I haven't seen this documented anywhere, but I discovered that you can select an entire paragraph of text by quadruple-tapping on it when entering text in the iPhone. For instance, when replying to an email, you can quadruple-tap on paragraphs in the quoted reply, then cut them. You have to do it pretty quickly, and take care not to move your finger too much between taps. Try it a few times, though, and you'll get the hang of it. And yes, I know it might sound weird, but I actually find it quite useful sometimes. [robg adds: This works, and isn't covered in the iPhone user's guide.]

You can perform many useful tasks using the icon in the title bar of many OS X applications (known as the proxy icon), in both Apple-bundled (TextEdit, Preview, etc.) and third party (BBEdit, Path Finder, and numerous others) applications. For this to work, you need to be using a file that has had its latest changes saved (otherwise, the icon will be grayed out). Normally, when you click-and-drag on the title bar of a window, you just drag the window around. However, if you click-and-hold directly on the proxy icon, and optionally add a modifier key, you can access other useful functions. Here's what happens in most applications, including TextEdit and Preview: Drag icon: If you drag the proxy icon to a Finder window or your Desktop, an alias to the open file will be created at the location where you drop the icon. Option-drag icon: Hold down the Option (Alt) key prior to dragging, and you'll create a copy instead of an alias. Command or Control: ...

This hint shows how to utilize OpenMeta tagging to attach a set of multiple, often-changing files to an iCal event. Although it may work with other tag managers out here, I'm using TagoMan2 for this purpose, which allows me to refer to a tag using a tag:// URL scheme: Edit an event in iCal Enter tag://Name_of_tag into the URL field. Click on the link you just created; this will open up an empty window you can drag your files into. Drag in your files. The way this works is that TagoMan will associate a tag (e.g. Name_of_tag) to every file you drag in. When you click on the link again, TagoMan will search for all files using this tag -- any newly-tagged files that match Name_of_tag will show up in the list. Tags are Spotlight-aware, and this tag:// URL may be used in any app which support URLs. ...

Here's a simple workaround that will let you modify your own iWeb website from multiple locations and machines: Carry the original files on a USB stick, and trick the local machines into using the USB stick instead of the local file by using an alias. Important to make this workaround work is that the alias file is set with its 'Open With' set to 'iWeb.' Detailed steps are below. This workaround assumes that the data for all websites created by your machine are on your USB stick. (For management of multiple websites, see this older hint). First, generate your website with iWeb. iWeb stores all information in your user's Library » Application Support » iWeb folder, in a file named domain.sites2. Navigate to this file in the Finder, then: Copy the file domain.sites2 to a USB stick. Create an alias of domain.sites2 (will be called ...

Snow Leopard has an built-in grammar checker (in Cocoa and other certain apps) that will place green dotted lines under any possible grammatical errors it detects. (You may have to enable this first, in the program's Edit » Spelling and Grammar » Check Grammar With Spelling.) However, accessing the corrections panel using Control-Click » Spelling and Grammar » Show Spelling and Grammar has always seemed cumbersome. Now I've discovered that simply hovering the mouse over the underlined word pops up a tool tip description of the error. [robg adds: The first option in the contextual menu will be the replacement suggestion, but the Spelling and Grammar box will typically have more information. Given you probably want to make the suggested change anyway, I prefer the contextual menu, so I can see and replace; the to...

Sometimes, like today, I'm particularly interested in the Apple Store's status...as in, when is it back up so that I can order whatever it is I'm waiting to order. While sitting around pressing Command-R this morning, I figured there must be a better way. After a few minutes with curl and GeekTool, I had the solution. Because I didn't have very much time to implement this trick this morning, I just created a new 'Shell' Geeklet in GeekTool, with the refresh set to every five seconds, that showed the output of this command: curl -s http://store.apple.com/us | grep backsoon | grep australia Note that the above is specific both to the US Apple Store, and to the current version of that store. You may have to modify it for other geographies, or for future store site changes. Basically, what the command does is grab the Apple Store page via curl, suppresses the normal output (-s...

