OSX - alphabetical order
Tips tricks and how tos for using Apple Mac OSX
OSX is Apple's UNIX based operating system and GUI that has been sold since 2002 as a replacement for the classic Mac OS which ended at version 9. This section contains tips and tricks and howtos for using OSX. I have been using OSX as my day to day desktop and development environment since June 2010.
Post sort order: Post Date (Newest First) | Post Date (Oldest First) | Alphabetical | Date Updated
"Error opening terminal xterm-color" on Mac OSX Terminal
Posted January 27th, 2012 in Linux/Unix/BSD and OSX
If you are connecting to a remote server from the Mac OS X terminal and get the message "Error opening terminal: xterm-color" when doing certain operations on the remote server, then you either change your terminal's declaration setting or add a TERM declaration to the bash profile on the server at the other end to prevent the error message from happening. There may be other ways to solve it at the server end but this post shows a quick and easy fix.
32 days of OSX
Posted July 12th, 2010 in OSX
32 days ago I began my "30 day OSX challenge" after buying a MacMini so I could use the iPhone and iPad simulators, as well as for once being able to test websites on a Mac. I had decided that because I'd bought this shiny new box I should really give OSX a go and have used it as my main computer since then.
Apple Magic Trackpad on Windows (not Boot Camp)
Posted August 14th, 2010 in Offsite Articles, OSX and Windows
I started using an Apple Magic Trackpad yesterday and already far prefer it to a mouse (I'll do a review of it next week once I've used it a bit more). This post has a link to a page which shows how to connect a Magic Trackpad to a Windows machine that's not on Boot Camp and a few observations I made when attempting to connect.
Change Mac OS X DNS servers from the command line
Posted June 5th, 2012 in OSX (Updated August 2nd, 2012)
I frequently need to change the DNS servers I use on my Mac and it can be quite a convoluted process to switch them around using the GUI settings. This post shows how quickly you can change between DNS server settings from the command line using terminal.
Disable the screenshot shadow on Mac OS X
Posted April 9th, 2012 in OSX
When you take screenshots on Mac OS X there's a shadow around the screenshot by default. This post shows how to disable the shadow from the screenshot and how to subsequently restore the shadow.
Failed to add the host to the list of known hosts
Posted November 13th, 2012 in Linux/Unix/BSD and OSX
I recently reinstalled the operating system on my MacBookPro and discovered when trying to SSH into a new server for the first time I was getting the error "Failed to add the host to the list of known hosts (/Users/chris/.ssh/known_hosts)." This post shows what I needed to do to fix them problem.
Fix "the operation can't be completed because you don't have permission to access some of the items" error on OSX
Posted June 20th, 2010 in OSX and Quick Tips
I run my webserver and file server from a virtual machine with the files shared using Samba (yes, now that I'm running on OSX I should really share the files with NFS but that's for another day). When trying to copy files from the Mac to the Samba share I was getting the error message "The operation can't be completed because you don't have permission to access some of the items".
Free inactive memory on Mac with FreeMemory
Posted January 19th, 2012 in OSX
I've posted in the past about using the "purge" command line utility on Mac OSX to free up inactive memory but a recent update appears to have broken the tool from working. An alternative is to use the FreeMemory app from the App Store to do the same thing, but more easily.
Hide the Spotlight Menu Icon in Mac OS X
Posted February 5th, 2013 in OSX
In the past I've looked at how to disable Spotlight indexing on Mac OSX, but that still leaves the (now unnecessary) Spotlight icon in the menu icon area. This post shows how to hide the Spotlight icon from the menu area on Mac OSX.
How to clear the DNS cache on Mac OSX
Posted February 19th, 2013 in OSX
DNS lookups are cached so that subsequent lookups for the same host don't require querying an external DNS server again until the TTL expires. Sometimes you need to clear the cache, for example if you've changed a DNS record, and this post shows how to do it on Mac OSX.
How to copy the OSX Lion installer to prevent multiple downloads
Posted July 25th, 2011 in OSX
Apple's OSX Lion upgrade is available from the App store as an almost 4GB download, and a single purchase can update all your computers running Snow Leopard. My concern was that I didn't want to have to download it twice for each Mac I have, but fortunately it's very easy to make a copy after the download has completed and before the install starts.
How to disable spotlight indexing on Mac OSX
Posted October 4th, 2011 in OSX (Updated February 5th, 2013)
Spotlight is a useful Mac app for launching apps, finding files and other stuff on your computer, and a whole bunch of other nifty little things. Since upgrading to Lion I've been finding it doing some serious CPU hogging for long periods of time while it updates its index, and because I use very few of the features I decided to switch Spotlight's indexing off.
How to see how long an app store app will take to download
Posted July 25th, 2011 in OSX
After starting the Apple Mac OSX Lion upgrade via the App Store on Saturday morning, I had no idea how long it was going to take to download on my slow broadband connection. Fortunately it's easy to find out when you know how.
How to uninstall Parallels 6 on a Mac
Posted September 20th, 2011 in OSX
The Parallels Knowledge Base has information about how to uninstall several version of Parallels (3, 4, 5) but not version 6. I managed to work out how to uninstall Parallels 6 on my Mac and this short post covers how to do it.
iOS Simulator and Xcode 4.3
Posted April 26th, 2012 in Applications and OSX
I installed/upgrade Xcode on my Mac Lion to 4.3 and couldn't work out where the iOS Simulator was. It turns out you have to manually configure Xcode to install the simulator but even then there's no obvious way to run the iOS Simulator. This post shows how I did it.
