Mac Tricks And Tips

Its Vaction Time – See You In Two Weeks

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:11:28 +0000

Hey

This is just a little heads up. I’m currently going on holiday for two weeks and as a result there won’t be any posts available. I normally have a couple written up and ready to go, which will be automatically displayed. However this time i’ve been a little bit busier and I haven’t had the time to pre-write them.

I’ll be back in two weeks where I should have loads of new ideas. I’ve got someone to look after the site while I am gone and hopefully he should answer some of the questions or comments you may have, I can’t guarantee anything. During the weeks I am off, i’ll also be popping in from time to time to make sure everything is running smoothly.

See you soon.

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Its Vaction Time – See You In Two Weeks

Mac Tricks And Tips

Turning Off Location Services / Data

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:02:49 +0000

Hey

This is only a quick post, but it may be quite useful to many people, especially if you are interested in your own security and privacy. An eHow article a couple of days ago mentions about your Mac sending your location, and Wi-Fi data back to Apple. This is probably OK and there may be a genuine reason for this to happen. However if you want to be a bit more conscious of what is being sent you can turn this off.

The function is called “Location Services” and is found in System Preferences > Security > General. If you can’t make changes click the lock at the bottom of the screen. On the screen check the box next to “Disable Location Services”, this should turn off the function and stop your Mac send out data back to Apple.

Its only a quick fix. From what I have read this only effects Snow Leopard, however you can check for yourself if the check box is present in previous versions of OS X. I haven’t seen any ill effects.

If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment below.

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Turning Off Location Services / Data

Mac Tricks And Tips

Saving Multiple Images Into A PDF Using Preview

admin — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:13:38 +0000

Hey

A couple of days ago I wrote a post on how to make a PDF file from anything, some one asked the question how do you save multiple images as one PDF. There may be many reasons for adding images into a simple PDF, it is generally useful for email purposes. This post has actually taken me a while to find the best solution. My original solution involved me making an original PDF file and then adding pages into the PDF file and then adding the images. However with a bit (of rather obvious) looking i’ve found a simple way to do it.

The first step is to open your images using preview. The best way to do this is to first open your first image and then dragging the result of the images in. Therefore open up Preview with your first image. If the sidebar isn’t already open go to View > Sidebar > Thumbnails. Then select the second batch of images and drag them into the sidebar. If you images are all in the same folder you can open them all at once by selecting the images and double clicking one of the images. If needed you can re-arrange the images by dragging and dropping them into the correct order.

You are now ready to export the images (make sure you rotate the images as needed before hand). Select all of the images in the sidebar. Go to File > Print Selected Images. Then use the PDF option at the bottom of the page in a similar method to the PDF option done before.

This method is very similar to one done previously. However it took me a while to find the option in the File menu and its quite useful when you do.

If you have any questions or comments, please leave one below.

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Saving Multiple Images Into A PDF Using Preview

Mac Tricks And Tips

Rotating User Images in Selection Window

admin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:52:20 +0000

Hey

The title of this post is a little simple, possibly confusing and may be deceptive, it should really be called “A little tip to help you rotate images of people within the user picture selection window found in applications such as Address Book”, however that title is too long. When you use applications such as Address book and you want to select a picture for a users details you may want to rotate the image to make sure it fits within the slot. This is rather simple and nifty.

Take the image below (of Mr Bean) if you press the option key and then rotate in a circle you can change the orientation. A useful wheel pops up to help you rotate the image. This is useful in making sure any portrait is suitably aligned.

This option is particularly useful if you insert an image that is up side down or slightly squiffy. This function can be done in any application that uses this pop up picture choosing window.

I hope this little tip helps, I certainly found it quite useful.

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Rotating User Images in Selection Window

Mac Tricks And Tips

Making PDF Files On Your Mac (Any File)

admin — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 20:38:16 +0000

Hey

I’ve been asked this question many times by my friends. How do you make that file, whether it by a word document, html file, image or anything in between, into a PDF. Thankfully Apple has gone to the trouble of adding a PDF creator within your Mac operating system, so you don’t have to install or download anything. I use this little function all the time, when sending files to people over email, or I just want to store them as a PDF file for myself.

Creating a PDF file on your Mac is as simple as hitting print. In fact any application that has a print dialogue box can create a PDF file. For example open your file, it can be anything, you can use this web page as an example. Go to File > Print. Don’t go the usual route of loading up your printer, instead click on the PDF drop down menu and select one of the PDF options. Use the first option “Save as PDF” for the default PDF option.

Let it work away and run. It may take a couple a seconds to mintues for it to work it’s magic. There may be nothing to show while the application is working and you might not be open the file until it has finished. Unfortunatly the save function doesn’t have hundreds of options to choose from unlike a normal PDF creator, however for basic PDF files it should be sufficent.

If you have any questions or tips, please leave a comment below.

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Making PDF Files On Your Mac (Any File)

Mac Tricks And Tips

Setup Mail For A Three Column Layout

admin — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 17:37:37 +0000

Afternoon,

Currently Mail is set up so your Mail messages are at the top of the screen and the contents are at the bottom of the screen. This is fine most of the time, however people with widescreens monitors, or if you want to view a lot of messages at a time you may want to flip the layout into a “three column” layout where your mailboxes are on the far left, the list of emails in the centre and the contents in the third column. This is useful if you have long email messages, and a lot of emails. I prefer it, since I have a widescreen monitor and I want to see a lot of emails. You can’t do this normally within Mail, however there is a quick plugin to solve your problem.

