TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Terminal Tips: Unfreeze your Mac

by TJ Luoma (Jul 12th, 2010)

Look, it's nothing to be ashamed of, it happens to everyone: your Mac has frozen up and won't respond. I know, I know, for years we Mac folks used to love poking fun at Windows because it freezes up. Apple even made a commercial about it. As someone ...

Terminal Tips: Generate random filenames for digital photo frame images

by Aron Trimble (Feb 25th, 2010)

It's not at all unlikely that you or a relative have received a digital photo frame as some sort of gift. The concept is great, one frame on your mantle, many pictures on display. Unfortunately, Apple has yet to enter the photo frame market -- at ...

Manually schedule Software Update 'the OS X way' with launchd

by Brett Terpstra (Jan 10th, 2010)

In response to a Macworld article, TidBits' Chris Pepper elaborated on ways to run Software Update, Apple's means of delivering updates and patches, on your own schedule. Beginning with the fact that Software Update schedules its next update based on ...

Homebrew, the perfect gift for command line lovers

by Brett Terpstra (Dec 25th, 2009)

If you're an OS X user who spends as much time on the command line as you do in the GUI, you're probably familiar with the MacPorts and Fink package management projects, making open source software easier to compile and run on Mac OS X. You may also ...

Snow Leopard Fixes: Terminal shell workaround

by Erica Sadun (Oct 23rd, 2009)

Ever since I installed Snow Leopard, I've been dealing with a particularly annoying bug. Terminal keeps forgetting my shell preferences. I generally prefer to use tcsh rather than bash. This is mostly because I'm a technological dinosaur. I also have ...

Change the behavior of the iTunes zoom button in 9

by TJ Luoma (Sep 28th, 2009)

For me, one of the most welcome new features of iTunes 9 was the restoration of sanity to the way that iTunes responded to the zoom button. I had long been irritated by the non-standard behavior iTunes had displayed, brazenly flaunting the accepted ...

Terminal Tips: Change the location of snapped screenshots

by Joachim Bean (Jul 28th, 2009)

Are you tired of all of those icons from screenshots you've taken cluttering up space on your desktop? If you would like them in a different place when you snap them, here's a command to change the location. Using the Terminal, enter the following ...

Mac 301: Time Machine backups after your Mac's brain surgery

by Chris Rawson (Jul 20th, 2009)

As I've discovered recently, one of the unfortunate side effects of having the logic board on your computer replaced (aside from the potentially hefty bill involved if your AppleCare has lapsed) is that your Time Machine backups won't play nicely ...

Terminal Tips: Rebuild your Launch Services database to clean up the Open With menu

by Jason Clarke (Jun 11th, 2009)

Problem: Some piece (or pieces) of rogue software have cluttered up your Open With contextual menu, which you can see by right-clicking or control-clicking any document in the Finder. This problem seems to be most prevalent with virtual machines that ...

TUAW Tip: Moving your home folder to another disk (or moving it back)

by Robert Palmer (May 14th, 2009)

In ye olde times, with "Mack OSe 9," many users chose to keep their personal files, work, and documents on a different physical disk from their startup disk. It was a safety measure: If one disk goes down, at least the other won't. There was no ...

Safari 4 hidden preferences

by Mat Lu (Feb 25th, 2009)

There's quite a debate going on in the Mac web over Safari 4's new user interface. Personally, I think the new tab implementation is hideous, so I was glad to see that Caius Durling has discovered a bevy of hidden preferences for Safari 4. With a few ...

Revisiting the randomized signature AppleScript, now with API goodness

by Brett Terpstra (Feb 10th, 2009)

When I shared an AppleScript last week which created randomized signatures using TextExpander, I promised to revisit it when the iheartquotes.com API started working again. It's working right now, but it seems to go up and down; check this link ...

iLife Tip: Enable Multi-Touch maps in iPhoto '09

by Cory Bohon (Jan 28th, 2009)

After using iPhoto '09 for a couple days, I have come to love the new features, in particular the Places feature. However, one thing that annoyed me is that you cannot use the Multi-Touch feature on newer MacBooks to manipulate the maps (zooming ...

Terminal Tip: Enable half-star ratings in iTunes

by Cory Bohon (Dec 31st, 2008)

Do you like giving ratings to songs in iTunes? If so, then you've probably noticed that you are only able to rate songs on a full-star basis, not enough granularity for some music fans... there's a longstanding AppleScript hack to enable half-stars, ...

Terminal Tip: Enable Safari web inspector

by Cory Bohon (Dec 11th, 2008)

Perhaps you are a web developer, or maybe you're just nosy. Either way, looking at certain websites' CSS, HTML, and Script documents can be fun. If you are a Safari user, you can easily look at the loading documents in the Activity View (Window ...

Terminal Tip: Change Time Machine backup interval

by Cory Bohon (Dec 8th, 2008)

Sometimes you want your Mac to be backed up more frequently than usual. If you want to instantly back up using Time Machine, you could click on the menu bar item and select "Back Up Now," but what if you want to change the backup interval ...