Sometimes I visit a website on my iPod Touch that is almost unreadable due to the expected size of a screen on a desktop computer. Even when zoomed in, some sites have the text continue off screen, meaning I'd have to scroll left and right to read a whole line of text. I have MobileMe and sync my bookmarks between computers and my iPod Touch. And one day I happened across just such a too-small site. Frustrated, I decided to just try my Readability bookmarklet, and was happy to see it worked! You'll need either an iPhone or iPod Touch and a computer that you sync your device to via USB or MobileMe. From a computer, navigate to Readability and set your desired options. I like Inverse, Extra Large text, and Extra Narrow margins, but pick what you like. Drag your bookmarklet to your bookmark bar, as the site instructs. (You can move it to your Bookmarks menu, anywhere, or into the sidebar of Safari's Bookmark ...

I have a lot of people in my Mac OS X Address Book. I thought it would be a nice idea to have the system check the birthdays in Address Book, and inform me of any forthcoming birthdays via a Growl notification. So I've created an Apple Script to do that (with a lot of help from a few other peoples). First, install Growl if it isn't installed. Also install the Terminal growlnotify command, which you'll find in the Extras folder on the Growl disk image. Next, copy and paste the following into AppleScript Editor: delay 0.5 set isRunning to 0 set timer to the time of the (current date) repeat while isRunning = 0 tell application "System Events" set isRunning to ¬ ((application processes whose (name is equal to "GrowlHelperApp")) count) ...

If you have entire albums, artists, or playlists excluded from shuffling in iTunes (The 'Skip when shuffling' flag is set), your iPhone 3GS will fail to play these albums, artists, or playlists when you select them using Voice Control if it has shuffle play mode enabled. The manner in which it fails makes it seem as if something is seriously amiss (hence this hint): It acknowledges your voice input, indicating that your selection is about to play (e.g., 'Playing album Avatar'), but then returns to whatever had been playing before. If nothing had been playing before you gave the voice command, the iPhone will remain resolutely silent after acknowledging your input. The solution to this 'issue' is, of course, to simply to turn off shuffle play mode. Unfortunately you can't do this with a voice command (as far as I know).

The titles iPhoto chooses for just-added photos is the annoying "IMG_nnnn" serial number from the camera. This AppleScript simply takes the date of the photo (EXIF info that iPhoto knows very well) and uses it as the photo title. The format is: yyyy-mm-dd-hh.mm.ss, so it's a bit easier to read than the ISO version, but also easily sortable. Here's the code: tell application "iPhoto" -- activate -- bring iPhoto back to front copy (my selected_images()) to these_images if these_images is {} then error "Please select some images before using this script." set thename to "" set thepaths to "" set thedates to "" repeat with i from 1 to the count of these_images set this_image to item i of these_images --set this_file to the image path of this_image set thename ...

Are you curious, like me, about the new Single Window Mode (most excellent; see this article at Ars for more details) available in the newest unstable 2.7.x GIMP releases? Well, sadly, the final and stable GIMP 2.8 release won't come out before the end of this year, and there are still no experimental 2.7.x binary releases available for Mac OS X (via X11). One could always try to compile everything from source, but that might be quite complicated and time-consuming. So, let's look at another, definitely easier way of running GIMP 2.7.x on Mac OS X: not (semi) natively through X11, but through virtualization. First of all, we need a virtual machine with the latest Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic), or even 10.04 (Lucid, in Alpha at this time) installed: you can create a 32- or 64-bit Ubuntu VM in...

I have several sites that I access on both my iPhone and desktop, so I like to have quick access to them via the Bookmarks Bar. However, these sites have different versions for the desktop, for mobiles, and, in some cases, yet another version for the iPhone. Usually, the full version doesn't work so well on the iPhone, and the iPhone version is undesirable on the desktop. Instead of creating a plain bookmark, a little Javascript can make a bookmark context-sensitive, and allow you to have one bookmark that opens the right version of a page, depending on which platform you're browsing from. The basic idea is to use some client-side Javascript to check the browser's platform (a.k.a. operating system), and then tell the browser to access a URL based on that check. The code looks like this: javascrip...