The app is called “Letterbox” from harnly.net. The latest version for Snow Leopard can be found here. To install the app, download the disk image and follow the on screen instructions. Once it is installed your version of Mail will be set up into three columns as shown below.

There is a couple of settings which you can change such as switching between the three column layout and the normal view. As well as changing the slider style.

There isn’t much to the download, however I find that the three columns layout is a lot more useful and this simple plugin is great to use. If you have any other apps or plugins please leave a comment below.

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Setup Mail For A Three Column Layout

Mac Tricks And Tips

Automatically Start Up & Shut Down Your Mac

admin — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 18:13:38 +0000

Hey

This is going to be a quick, but very useful, tip. In times of increasing power prices having your Mac running constantly (even in Standby) can be a small power drain. The solution to this is to shut it down on an evening. I, however, like my Mac to be up and running in a morning so I can quickly check me emails before the day begins. There is a solution to this problem (hence the post), and best of all it includes settings and functions already present on your Mac, so you are ready to go.

To set the start up and shut down time on your Mac open up System Preferences, located in Applications. Then go to Energy Saver and press Schedule at the bottom of the window. What will appear will be a small box allowing you to change when you Mac will start up and shut down, there is also options for putting your Mac into standby and restarting it as necessary.

The settings are not that complex, and unfortunately you can’t create extensive and complex shut down and start up procedures. However if you want your Mac to start before your wake up and automatically go to sleep at a certain time there are options here. There is also settings to change the times to specific days (such as the end of the week) or weekdays and weekends.

If you want an account to automatically log in. Go to Accounts within System Preferences, select Login Options at the bottom of the left hand list and select Automatic Login to “On”.

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Automatically Start Up & Shut Down Your Mac

Mac Tricks And Tips

Repairing Your Out Of Warranty Mac – Hardware

admin — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 18:08:28 +0000

Hey

I seem to be repairing quite a few out of warranty Mac’s over the last month. I’m not particularly adept at fixing Mac’s, i’ve never been on a course, however people I talk to never believe how simple sometimes it is to fix a Mac. They always think they have a million parts, requires a soldering iron (never needed to use one yet) or you need a PhD in fixing computers to Mac them work again. This isn’t always the case. Most of the time, with the right guide, a little bit of patience, you can fix your own Mac, even the fiddly bits. Once you have all of the parts you can have your computer working within the hour. This mini guide is a list of things I have compiled to help you get your Mac working again.

Make Sure It Is Out Of Warranty/Apple Wont Fix It

The first step is to make sure your Mac is out of warranty or Apple wont fix it for free. If you want to check that your Mac is still in warranty the best place to check is Apple’s coverage site. The last thing you want to do is take your Mac apart and find Apple could have fixed it. I’m pretty sure taking your Mac to pieces will void the warranty.

If it is out of warranty and you have a major problem, check with Apple anyway. Some times they can fix your Mac for free. Checking with them shouldn’t take too long, a trip to an Apple store, or by ringing there phone number. By checking them you also get to see how much it will cost them to fix it. It may be cheaper for them to fix it than yourself, as well as this you also get a diagnosis of what is wrong. Note that Apple Care from Amazon is usually cheaper.

Diagnose The Problem

This step is either the easiest or hardest problem. There are many ways to solve this problem and it will all depend on what problem you are having. One route to finding a solution is to use Apple’s Hardware Test, a read me is found here. This may help diagnose problems relating to specific bits of hardware, although not always perfect it can point you in the right direction.

One of the best ways to help find a solution to a hardware problem is to search for it. If you have a problem with a piece of hardware, odds are, some one else has had it before you. Combined with the Apple Hardware Test you can find exactly what is wrong. Find and ask as many people as possible to narrow it down to a single component. Having help by going into an Apple store is always a bonus.

Most problems are pretty obvious to identify. If you Mac doesn’t boot, there is a logic board or CPU problem. If it boots but doesn’t run very well, it again could be a logic board or CPU, but can also be a RAM or Graphics card. Finally if you Mac boots into the desktop, but runs slow it is usually a Hard Drive or RAM issue. If it is an obvious problem such as no sound, lack of Wi-Fi, BlueTooth or disk drive, its pretty self explanatory.

Find The Solution

If you have found the source of your problem you now need to fix it. Since I am talking about hardware problems the solutions tend to be simple. Find the part that is wrong, swap over part, and then boot your Mac hoping it will work again. The best guides are from iFixit. They have sections on Powerbook’s, iBook’s, iMac’s, MacBook’s and MacBook Pro’s and Mac Mini’s. Simply find your model (there may be different parts in each model) and then the guide for what you want to fix.

There is other guides out there and it is worth searching for them if iFixit doesn’t have the one your are looking for. However on all the repairs and replacements I have done, iFixit have been exemplary.

Find The Part and Tools

Now you now what to fix and how to fix it you need the parts and tools to get the job done. From a quick Google search providers such as Powerbook Medic, for people in the USA and VIS or TheBookYard for people in the UK. It really doesn’t matter where you get them from as long as they will fit. Make sure you are buying the right part by checking part numbers. Its always worth looking at pictures to make sure they look at least right. I don’t recommend places such as eBay although you may feel otherwise. My friend has had a couple of bad experiences, so trust who you are buying from.

