Quicksilver’s Triggers let us bind Quicksilver actions (including, conveniently, opening Applications) to keypresses.

So, to create a key to activate your screensaver or lock your system with Quicksilver, follow these simple steps:

1. Create a Quicksilver trigger to open the screensaver engine. The engine is /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/
Versions/A/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app
   

   QuickSilver Trigger Window

2. Bring up the Trigger’s info pane.
3. Set a key shortcut for the trigger. The combination of options I’ve got selected mean that the trigger only goes off if I hold the keys down for three seconds, and Quicksilver brings up a display window to let me know that I’m activating a trigger. Very handy!  Mine’s set to cmd-alt-ctrl-L)



4.  Don’t forget go to Leopard -> System Preferences -> Security -> General. And check the “require password” checkbox.

In 10.6 that when use Exposé in Application Windows mode, it shows  all windows, not just the ones in the current Space. I always end up clicking on the wrong window and being whisked away to a another Space.

To stop that from happening, open Terminal and run these two commands:

defaults write com.apple.dock wvous-show-windows-in-other-spaces -bool FALSE
killall Dock

From now on, Exposés Application Windows mode will only show windows in the current Space.

To reverse this hint, use

defaults delete com.apple.dock wvous-show-windows-in-other-spaces
killall Dock

Source: mymacosx

You can reveal the location of a recently-used item by holding down the Command key while looking at the Apple menu’s Recent Items menu. With the Command key held down, the wording of the menu items (for Applications and Documents) changes from some item to Show “some item” in Finder.

source: osxdaily