Two poll updates today. First, I've posted a new poll about the mix of Macs you're presently using -- Intel (via Apple), Intel (via build-it-yourself), PowerPC, or some mix of the above. I'm curious to see not only the mix of Intel and PowerPC, but how many are using self-built Intel powered Macs. The second poll update is that the iPad interest poll has now closed, with just over 10,000 votes. Of those who voted, nearly 44% are planning on buying iPad 1.0 when it comes out in April, with a virtual tie (two votes' difference) between then cheapest and the most expensive versions for the most-popular spot (11.3% each). In total, Mac OS X Hints readers will be buying at least (as the poll didn't allow for more than one purchase) $2.92 million worth of iPads! An additional 29% claim they'll buy the second gen...

Frequently we need to clean a directory before zipping it or copying it to an external USB drive to be used by Windows or Linux users. Apple Finder has the custom of populating directories with those unavoidable .DS_Store files, volumes with .Trashes, and some files (especially pictures) with ._resources. The following interactive script will safely remove these files prior to copying. #!/bin/sh # bash script to clean (delete) Finder .DS_Store, .Trashes and ._resources # Use cleandsstores.sh # juanfc 2010-03-06 if [ $# != 1 ] then echo "ERROR: use\n\t`basename $0` dirtoclean" exit 1 fi res=`find "$@" \( -name ".DS_Store" -or -name ".Trashes" -or -name "._*" \) -print` if [[ -z $res ]]; then echo "nothing to delete" exit 0 el...

At my office, I needed to find a way to turn of the wireless network when someone plugged in their network cable. I also did not want them to be able to turn the wireless network back on until the network cable was unplugged. I came up with the fallowing solution. I created a launchDaemon called com.companyname.ethernetmonitor, and saved it in /System » Library » LaunchDaemons: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>Label</key> <string>com.companyname.ethernetmonitor</string> <key>ProgramArguments</key> <array> <string>/Library/Scripts/CompanyName/turnOffAirp...

Over the weekend, I plugged in my old-style 80GB iPod for the first time in, well, a long time -- so long that the battery needed to be charged a bit before it would even sync. Once the sync started, things seemed to go well, but near the end of the photos section, iTunes displayed a message telling me there wasn't enough room to copy all my photos. This was a bit odd, because best as I could recall, my iPod had about 20GB of free space the last time I synched. And while it had been a while, there's no way I took enough photos to fill 20GB -- especially at the iPod's resolution (I don't sync full-sized copies). I noticed that the Other (orange) section of the Capacity gauge in iTunes was huge -- basically all the remaining space was used up by Other. Switching to the Finder, I quickly scanned through the iPod's various folders (it was set to enable disk use) with the Inspector open (Command-Option-I), and they all looked normal in size ... until I got to Photos &r...

I use a couple of shell scripts that use Growl to remind me to run SuperDuper backups. The first script (backupcompleted) is set to run after each SuperDuper backup. It writes a timestamp into an invisible file called .lastbackup in my home directory; here's the script: #!/bin/bash # This script is run by SuperDuper each time a backup is completed. date "+%s" > ~/.lastbackup The second script (lastbackup) reads the .lastbackup file and calculates the time elapsed. It takes one argument: the desired number of hours to wait before showing an alert. If the elapsed time is greater than the time suppled to the script, it shows a Growl notification. If the elapsed time is greater than twice the time suppled to the script, it also increases the priority of the alert (so you can set a diferent colour for it in Growl preferences). Here's the script: ...