At this point you have to determine if the part you are buying is worth the cost. For example an Apple repair for a screen may be $400 (I have no idea i’m just hypothesizing) or $300 by doing it yourself. You now have to take the gamble, is it worth doing it myself? if the part particularly tricky or complex? Items such as screen or parts that are fiddly may not be worth doing yourself. Have a good read of the guide that you find and see if your skill level is high enough for the job in hand. Items such as logic board and cables are pretty easy since its only involves screws. Screens, on the other hand, can be a real pain and may not be worth you undertaking them. You also have to consider the age of your computer. Is paying $300 for a component worth it when you could buy a new one. Although a new one will be more expensive, in the long run you new Mac will last a lot longer. Putting a lot of money down on a 6-7 or even older make will probably not make sense.

Once you have the parts ready its also worth buying the correct tools. There is a lot of screws of different sizes in a Mac. Read through the guides to see what size screw driver you will need (iFixit are particularly good at this). My top tip is to always have the tools ready and the correct tools. There is nothing worst than having your computer in pieces and having to rush to the shops at the speed of light to get a screw driver set (personal experience talking here). Again, Amazon comes up with the goods ith Maxtech 32-Piece Precision Bit Set and Screwdriver Set for $3, even if you use it once stretching to $3 for the correct tools isn’t that much.

Once you have the parts and pieces you are ready to insert your new hardware. One top MacTricksAndTips tip, when taking out screws tape them to the step on the guide you have printed out . Then when you put your Mac back together you know you haven’t lost a screw or wondering where it goes when you have one felt over.

Start Up

When you are all done you have to start your Mac up again. This is where you pray to the computing god and hope that you have replaced the right part and done it correctly. If it went well and you have diagnosed the problem correctly most of the time it will work. This is why you have to decide if replacing the part is worth it, you don’t want to spend lots of money only to find it is the wrong part and your Mac still doesn’t work, or there is bigger problems. If all is well you can continue using your Mac another day. If it doesn’t you may have installed it wrong or there may be a deeper problem at heart and professional help should be sought.

Conclusion

Fixing your Mac can be really simple and cheap. If you have a good grip on the problem and know what you are doing fixing a faulty component is a good way to get your Mac back up to speed. On the other hand if it doesn’t work, what you have replaced, it can be a lot of wasted money.

There is not a lot more I can write without going into massive detail on every component. This post is designed as a general guide for people who don’t no where to start. Make sure you do your research and read as much as possible. The only book I can find is Upgrading and Fixing Macs and iMacs for Dummies on Amazon, but I can’t vouch for its quality. If you have any questions or comments, please leave one using the box below.

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Repairing Your Out Of Warranty Mac – Hardware

Mac Tricks And Tips

Introduction To GeekTool – How To Use It

admin — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 17:59:01 +0000

Good Afternoon,

For a little while I have been playing around and using GeekTool, its a unique app in that it displays Terminal output (from various commands) onto the desktop. This seems a bit geeky, but after playing around with it and customising as you see fit, it is a really useful application. Although the app does need a little bit of fiddling to get working, it can display pretty much anything on your desktop. Its great for seeing your Mac’s inner workings and very useful for getting certain information quickly and easily, most of the time there is no better place to put this than on your desktop. This post is going to show new users how you can get this app up and running and some basic commands to get you on your feet, once you get the hang of how the app works you can spend hours playing and adjusting the settings to get something truly awesome.

Step 1. Download and Install

The best way to start any tutorial is at the beginning. To get GeekTool up and running head over to the download page and download the latest version of the software. Once as the download has finished, install the app by opening the disk image and double clicking the preference pane within the disk image. This application is not an app in the normal sense that it doesn’t have a dock icon etc, it installs itself into the system preferences and runs from there.

Once it is installed open GeekTool from System Preferences.

Step 2. Add Your Command

Commands on your desktop are called “Geeklets” they can take the form of shell commands which include commands that would normally run in Terminal, you can also have images and files that run on your desktop. To make your first Geeklet drag the shell command from Geektool window onto the desktop. Then use, in combination with exposé show desktop, move it to a suitable location. The top left will usually suffice.

When you place the geeklet you will notice a properties window will appear. This is used to change the properties of that specific Geeklet. I’m going to run through it in a slightly different order than top to bottom, because I personally think my method works the best, however it doesn’t really matter how you use the properties editor.

Within the editor we have to add a command that will run. The only command that will work are ones that are not self updating, so Terminal commands such as top, which shows information similar to Activity Monitor will not run. In this example I am going to use the “cal” option to show the calendar. However as you become more experienced with the app and Terminal commands you can put practically anything in the box.

Therefore select the text box labelled command and type “cal”. After a brief moment a calendar will show up on your Desktop in the place of the Geeklet.

At the bottom your will notice two options, Refresh and Timeout. Since GeekTool will only accept static commands you set the refresh option to try the command again to get new information. For commands which will show very static options such as a calendar your can set the refresh option to a long time. Commands which show your CPU usage (which I will post later) you can set to one or two seconds. If you use commands that pings an internet page or pulls a lot of information you can use the Timeout option to stop it taking too long or using up too many resources. Remember the more complex the command and the more you refresh it the greater number of system resources you will take up.

Since the command box is a little small, I recommend you develop your Geeklet command within Terminal. It is a lot quicker to write a command within Terminal than in the command box.

