QuickBoot is a free utility that fixes that annoying problem of forgetting to hold down the Alt key when you restart your Mac to boot into Windows via Boot Camp. It sits in the menu bar and let’s you restart your Mac and boot into Windows with a mouse click. Continue reading →
Use QuickBoot to restart with Windows and Boot Camp
How to hide the Genre column in iTunes 9
Apple released iTunes 9 yesterday and along with a bevy of new features, it also put the Genre column back into browser view — and the old trick for hiding it doesn’t work.
Fortunately, Apple has evidently listened to our cries of despair and there is now an easier way to disable Genres. Just go to View > Column Browser > Genres to toggle the column on and off. Thanks, Apple!
Samsung ML-1510 laser printer incompatible with Snow Leopard
This is just a heads up if you can’t get your Samsung ML-1510 laser printer to work with Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard. The current Samsung driver for Mac OS 10.3 doesn’t work with Snow Leopard and Samsung’s advice to reinstall the 10.5 driver isn’t much use — there is no 10.5 driver.
With regard to your ML-1510 and the recent issue you have experienced with Mac OS 10.6, as with previously released versions of the Mac OS, Samsung Electronics will provide support for this platform and will provide drivers for the new OS once they have been refined. In the mean time a number of our users have reported that simply reinstalling the 10.5 driver will allow users to continue using their printer.
Once the drivers have been refined for this latest Mac OS release they will be posted on the download centre of our website, we suggest that you monitor the website for their release.
Fortunately, Samsung is at least working on a 10.6 driver for this cheap and cheerful laser printer, but there’s no word on when it will appear. When it does, look for it here.
Why does Disk Utility crash under Snow Leopard?
I’ve just (thanks Royal Mail!) installed Snow Leopard on my iMac and immediately ran into problems with applications not behaving properly. In some cases, they wouldn’t run at all and crashed upon launch.
For example, Activity Monitor reported some apps as using 16,777,216TB of hard disk space (I have no idea which SI unit that works out at – yottabytes..?) and Disk Utility crashed as soon as it was started. After a few minutes of panic about having to wipe and reinstall due to some mysterious bug, I figured out the problem — it’s all due to the Snow Leopard installer. Continue reading →
Use a three-finger trackpad swipe to scroll to the top & bottom of a page in Firefox
Here’s another Firefox I discovered the other day. On a MacBook with a multi-touch trackpad, you can use a three finger up/down swipe to move instantly to the top/bottom of a web page. It doesn’t work in Safari, sadly.
Two useful keyboard shortcuts for Firefox
These are very old news (I’m sure), but I’ve just stumbled upon two useful keyboard shortcuts for Firefox.
- ⌘ + L — jump to and select (ready for overtyping) the contents of the location box.
- ⌘ + K — jump to and select (ready for overtyping) the contents of the search box.
In other words, you don’t need to reach for the mouse when typing a new URL or searching for something. I’m sure everyone’s been using these for ages, but they’re a revelation to me…
Update: Thanks to Mark for pointing out that ⌘ + L also works in Safari — but ⌘ + K doesn’t…
How to change the ‘Today’ highlight colour in iCal
I love Mac OS X iCal, but there’s one thing that bugs me — the pale blue highlight that denotes ‘Today’ in the month view is all but invisible.
There’s no way to tweak this colour in iCal and the best the internet could suggest was to tilt the monitor back a bit… In fact, looking at the screen from a lower angle does make the pale blue more obvious, but not obvious enough.
While hunting around for a hack to fix this, however, I stumbled upon a partial fix. Continue reading →
Move windows around on a Mac with keyboard shortcuts and SizeUp
Some utilities fill their niche so well that they quickly become an indispensable part of your daily computer use and SizeUp is one program that falls into that category for me.
The concept is simple enough — this tiny program (4.1Mb) lets you resize and position windows on the Mac OS Desktop using keyboard shortcuts — and some new features added by its most recent update prompted me to write a bit about it. Continue reading →
Keyboard shortcuts for rating iTunes songs
I’m on the hunt for a good Mac to-do list/GTD manager and while I’ve yet to settle on one of the multitude that are available, the search did lead me to a handy utility I’ve been looking for for ages. It’s called I Love Stars and it puts an iTunes star rating tool in the menu bar so you can rate songs as they’re being played without going into iTunes. Better still, you can assign keyboard shortcuts that work in any application — something I’ve had zero success with using Mac OS X’s own keyboard shortcut feature. Continue reading →
How to upgrade a Mac OS Time Machine drive
Since it’s wholly automatic and completely transparent, it’s silly not to make use of the Mac OS Time Machine utility — as long as you’ve got a large enough external drive for it to work with, of course. I’ve been using it with a 320Gb Seagate FreeAgent Pro external USB drive, but this only gave a backup history of about a month with my 320Gb MacBook Pro drive (which has about 90Gb in use).
So, since I also had an old 500Gb Western Digital MyBook drive lying around, I thought I’d use that for backups instead — not only would its greater capacity offer a few more weeks’ backup history, but its FireWire 800 port should make Time Machine a bit quicker to work with, too.
Rather than simply plug in the MyBook and use it as a new Time Machine drive though, I wanted to transfer my old backups and simply add to them. There’s no obvious way to do this, but it can be done easily enough — here’s how. Continue reading →