Most of us know that Quicktime X, included with Snow Leopard, can trim movie and audio files. However, this trim is less than precise, as you cannot specify an exact trim start and stop point. Worse yet, if you want to make 10 minute segments for YouTube, you have to write down the last trim end time, undo the previous trim after uploading, and hope the trim slider will let you select the same trim point to start your next clip. What a pain. Enter AppleScript -- trim is a scriptable function. Open your movie in Quicktime X, and open the AppleScript Editor in the Application » Utilities folder. In the AppleScript Editor enter this script: tell application "QuickTime Player" activate trim document 1 from start_trim to end_trim end tell Replace start_trim and end_trim with the time, in seconds, at which you wish ...

If you regularly use a language that requires letters with diacritics -- such as á, ä, é, ë, í, ã, ñ, õ, etc. as they are used in Spanish, French or Portuguese -- and you recently switched from Windows to Mac OS X as I have, you might find this hint useful. In Windows, while there were various ways to enter these characters, the best one of them was just to enter a ' and then the vowel, and you would get the accented version of that letter (in this example, the letter with the acute diacritic). In Mac OS X however, if you set the keyboard layout to a language that has these letters (such as Spanish), you cannot use this trick; the only way of inputting these letters is the standard way supplied in Mac OS X (Option-e then e for é; Option-e, then i for í; etc.). I personally found this very annoying, and searched for...

I got the idea to put this together after reading an article on TUAW about creating iCal ToDo’s with AppleScript. I remembered that SuperDuper! supports running shell scripts before and after a copy job, so I thought it would be nice to script myself a reminder to clone again in two weeks. First save this code as a shell script (AnyName.sh) #!/bin/sh arch -i386 osascript

I bought a new iMac and went crazy with Faces in iPhoto. Two days later I had a lot of tagged photos in Faces. Then I noticed that since I synced my Address Book with Google Contacts, Address Book entries were appearing as suggestions in Faces. I didn't want to re-tag all my existing Faces photos, but there didn't seem to be an obvious way to link a new Address Book contact to an existing Face. So I took the only honorable course of action and starting messing around. I discovered that you can transfer a Faces collection to an Address Book contact very quickly. Assume you're working on John in your Faces collection, who has the entry John Doe in your Address Book. Go into Faces and pick any photo of him, double-click to view it and then click name. Start retyping John and John Doe should be one of the suggested values, with an Address Book icon next to the name. Click to select it. Go back to the Faces cork board and you should now have your original John ...

A few days ago, I wanted to get iTunes to accept my AmEx Gift Card, but somehow it always said the security code was invalid. Different from VISA and MasterCard, the security code from an AmEx Card is on the front and is four digits long. There was no doubt this code was in fact valid, and I was typing it correctly. Obviously I wasn't the only one with this problem -- Apple's Support Discussion Board was filled with people complaining about that, and the "hints" there weren't working at all. As for me, it worked after I put an empty space after the last number on the card. The reason: iTunes wanted to have 4 4-digit parts (16 digits) of the credit card number, but the AmEx had only had 15 digits. This was causing the invalid security code. However, you couldn't tell that in the first place, because all iTunes showed after rejecting the code was **** **** **** 4123. In fact, 123 were at positions 13 to 15 in the real credit card. But iTune...

If you download a file with Safari or certain other programs, you may be able to copy its download URL from its Get Info window. Select the file in the Downloads folder (or elsewhere) and press command-I. Find the Where From ntry in the More Info section of the Get Info window. Hold down the mouse button and drag across the URL listed there to select it, then choose Copy from the Edit menu (or press Command-C). [robg adds: This will only work in 10.6; 10.5 won't let you select the text in that field. I'm not sure which browsers/apps other than Safari record this data; Firefox does not.]

Want to do quick and dirty image editing on the fly? Let Image Events do the work for you. I created a free AppleScript app, which I've named uPad; download the script (112KB) (macosxhints mirror -- but use the original link as long as it works.), and then read on for some notes on how to use it... uPad is an image manipulation utility that can convert, crop and pad, scale, and rotate images. It's an AppleScript that uses the Image Events process to read and manipulate images. For convenience, use a launcher to launch the AppleScript -- I'm using Spark. Or, for access from the menu bar, enable Show Script menu in menu bar in AppleScript Editor's General preferences, and put uPad in ~/Library » Scripts » Applications » Finder (you might have to create some of those folder...