Step 3. Style Your Geeklet

We now have a small calendar sitting on our Desktop behind our icons. We can now style it to make it look better. At the bottom of the preference pane for the Geeklet you will notice some options to style the text and background. When you click on the button to style the text a window will pop up giving you the options to style the text. If you want to change the text colour, click on the little green button at the top of this popup window. If you haven’t used this window button it can be difficult to find.

Have a play around with the text size and colour. I recommend an transparent background with white text, however adjust it to meet your desktop background and style.

Step 4. Position Your Geeklet

The final step is to fully position your Geeklet. The reason I suggest you do this last is due to the style and size of your command. There is no point in positioning a Geeklet only to have to move it again when you write your command and style it. Within the properties box add a name and use the text box numbers to position it on screen. You can move the Geeklet by hand and then use the number boxes to finalise the position.

A quick tip here, if you ever delete a Geeklet by accident, press Command + Z to get it back. I’ve found this more than useful on a number of occasions.

Step 5. Add More

The last step is to add more Geeklets. The limit here is really your imagination (and Terminal coding skills). You can use the image Geeklet to get images from web cams or other sources. The file Geeklet is very useful if you want to read from a log or a text file. You can use the extra settings to make sure you get the perfect little desktop icon.

If you are looking for stuff to add to your Desktop you can check out Small Little List of Geek Tool Commands, written by myself a while ago. Another great tool is Geeklets on MacOSXTips. These are small little files that contain all of the information needed to run on your desktop. Anything your can do in Terminal will work with Geektool (except the self updating commands, of course).

My Geeklets

To get the inspiration following below is an image of what I have on my desktop. I’m still thinking about adding more, I need to find the time to play around with the commands.

As shown there is a calendar, current disk space, load on my Mac and well as network through put (from the Geeklet website just mentioned). I also have a liveish image of the international space station found from Heavens Above which is set to update every 30 seconds. The following commands were used for load and CPU usage. Although it uses top (which is self updating command and thus not allowed), to actually cuts information out of the top command so it is perfectly OK.

top -l 1 | awk '/Load/ {print $1 " " $2 " " $3 " " $4" " $5}'; top -l 1 | awk '/CPU usage/ {print $1 " " $2" " $3" "$4" "$5" "$6" "$7" "$8}' ;

Conclusion

There are hundreds of ways to play around with this little program. I’ve had it installed over the last couple of days and made many commands and options which i’ve placed on my desktop. It is limitless for what you can do. The best way to use this app is to play around with it and query Google any time you have a problem or need something doing.

If you have found some cool Geeklets or commands, please leave a comment below. Also if you have set up some cool desktops please give a link to an image of what you have done. In the near future I may have a second post of other cool Geeklet commands, so stay tuned. In the mean time if you are stuck for commands either search this site, or visit the Terminal categories page, Google is a good resource as well as Mac OS X Unix Toolbox and The Mac OS X Command Line: Unix Under the Hood from Amazon.

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Introduction To GeekTool – How To Use It

Mac Tricks And Tips

Solve Your Mac Randomly Locking Up

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 10:44:37 +0000

Hey

This is a rather quicker trick that I think I have mentioned before. However it is worth repeating. For the last couple of days my Mac has randomly been locking up. Sometimes it would be straight after boot, some times after a couple of hours. I spent ages seeing if it was a hardware problem, testing my Mac’s memory, doing disk checks etc. However the problem would still persist and it was getting rather annoying. The solution to this problem was to clear my Mac’s cache files. I normally mention to people that this is the first thing you should do if you have an application or system problem, such as lock-ups or freezes.

Clearing your cache files is quite easy. There is two ways to do it. Either through an application or by hand. I prefer to do it through an app called Onyx although there is many applications which can do this sort of thing. The advantage of using an app is that it can clean many places at once, most of the time it is quicker to do so. Within Onyx by going over to the “Cleaning” tab you can run through the various check boxes and delete various different cache files. It will ask you to restart after each time, but you can hold fire until you have finished every option.

I recommend you clean up every option, except Boot and Kernel as well as the options under Logs and Misc, as these options are not needed. When you have finished, restart and hopefully your problems are gone. After you have cleaned your cache files Onyx has a bunch of other options to help you keep your Mac clean.

Manual Deletion

If you don’t want to download an app you can do it by hand. Although it doesn’t have as many options as using an app such as Oynx, doing it by hand is certainly useful. Your three main cache file locations are found in:

/Users/[name]/Library/Caches /Library/Caches /System/Library/Caches

Delete all of the files within those folders and restart. This should have solved your problem.

The caches files one you Mac are designed to be a quick way for apps to retrieve certain elements needed by the app for fast operation. Sometimes they get corrupted and don’t function as desired, by deleting them you force your Mac to great a new fresh file. When you start your Mac and an app up again after the install it may be a little slower as it has to create the cache file. However once it is created you Mac should be up to full speed.

If your Mac still locks up and freezes it is probably a specific hardware or software problem and you may need to delve deeper. If you want to learn more about your Mac I recommend Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual or Mac OS X Snow Leopard Bible. They are both great books.

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Solve Your Mac Randomly Locking Up

Mac Tricks And Tips

Highlighting Email Messages From Friends

admin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 19:07:56 +0000

Hey

When I get email’s from certain contacts I like to keep track of who is sending them and organise them appropriately. The best way i’ve found to do this is through Smart Mailboxes. This evening i’m going to show you how you can combine the use of Address Book and Mail to pull emails from certain contacts so you can quickly and easily manage them. It takes a little bit of work, however its very useful.

