How to set alarms and timers on your Mac

I’ve tried out at least a dozen different “Alarm Clock” programs for OS X. I finally found the perfect one in a program aptly titled Alarm Clock. This brief tutorial will guide you through setting up and using Alarm Clock. Read more

How to change the OS X login screen

This tutorial will guide you through changing the OS X login screen from the “Leopard wallpaper” to any image of your choice.

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How to restore a folder that has turned into a package in OS X

Earlier this week I accidentally copied something to my Desktop that caused the Desktop itself to no longer be recognized by OS X as a folder. It turned into a “package” instead. All of the icons on my Desktop disappeared and the link to my Desktop from the Finder’s sidebar no longer worked. Here’s how I fixed the problem. Read more

Make the OS X maximize button work like Windows

One very, very common question/complaint from folks who have recently switched from Windows to Mac is “Why does the green button only resize windows and apps?”. It’s a totally valid question - the resizing behavior has always annoyed me too, and I made the switch years ago. Fortunately, there’s a very small and perfectly customizable program called Right Zoom that will change the default behavior and truly maximize programs when you click the green “Zoom” button” (). This tutorial will show you how to use it and set it up to best suit your needs. Read more

How to rip DVDs and convert videos on your Mac

Handbrake is a DVD and video converter for the Mac. It’s a free download and you can convert videos to various formats, including ripping DVDs to the iPod format. Handbrake supports formats such as FLV, WMV, AVI, and MOV out of the box. Handbrake is an open source project and it uses a number of video and audio libraries from the Linux and open source world. Read more

How to shop on eBay directly from your Mac

GarageBuy is a Mac application that makes shopping on eBay more fun, a lot easier, and much more effective. It’s from the folks at iwascoding, the same people who brought us GaragePay. If you spend a considerable amount of time shopping on eBay you might find GarageBuy pretty useful. And it’s free. Read more

How to batch rename files in OS X

NameChanger is a very useful application from MRR Software that helps you rename a list of files quickly and easily. The main purpose of this application is to help rename photographs, although it works well for other kinds of files as well. When you have a large number of photographs it is quite useful to have a software like this one that can perform a batch renaming of the image files quickly and effectively. Read more

How to get detailed information on every Mac ever made

Mactracker is a handy program that has a complete database of every Apple Macintosh ever made (Note: the last update was in Dec of 2008, so the 2009 models for MacBooks, MacBook Pro’s and iMacs are not included, yet). Read more

How to free up some had drive space on your Mac with Monolingual

Monolingual is a free program that does a great job of freeing up disk space on your Mac. Using Monolingual you can remove all the support files of all the extra languages that your Mac supports when shipped. This can total up to hundreds of megabytes of data. Chances are that you will never use Klingon or Esperanto on your computer. Why not get rid of it and use it to store some more music or videos? Read more

How to backup your Mac to an Amazon S3 server

Very few of us really understand the value of backups until the day comes when we need to create that urgent report or we’re back from a fine holiday and something goes wrong with the computer and all your data is gone with it, reports, photographs, emails, music, all of it. Read more

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