Join video files together on Mac with cat and mencoder
Posted October 25th, 2012 in OSX
I have a whole bunch of short avi files (not sure what format they actually are, but the extension is .avi) and needed to join them together quickly and easily so the 3 year old could watch some TV without bothering me every 5 minutes to start the next one :) This post shows how to do this from the command line with the cat and mencoder commands
Mac OSX Apps I use
Posted July 13th, 2010 in OSX
I switched from Windows to Mac OSX just over a month ago after buying a MacMini so I can test websites using the iPhone/iPad simulator (see related posts links at the end of this post for more details about my 30 day OSX challenge). This post looks at the apps that I'm using compared with what I was using before on Windows.
No seq on Mac OS X - use jot instead
Posted November 25th, 2010 in OSX
I'm used to using the seq command line tool on Linux for generating a sequence of numbers (which is useful if you need to download a bunch of files with wget which have consecutive numbering in the filename). I went to use it on OSX but there's no seq. A quick Google and I learned there's "jot" instead.
OSX Quick Tip: How to remove automator services
Posted June 22nd, 2010 in OSX and Quick Tips
The Automator in OSX allows you to create processes, services, folder actions etc. Once you have created a service in Automator there doesn't appear to be a way to delete it in the Automater app.
OSX Quick Tip: Prevent .ds_store files being written on network shares
Posted June 28th, 2010 in OSX and Quick Tips
When using network shares (e.g. from Samba or Windows servers) on OSX .DS_Store files will be written out when accessing directories. This post shows how to prevent this from happening.
OSX Quick Tip: Show all files in the Finder including dot files
Posted June 14th, 2010 in OSX and Quick Tips
The default behavior of the Finder on OSX is to hide UNIX files such as /usr /var etc and dot files (e.g. .htaccess). This quick tip shows how to enable (or disable) showing these files.
Prevent Parallels creating Windows application folders in the Dock
Posted August 13th, 2010 in OSX
When Parallels starts a Windows Virtual Machine it creates a folder in the dock containing Windows Applications. I run my Parallels Virtual Machines in windowed mode so prefer these folders not to be created at all. This post shows how to prevent Parallels from creating the Windows Applications folder in the dock on Mac OS X.
Purge all Google Chrome user data on a Mac
Posted August 24th, 2011 in Applications and OSX
In Google Chrome you can easily purge browsing data including cookies, history, etc using the application preferences. But there are still a bunch of files that it doesn't touch. I was having some weird issues with my SilverStripe installs (I won't go into that here) which didn't happen when using incognito mode but did under normal browsing. Deleting all browsing data made no difference so I needed to really poke under the hood to delete all data.
Remap quit and close tab shortcut keys etc in Mac OS X
Posted November 6th, 2012 in OSX
I'm the king of hitting random shortcut key combinations and doing unexpected things and often accidentally close a tab or the entire window in Google Chrome while editing some content on one of my websites. Which means having to go back and re-write that content... I'd have enough of that so decided to work out how to remap the Cmd+Q and Cmd+W keys so I could no longer accidentally shut down a tab or window when really meaning to copy n paste or select all (or some other well meaning shortcut).
Remove input shadows on iOS devices
Posted July 28th, 2011 in OSX
One thing I've found annoying with the mobile Safari browser on iOS is the shadows that appear at the top of input boxes. It's not normally too much of an issue unless you are doing fancy styling and then they can make it really messy and ugly. Fortunately David Walsh has provided a solution. I won't repeat the solution but do post some screenshots here showing the issue and how much better it can look after applying his fix.
Restore 3 finger swipe between pages in Google Chrome on Mac OSX Lion
Posted July 25th, 2011 in OSX
The default gesture in Mac OSX Lion to swipe between pages is to use 2 fingers which, unfortunately at the time of writing this post, this doesn't do anything in a number of apps including Google Chrome, Path Finder, and even Apple's Finder. Chrome and Path Finder previously used 3 fingers and fortunately Lion makes it easy to configure the gestures so they can again.
The 30 day OSX challenge
Posted June 9th, 2010 in OSX
With the rise in popularity of iPhone and iPad devices, and the rebuild we are shortly going to do with the Personalised Plates website, I have come to the conclusion that I need a Mac to be able to test for iPhone/iPad using the simulator which comes with the iPhone SDK. I currently use Windows 7 and the simulator/SDK is Mac only. So time to take the plunge and get a Mac.
The 30 day OSX challenge begins
Posted June 11th, 2010 in OSX
I posted a couple of days ago that I was going to buy a Mac Mini and do a "30 day OSX Challenge". After buying it that same day and spending the last couple of days setting up all the software I need, I switched off my Windows 7 desktop PC last night and don't intend switching it on again for (at least) 30 days.
Using purge to free inactive memory on Mac OS X
Posted November 17th, 2010 in OSX (Updated January 19th, 2012)
Apple Mac OS X is generally good at memory management but I sometimes find the inactive memory takes a long time to be released as free memory and my system can grind to a bit of a halt if I need to start up a virtual machine. This post shows how to use the purge command to free up the inactive memory.
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