I really like browsing without all the flashy ads around, so I've been using the filtering-proxy Privoxy now for many years. But there is no longer support for Mac OS X, as there isn't a maintainer for the Mac OS X port any more. MacPorts still has 3.0.12, which has some major bugs (timeouts), so I decided to build from source. Here's how to get it run... First, get the source for Privoxy 3.0.16 from SourceForge (1.7MB direct download). Unpack the download somewhere, and make sure you have Xcode installed somewhere. Open Terminal and c...

My 2007 DC MacBook (running 10.6.2) has an internal SuperDrive that is defective, which hampered my Boot Camp installation. 2br I set up the MacBook up for dual boot with the Boot Camp assistant, and I wanted to install Windows using a bare internal drive (Samsung) connected to USB thru a USB2.0 to SATA/IDE cable. The process failed after restart -- it stuck on the boot screen, displaying an Apple icon with (sometimes) a flashing question mark. Looking for a solution I came a across rEfit, which is a kind of boot manager for EFI-equipped (Intel) Macs. Install the program and restart the MacBook twice. After the second restart, the rEfit boot menu should be visible. When I connected an external CD/DVD drive that contained a bootable Windows CD, that disk showed up as bootable. You selected the Windows installation disk and it continued with the installation process. For me it saved the day; I was able to instal...

Over the weekend, I was installing a demo of some web-based help desk software, and this particular package used encrypted PHP files. With my hosting company, I have to place a php.ini file in every directory that contains encrypted files, or the site won't work. This particular package had hundreds of directories, buried in folders and subfolders, and I was dreading the task of copying this one file into each of them. A tip from my friend James pointed me to the solution, in the form of Smiling Dragon's reply in this thread over on the Unix/Linux forums. Assuming the file exists in the parent directory, then this command does the trick: find . -type d -exec cp php.ini {}/ \; This worked perfectly, and incredibly quickly -- at first I thought it had failed, but a quick sample of a deeply-buried folder showed that the file was ...

Mac OS X's default volume control hot keys change the volume in huge steps, but you can use Shift-Option and the Volume Up or Down keys for quarter-step changes (see this hint). Still not fine enough for you? AppleScript to the rescue, once again. Though it has some oddities, AppleScript can be used to set the volume based on an entered number. Here's the first quirk: the number of squares filled in on the HUD will be twice the number you typed in. So, typing set volume 1 sets the volume to level two. (There are 16 squares total, so you can enter a number from 1 to 8). You can use decimals to set the volume by individual square, too: set volume .5 fills in one square. You can, amazingly, extend this functionality to even greater levels of precision. Want to set the volume to three and one-fifth squares (i.e. 3.2)? Type set volume 1....

The motivation for this hint was to have one folder for common use, with read and write privileges for every user. In Mac OS X, the Shared directory can be used by all users. However, a file there is still owned by the user who put it there. Another user cannot edit the file without authentication. This hint creates a common volume named AppleBasket, where users can have files in common. In practice, an encrypted disk image mounting automatically for every user is a good solution to this problem. The following AppleScript automates the unixy requirements in creating such a disk image. Here's the script: (* AppleBasket 1.0 Creates a common volume for all users. Motivation for the script was to have a folder for common use, with read and write privileges for every user. Tested with Mac O...

If you're an iTunes master user, you'll probably say "well, duh!" to this hint...but if you're like me, it might save you some frustration. I was doing some work on my library over the weekend, and had my collection sorted by Album. As it turns out, there are three albums named 'Home' in my library; when I reached this section, the sort just looked awful--the artists were in a seemingly random order, not grouped by album title. First I tried changing the sort to Album By Artist, but that didn't work -- it actually sorts by artist first, then by album, and I needed the main sort to be by album. After some fiddling about, I discovered that if I coded the artist of each Home album into the Sort Album Artist field on the Sorting tab of the Get Info (Command-I) dialog, everything worked: sorting by Album now groups the artists by album within the 'Home' section. Apologies if this was obvious to most of you, but it wasn't to me, and reading help didn't make things any cl...

