Apple has long included many subtle features as part of OS X. One of the most useful is a built-in audio converter in Finder. Here’s how to convert your audio files to Apple-friendly AAC using just two clicks.
How to Activate OS X’s Quick Look Using Your Mac’s Trackpad
Quick Look in OS X is a great feature that lets users quickly preview files without having to open the corresponding application. Everyone knows you can activate Quick Look by pressing the spacebar, but a helpful tip reveals the little known role that your Mac’s trackpad can play as well.
Become a Time Machine Power User With These Terminal Commands
Apple created Time Machine to be an easy way to backup your Mac’s data, but underneath its simple exterior lies a very powerful and customizable foundation. Here’s how to use Terminal to unlock Time Machine’s full potential and become a backup power user!
Three Ways to Prevent Spotlight from Indexing Items on Your Mac
Spotlight, introduced by Apple with OS X 10.4 Tiger, is a powerful system tool that allows for fast and easy searches of your entire Mac and any attached drives. For single users on secure Macs, it’s one of the best ways to find your files, app data, and even to launch applications. But if you share your Mac with others, or frequently use it in a public place, you may wish to temper Spotlight’s reach. Here are three ways to…
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How to Find Your MAC Address in Windows & OS X
After moving the TekRevue office and replacing some equipment this week, we needed to reconfigure our network and our DHCP reservations. There are a few ways to do this, but we wanted to use each computer’s MAC address to create the reservation (note that MAC stands for Media Access Control, a unique identifier for each network interface, and is unrelated to Apple Macintosh computers). Here’s how to quickly find your MAC address in Windows and OS X. Windows There are…
How to Create a USB or DVD Installer for OS X
UPDATE: Apple has changed the process for creating a USB installer with OS X Mavericks and the method below no longer works. For OS X Mavericks, see this updated process. With the release of OS X 10.7 Lion in 2011, Apple officially abandoned physical media for its operating system installations. Instead of a traditional disc, customers could now purchase and download OS X directly from the Mac App Store. This approach brought many benefits, such as not having to keep…
How to Hide Cells in Excel for Mac OS X
Apple’s Numbers spreadsheet app, part of the company’s iWork productivity suite, makes it easy for users to create beautiful tables, but lacks the power and compatibility of Microsoft Excel. For those stuck with Excel on Mac OS X, however, manual formatting can still be used to improve the look of your tables. One of the most useful steps is to hide unused cells, mimicking the look of Numbers. To hide cells in Excel for Mac, first create your table, making…
Automatically Eject Drives at Boot in Mac OS X with Automator
The popularity of FireWire, Thunderbolt, and USB devices mean that most Mac owners have at least one external hard drive connected to their computer. Depending on the purpose of each drive, however, not all users want to have every drive mounted. In our case, we have a backup drive that holds an exact clone of our system drive. We only use it once per week to perform a clone operation and, to protect the drive from inadvertent changes while we…
The Complete Guide to Mac OS X Screenshots
OS X features powerful built-in tools for taking screenshots, but the default format and location of the captured images may not be suitable for every user. Thankfully, nearly every aspect of OS X screenshots can be customized using the Terminal app. Here’s how. The Basics Before we get in to the customizable settings for screenshots, let’s go over a few basics on exactly how to take screenshots (experienced users can skip this section). There are three primary screenshot types in OS X:…
How to Disable the Character Accent Menu in OS X Mountain Lion
A handy new feature in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is the character accent pop-up menu. Users with English keyboards who frequently type in accent-heavy foreign languages will likely love the new feature, which allows a user to bring up common accents for each character simply by holding the key for the letter you wish to accent. For example, in the screenshot above, we’re trying to spell the world “touché” properly with an acute accent. We typed the word normally…