Smart Mailboxes are a way to filter emails. To filters ones from friends or family we are going to create a group within Address Book. Open up Address Book, found in Applications. If you have your contacts all ready imported and within Address Book, great, if you don’t you can skip to the end where I post where I have an alternate solution. Within Address Book, under the Group Column click the small plus icon, or select File > New Group. Then add all your friends or family to the group.

Now you have your group ready we can add it to a Smart Mail box within Mail. Under Mail go to Mailbox > New Smart Mailbox. From the first pop up menu select “Sender is member of group” and then select the new group you have made. Press OK and you are done. The new Smart Mailbox will now contain all of the emails from the people within the group.

If you don’t want to go to the trouble of making a group within Address Book, or you don’t have those contacts listed you can do the following. Instead of adding a group from Address Book you could simply add each individual email message. Select “from” from the first drop down menu and add each email address as needed by clicking the plus button. Make sure the drop down menu is set to “any” and not “all”.

This selection is OK, if you have a couple of email addresses, however if you have plenty of email addresses it can become a bit impractical. The first option, utilising, Address Book, is more useful. Overall you can do some really cool things with Smart Mailboxes and this one is quite useful.

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Highlighting Email Messages From Friends

Mac Tricks And Tips

Use Terminal To Measure Wi-Fi Strength

admin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 19:31:45 +0000

Good Evening,

There is a lot of power available in Terminal, and if used correctly you can create some really interesting scripts and result. Today’s post is going to take advantage of some built in Airport frameworks to measure the strength of your connected Wi-Fi signal. Although you can download and use various different apps to do this, if you want a quick way measure the signal, to find the best place to put your laptop, or integrate into something like GeekTool. A quick Terminal script is what you need.

Your make is built up on various frameworks, essentially build in blocks. Within these building blocks your Mac has all of the usual features you see and use. However select frameworks allow you to extract certain bits of information. This is exactly what we are going to do, to measure signal strength. To do this open Terminal and type the following.

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport -I

You have to be connected to a Wireless signal. The output will look similar to the following:

agrCtlRSSI: -69 agrExtRSSI: 0 agrCtlNoise: -96 agrExtNoise: 0 state: running op mode: station lastTxRate: 48 maxRate: 54 lastAssocStatus: 0 802.11 auth: open link auth: none BSSID: 0:11:11:11:11:11 SSID: DLINK_WIRELESS MCS: -1 channel: 6

Most of the data is self explanatory. ‘agrCtlRSSI’ is the signal strength, we will want to get this as high as possible. This is the value we will use later on, ‘agrCtlNoise’ is the noise on your Wi-Fi signal you want this as low as possible. Finally, ‘maxRate’ is the maximum rate at which your Wi-Fi signal can run at, and ‘lastTxRate’ is the last transmitted rate. These two values will probably not change.

If you are interested you can also use this Terminal command to scan the airwaves for other Wi-Fi signals to connect to.

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport -s

A Live Scanner

At the moment, using the first command to find the best signal is a bit bulky. The amount of information returned is too much. By placing it into a little loop and picking the right bit of information, it will return just the signal strength. As a result the information returned can easily be used to pick the right spot for your laptop. You simply walk around with your laptop and watch as the signal will rise and fall. [via macosxhints]
while x=1; do /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport -I | grep CtlRSSI; sleep 0.5; done

This little script will query the Airport as previously mentioned and pull out the signal strength part. Every half a second it will repeat. The results will look something like the following:

agrCtlRSSI: -69 agrCtlRSSI: -69 agrCtlRSSI: -70 agrCtlRSSI: -71

If you want the list to populate quicker, change 0.5 to something smaller. If you want a longer pause between the lines updating put in a higher value. To stop the output press Control + C and you be returned to the command line. If you want to view the noise associated with the Wi-Fi signal, type the following:
while x=1; do /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport -I | grep CtlNoise; sleep 0.1; done

Very useful and very interesting. If you want to use the command line in a different bash script or in something like GeekTool you only need to type the following.

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport -I | grep CtlRSSI

There you go. Have a play around and see where to place your laptop for the best Wi-Fi result. Its a simple command but very useful. If you have any comments or tips relating to this command please let me know in the comments. If you are interested in reading more about Wi-Fi I recommend The Book of Wireless from Amazon.

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Use Terminal To Measure Wi-Fi Strength

Mac Tricks And Tips

How To Cheat At Scrabble (With Terminal)

admin — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 12:56:58 +0000

Hey

I enjoy a good board game every so often, they are even more fun when you can play them online or as a standalone game. The one game, however, that I can never really play is Scrabble. Simply because I can’t figure out words from the 7 tiles given to you. The best I can do is five letter words, swear words and adding the occasional ‘s’ or ‘ed’ to the end of the words. What I need is a way to cheat, or at least give me a helping hand. As the title of this post suggests there is a very simple and effective way to do this using some commands and files built into Terminal.

The simplest way to cheat at scrabble is to use a word list with plenty of words and then query that list to look for words containing certain letters. There are many ways you can do this and you may develop your own solution, the method I have found is to use a Terminal command called ‘grep’ which finds lines containing a pattern, exactly what we need.

