Geek Guides » Mac OS

Use QuickBoot to restart with Windows and Boot Camp

Jules — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 11:34:36 +0000

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. The utility is a bit [...]

Originally published at Geek Guides

Use QuickBoot to restart with Windows and Boot Camp

Samsung ML-1510 laser printer incompatible with Snow Leopard

Jules — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 12:23:20 +0000

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 [...]

Originally published at Geek Guides

Samsung ML-1510 laser printer incompatible with Snow Leopard

Why does Disk Utility crash under Snow Leopard?

Jules — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 08:18:06 +0000

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 [...]

Originally published at Geek Guides

Why does Disk Utility crash under Snow Leopard?

How to change the ‘Today’ highlight colour in iCal

Jules — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:38:40 +0000

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, [...]

Originally published at Geek Guides

How to change the ‘Today’ highlight colour in iCal

Move windows around on a Mac with keyboard shortcuts and SizeUp

Jules — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:45:22 +0000

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 [...]

Originally published at Geek Guides

Move windows around on a Mac with keyboard shortcuts and SizeUp

Keyboard shortcuts for rating iTunes songs

Jules — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 10:09:04 +0000

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 [...]

Originally published at Geek Guides

Keyboard shortcuts for rating iTunes songs

How to upgrade a Mac OS Time Machine drive

Jules — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:20:57 +0000

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 [...]

Originally published at Geek Guides

How to upgrade a Mac OS Time Machine drive

How to make an external monitor the main display on a MacBook

Jules — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 08:43:28 +0000

Running a dual-monitor set-upon a MacBook is easy enough — just plug in the monitor and go to System Preferences > Displays to configure it. The first thing you’l need to do is click the Arrangment button and drag the external monitor so that it’s position is Displays matches that on your desk — so [...]

Originally published at Geek Guides

How to make an external monitor the main display on a MacBook

How to sync an iPhone with two computers

Jules — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 16:11:45 +0000

Unless you’re using over-the-air Microsoft Exchange syncing with your iPhone (via Google Mobile Sync, NuevaSync or a corporate Exchange server), you’re probably keeping its contact and calendar information in sync with Outlook or iCal using iTunes. This works well enough, but what if your calendar and contact data is stored one computer (at the office, [...]

Originally published at Geek Guides

How to sync an iPhone with two computers

Custom keyboard shortcuts in Firefox for Mac OS are broken

Jules — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 05:11:16 +0000

I complained at length about keyboard shortcut inconsistencies in Mac OS X the other day — an OS that’s supposedly ultra-consistent — but it appears that the Apple isn’t wholly to blame. I singled out Firefox and NeoOffice as particular offenders (largely because as a new-ish Mac user, they’re the two apps I use the [...]

Originally published at Geek Guides

Custom keyboard shortcuts in Firefox for Mac OS are broken

How to enable hibernate mode on a Mac

Jules — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 18:17:12 +0000

Unlike Windows, Mac OS doesn’t offer a hibernate or deep sleep mode – selecting Sleep from the Apple menu just puts a Mac into a low-power state (suspend to RAM) that, while quick to resume, still keeps the contents of memory in memory. This isn’t much of a problem on a desktop Mac that’s plugged [...]

Originally published at Geek Guides

How to enable hibernate mode on a Mac

How to make the Home & End keys on a Mac keyboard work like Home & End keys

Jules — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:10:56 +0000

When you press the cursor keys, modified cursor keys (with [Shift], [Ctrl], and so on) or [Home] and [End] keys on a Windows PC, the on-screen cursor reacts in a consistent way when it’s in a block of text, no matter what application you’re using. Its behaviour is controlled at operating system level rather than [...]

Originally published at Geek Guides

How to make the Home & End keys on a Mac keyboard work like Home & End keys

How to display a Mac OS character map

Jules — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 09:56:35 +0000

Typing a character that doesn’t have its own key on the keyboard is easy in Windows – you can just use the Windows Character Map tool. Mac OS doesn’t have a similar tool – or rather, it doesn’t have one that’s so easily accessible. There are a few options for quickly inserting symbols like ®, [...]

Originally published at Geek Guides

How to display a Mac OS character map

How to hide the Genre column in iTunes 8 for Windows and Mac OS

Jules — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 14:55:13 +0000

iTunes 7 has a Preferences option to turn of the Genre column in the main window, iTunes 8 does not. This is very frustrating. I’m not in the least bit interested in seeing what genres are in my music library, and the Genre pane takes space away from the far more useful Artists and Albums [...]

Originally published at Geek Guides

How to hide the Genre column in iTunes 8 for Windows and Mac OS

How to type a hash (#) on a Mac UK keyboard

Jules — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 10:06:46 +0000

Mac keyboards don’t have a # (‘hash’ for the UK, or ‘pound’ if you’re American) key, which is a bit of a problem when you want to type a # symbol. The lack of a dedicated key doesn’t mean you can’t type the symbol, though – just type [Alt] + [3] or [⌥] + [3] [...]

Originally published at Geek Guides

How to type a hash (#) on a Mac UK keyboard