To use this command open Terminal and type the following:

cd /usr/share/dict
This will change the directory of your current Terminal session. What has been opened is the location of a built in list of words, i’ve mentioned it before here. This list is very long and contains thousands of entries. Although some entries wont be suitable words in Scrabble, it’s a good place to start. If you have a better list of words (such as one downloaded from the internet) you can use the ‘cd’ command and change it to that directory.

To search this list type the following:

grep -x '[ahegilk]*' web2

This command uses the grep program to search through the words file called ‘web2′. The option, -x, makes sure it only matches words which contain the letters within the square brackets. The letters within the square brackets will be searched and found within the words list. The better your words list, the more words you can find, the words list built into your Mac is sufficient, for most words and games. Simply replace the letters in the square brackets with the ones you currently have.

Its worth noting at this point that the star at the end of the square brackets will try and match the letters zero or more times. As a result you may get results where the same letter is repeated multiple times, but you only have one letter to use. You could get round this problem by replacing the star with a question mark, an only allow the letters to appear once. However this doesn’t seem to work on my Mac.

Having a list of words is fine, however in Scrabble you have to add the words onto the board, you need to control how the word starts or ends. This is very simple. To make sure the list only finds words that begin with certain letters, type the following:

grep -x '^be[ahegilk]*' web2

This will find words that contain the letters ‘a h e g i l k’ but begins with ‘be’. The letters at the beginning can be any length, however one or two letters yeild the best results.

You can also search for words that end with certain letters. This, again, is simple. Simply type the following:

grep -x '[ahegilk]*ed$' web2

This will find all the words that end with ‘ed’. Its worth noting that depending on your words file this will yield different results. I know that the words file built into your Mac, that we are using, doesn’t have many words ending in ‘s’ or ‘ed’, so it isn’t that useful. If you have found a bumper words file you may have better luck.

You can combine both commands so you can find words that start and end with a certain letter.

grep -x '^h[ahegilk]*ed$' web2

Very simple and quite useful if you are stuck for words. It does have some limitations such as a limited words file, or repeated letters, but its a simple and quick way to find some words if you are stuck.

If you have found any ways to improve this script, please let me know. I would like to see how this script can evolve and change. With a bit of work it shouldn’t take too long to make a command to find some really long and high scoring words. It may be cheating, but I still end up losing.

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How To Cheat At Scrabble (With Terminal)

Mac Tricks And Tips

Converting Files In Terminal (Including Docx)

admin — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 10:21:07 +0000

Good Morning,

Quite a while ago I mentioned how you can convert Windows Docx files to Doc using a little app supplied by Microsoft themselves, its a simple way of saving money and not having to fork out for Office for Mac. That app is great for one or two files that you want to convert, however if you have hundreds of files or want to build this functionality into a bash script it can be a little bit difficult. However there is a suitable Terminal program that you can use. This script piggy backs on the functionality built into TextEdit, so any results you get from TextEdit you will see in this Terminal program.

The function we are going to use is textutil. As you may guess by the name it is a text utility. The program has many functions and you can find out how to use them all by reading the man page (in Terminal type ‘man textutil’), i’m going to focus, however, on the conversion aspect of the program. In this example I am going to convert a docx file to a doc file. In total you can use any of these format txt, rtf, rtfd, html, doc, docx, odt, wordml, or webarchive.

To convert a file type the following in Terminal:

textutil -convert doc /path/to/my/file.docx

This will convert the file from docx to doc. The result will be exactly the same if you used TextEdit to open the file and save it out. For example i’ve found any docx images won’t appear in the final doc format, if you want the images its better to use the little app supplied by Microsoft. Simply change ‘doc’ into the format you are looking for. If you don’t think it will work, try the file extension and see what happens.

If you want to convert all of the files in a folder to one format you can type
textutil -convert doc /path/to/location/*.docx

This will convert every file in the folder with .docx as the the file type into the doc format. This is a very quick way of converting lots of files.

There is a lot of power with this tool. If you want to learn more about the program, use the man page as mentioned, if you have a cool little tip about this function please leave a comment below.

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Converting Files In Terminal (Including Docx)

Mac Tricks And Tips

10 Websites For New iPhone Users

admin — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:52:10 +0000

Hey

Since shops around the world are going into meltdown due to the release of the new iPhone, I thought it would be a good idea to compile a short list of 10 websites for new iPhone users. Over the last couple of days i’ve been reading many sites and wanted to post some of the cool ones i’ve found. I’ve tried to shy away from general news sites and sites which have tips and tricks for more than one platform (eg the Mac). I wanted a list where its iPhone only stuff, so you can go for a dedicated resource. If you feel there is a website I should have added, please leave a comment below. The list covers a wide range of things including tips, hack, apps and wallpapers, so there should be something for everyone.

1. Apple Support

The first item on the list has to be the Apple Support website. You can’t have a new gadget or gizmo and not visit the manufactures website to see how it works. The support website has a basic overview of how the iPhone works, and how to get the most out of your new phone. It also features some great question and answers within the sidebar sections so you can get the most out of your phone. If you are stuck on something its probably best consulting this site before you continue.

2. iOS 4 Manual

Coming in at a whopping 244 pages, the iOS 4 manual tells you everything you need to know about how to use the operating system on your phone. Its really detailed giving you lots of information on just about every thing you could ever do on your phone. For a manual its got a lot of pictures which is really useful, i’ve seen many manuals for phones which lack the details you need to get your device to work and function. It should take you a while to read through it and is pretty useful if you ever need to refer to it again.

3. iPhone Alley

Moving a away from Apple’s support site we have a rather cool site called iPhone Alley. I’ve linked to the tips page, however the whole site is dedicated to simple and useful tips for your iPhone. I’ve had a good read through, and learnt quite a few things. There is also a forum dedicated to discussions on any problems you may have.

4. iPhone User Guide & 5. iPhone Hacks

Both the iPhone User Guide and iPhone Hacks websites both offer general news and information about iPhones. They are both particularly useful if you want to keep up to date with the latest news. The iPhone Hacks website offers more information on jail braking your phone, if you need that information, however with the advent of the iPhone being sold unlocked you probably don’t need to read those posts and can focus on the news on the site instead.

6. Poolga

I’ve mentioned Poolga before in my post on 99 Amazing iPhone Wallpapers. In my opinion they offer some of the best iPhone (as well as iPad and iPod Touch) wallpapers. They are more “arty” and stylish than some of the wallpaper sites you can find out there. A great way to set your iPhone out from the rest of the crowd.

7. Fresh Apps

You can’t have an iPhone without apps. This next batch of sites is dedicated to giving you lists and reviews of the top apps out there. The first one of the list is Fresh Apps. Where you can rate iPhone apps by freshness. The site is quite new so it doesn’t have hundreds of apps listed, but the site is slowly growing so it is worth watching. Refer back to it over time to find some new and interesting apps you may want to download. It is similar to iusethis, if you have used that website before.

8. AppCraver & 9. Art of the iPhone

Having just a list of what is fresh may not be that useful, both AppCraver and Art of the iPhone are your general news and app review sites. AppCraver in particularly focuses a lot on comparing and review iPhone apps for you to use. Although there is news about iPads and such, the site is dedicated to giving you information about some of the latest or more interesting apps. Art of the iPhone is a general news site such as entries 4 and 5, but it also offers a wealth of information on the latest news for apps.

10. 148Apps

The last website, 148Apps, is a combination of app reviews and news. A popular website, its a good resource for finding new apps for your iPhone. There is a lot of information available on this site. You could spend an age looking through all of the posts reviewing the many apps availble. Useful for both browsing and finding specific information about apps.

To conclude there is a great wealth of websites out there. If you are a new user to the iPhone I hope this list helps. If you are an existing user I hope you have found one or two resources that have helped you. If you have a couple of websites or links of your own that you know of, please leave a comment and I will add them to the list.

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10 Websites For New iPhone Users

Mac Tricks And Tips

Hide Select Icons From View (incl Hard Drives)

admin — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:00:14 +0000

Hey

Continuing from a post a couple of days ago about Hiding Hard Drive Icons From Your Desktop and reading into an insight full comment i’ve found a method where you can hide certain hard drive, folders and files from view. A quick method is to normally add a dot in front of the file name so it becomes a “dot-file” for example “.hiddenfile.txt”. This will make the file disappear from view. However this changes the file name and if you have any scripts or applications that rely on the exact file name this can be a problem, it can be even worst when you want to remove a Hard Drive, change the file name of such a volume can be disastrous. Therefore we are going to play around with a couple of Terminal programs to change the attributes of files, folders and even Hard Drives so we can hide them from view.

Before we start you need to have the developer tools installed. Since we use two special Terminal files that get installed when the developer tools are installed. To install the tools simply insert your installation disk that comes with your Mac or follow this post on Installing XCode. I would just post the two files needed, however I don’t have the right to distribute them.

Once the developer tools are installed we are ready to go. We are going to use two Terminal programs, GetFileInfo and SetFile. The first is used to see the file attributes the second to change them. We are going to change the file attributes so it is hidden. First off open up Terminal under Utilities and type the following, we are going to hide a BootCamp partition, although it can be applied to any file, folder or disk.

GetFileInfo /Volumes/BOOTCAMP

It will post results similar to the following.

directory: "/Volumes/BOOTCAMP" attributes: avbstclinmedz created: 01/01/1904 00:00:00 modified: 06/23/2010 13:59:22

The second line is something that we are interested in. It has a line of attributes that we can change, although the letters are meaningless at this point they each represent something that can be changed, we are going to change the visibility attribute so it disappears. In Terminal again, type the following.

sudo SetFile -a V /Volumes/BOOTCAMP

This uses the SetFile program to change the attribute setting (-a) to invisible “V”, for the Volume BOOTCAMP, change the string at the end to anything you want. Use the full path to the file to make sure you don’t hide anything you don’t want.

After a quick moment the hard drive or anything you are hiding is gone. It wont be visible in Finder, but is still there with the original file name. If you are hiding a hard drive and a hard drive icon with the name “client node” appear, simply log off and back on again for it to disappear. I don’t no what it is, but it is relatively harmless.

This trick can be done with pretty much anything, i’ve tested it will files and folders as well and they all disappear. If you want to change anything back so you can see it again, type the following into Terminal.
sudo SetFile -a v /Volumes/BOOTCAMP

All that is change is the attribute item “v”. Its can from on, to off. If you want to see the different that you can change just type “SetFile” into Terminal. Err on the side of caution if you change anything as it may be difficult to revert.

Overall this is a very simple, and quite a useful trick. It could be used to hide your Macintosh hard drive if you have children that like to mess things up. There is quite a few possibilities that can be done with this little program.

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Hide Select Icons From View (incl Hard Drives)

Mac Tricks And Tips

Control How Your Mouse Scrolls

admin — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 18:16:14 +0000

Hey

This is a quick post for people using external mice (as opposed to track pads) who want to control the scrolling direction of your mouse. With the advent of scrolling balls, instead of wheels you may find your page flying around when using the small tracker ball. I find this really annoying and prefer vertical and horizontal tracking to make things a bit more organised. This is very simple and easy to do. Although settings might be slightly different depending on your mouse, the basic principle is the same.

To change your settings open System Preferences and select Mouse. Depending on your mouse the setting will be slightly different however you are looking for an option called “Scrolling”. Within this drop down you can select how your tracker ball works. You can have either vertical scrolling, horizontal and vertical scrolling or 360 degree where you can scroll in any direction. Change the settings as you please, I prefer just vertical scrolling to stop certain pages flying around when I use the scrolling ball. If you want you can turn the scrolling off completely.

Its only a simple trick, however one that can be easily overlooked. Its also useful if you find pages moving all over the place when you use your might mouse or tracker ball.

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Control How Your Mouse Scrolls

Mac Tricks And Tips

Hiding Hard Drive Icons From Your Desktop

admin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:54:53 +0000

Hey

Here is a quick little trick which I find quite useful. Depending on how you work and organise your desktop, icons such as your Hard Drive and connected servers may never be used by yourself. They could be taken up valuable space. This can be further exasperated if you have a lot of Hard Drives and servers connected. Most of you desktop could be taken up by unused icons which you may never need to use. Its a rather simple method to remove icons such as Hard Drives, Servers and connected iPods from your desktop.

For once we are not going to use any Terminal trick. The answer lies within Finder’s preferences. The preference pane, for me, tends to be the first item I look at hen I use a new application or want something sorted. In Finder however a lot of the settings get changed within System Preferences, so it can get over looked. To open up the Preference pane, either go to Finder > Preferences or press Command + , (comma) with the Finder app selected. A little window similar to the following will open up.

The check boxes at the top of the General tab or the ones we are looking for. De-select an items you don’t want. In a flash they are gone. Unfortunately you can deselect specific items, only groups of items. However if you want to free up some Desktop space, de-selecting any of the four items is recommend. I prefer removing “Connected Servers” from the list, after a good afternoon of moving files around I can have loads of connected servers on my desktop which starts to make things a bit messy.

Its just a simple tip, however I find it very useful. The simple ones tends to be the best.

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Hiding Hard Drive Icons From Your Desktop

Mac Tricks And Tips

MacTricksAndTips is Back. Posts to resume.

admin — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 16:16:27 +0000

Hey

First off, i’m sorry for the lack of posts, or any warning about being away such a long time. The last post on the 26th of April seems such a long time ago. In the intervening two months i’ve had a whole load of university exams which simply eat up the time. The plan originally, was to let you guys know of the situation and then have possibly a two weeks off. However the build up to the exams took away more time than I planned.

Any how, I have the next couple of months off for summer and I plan on doing quite a few posts. I don’t have a plan this year on what I want to do, however I do want to to have some quality in depth posts for you to read. If you have any suggestions, problems or ideas on what you want to see on this site please leave a comment below. If you didn’t already know the new iPhone is coming out so I will have plenty of posts about that in the next coming weeks. I also plan on buying a new version of the phone so I will have plenty to write about.

The first post will either be this evening or tomorrow. Depending on how much time I have left in the day. The World Cup is on and for some reason I seem to be watching every match. England are doing terrible as usual when it comes to major competitions, so it shouldn’t be long before we get knocked out (I hope we don’t). In the mean time i’ll be writing posts between the matches and at half time.

That’s all I wanted to say. I should have written a post earlier about the lack of new information, but I never got round to it. Stay tuned.

James

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MacTricksAndTips is Back. Posts to resume.

Mac Tricks And Tips

Innovative Way To Archive Specific Dates In Mail

admin — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 18:13:19 +0000

Hey

I was having a play around with Time Machine and Mail and I was wondering if there was any specific way to archive specific months of email. I know Time Machine backs up every single email address, however Time Machine isn’t that useful if you want to transfer or store these email addresses in another location. So I came up with this rather simple method, it takes a little bit of work, but by using smart folders you can actively back up and archive specific months of email.

This method uses smart mailboxes that are present within Mail. Smart mail boxes allow you to specify what emails are present in the mail box. We will be using this feature to select our emails to archive.

1) Open Mail

2) From Mailbox > New Smart Mailbox select the following values. “Contains messages that match all of the following conditions” and “Date Received, is in the date range xxx to xxx”

This will populate the smart mail box with all of the emails from the specific date range. I recommend you set each date range as a specific month and name the title as such.

3) When the smart box has populated, which may take a while depending on your Mac, right click on the smart mail box and select “Archive Mailbox”. This will archive the mail box and all of its contents.

4) Repeat for every month you want.

And you are done. A simple quick way to archive specific months. You can then import Mail messages as needed from the File > Import Messages option. It may take a while to do each month so you can expand how many months are done in each step.

I hope this helps people who don’t have Time Machine or want a different method of backing up emails. If I find a suitable script, tomorrow I might do a post on ho to automatically do this for you.

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Innovative Way To Archive Specific Dates In Mail

Mac Tricks And Tips