Some Acrobat PDF documents cannot be edited or marked with the Acrobat Pro fluorescent marker (Highlight Text Tool). This tool is extremely useful to mark up text for future reference, teaching, research, etc., but it seemingly can't be used on these documents. For example, any of the PDFs found here, such as this one [312KB PDF]. The solution turns out to be fairly simple. Open Acrobat Pro's preferences, and select the Documents section in the left-hand column. In the PDF/A View Mode section on the right, set the pop-up menu to Never, and click OK. From that moment on, all 'PDF/A' documents can be highlighted with Acrobat. Great!\ [robg adds: This fix works as described.]

After I installed Snow Leopard, I turned on my Mac to find that the nice Apple logo had changed to a prohibitory sign (with a slash through it). I didn't know what to think about it, so I tried a few fixes. I let it do that for about 5 minutes. I turned it off with the power button. I did everything! From zapping the PRAM to repairing disk permissions. I poked through the Apple Support Forums. Finally, I realized that I had installed Norton Anti-Virus (my ISP gives it out for free), and that I should try removing it. The easiest way to do this is to use the Symantec uninstall utility, which can be very hard to find. For those who are having troubles, I finally found it here: RemoveSymantecFiles remova...

I use docked folders together with the List view option to create pop-up folders with navigable menus. I then create a folder of aliases (e.g. of applications), dock it, and set the List option. This works well apart from the ugly (at least on a 16x16 icon) alias badge. The alias badge is defined in /System » Library » CoreServices » CoreTypes.bundle » Contents » Resources » AliasBadgeIcon.icns and contains 16x16, 32x32, 128x128, 256x256 & 512x512 versions of the alias badge. If you replace the 16x16 version with nothing, then alias badges will only be shown on icons from 17 to 512 pixels. Result: nice dock menus. Here's one way to do this: Make a copy of the original file as a backup. Create a 16x16 transparent PNG file -- I used Photoshop (Photoshop won't let you Copy nothing, but it can Save no...

There are plenty of hints here involving Safari's excellent Activity window, like this one. I managed, however, to find one more way to use it. I was downloading mp3's from my friends' alternative band music site. The player is in Flash, so I went to the Activity window and copied the first download file, which was at this URL: http://www.nonitz.ic.cz/mp3s/mp3-0.mp3. When I went to copy the next one, I noticed that the only difference was the sequential number at the end (i.e. .mp3-1.mp3, .mp3-2.mp3, etc.) So I created a text file and copy and pasted multiple lines, edited the numbers, selected all, copied, and then pasted into Safari's Activity window. No surprise here -- it just worked!

Today I needed to use Workgroup Manager to add a Login Item that Mounts an afp Volume. Apple provides no instructions for doing this while logged in directly on the server; instead this task is done using Workgroup Manager on a client (see this Apple support document). I didn't have my MacBook with me at the time, nor did I want to install the Server Admin Tools on another machine just for this one task. The solution is: Open Safari and enter the URL in the form of afp://IP-address-OR-Server-name/Share Point Drag the favicon (next to the URL) onto the Desktop. Drag the favicon into the System Preferences » Login » Items section of Workgroup Manager. Click Apply Now. Note that you do not need to add %20 to any white space when typing the URL in Safari; this will automatically be added when you drag the Favicon to the Desktop. Also, the colon and for...

I use Liquifile from time to time to identify those places in the file system that have grown a little bloated over time, and to see if I can thin things out anywhere. It gives a unique visual interface into your entire directory structure, allowing you to easily see where all the space is being used, and how long it's been used for. I used it yesterday in just such an exercise and discovered a hitherto unknown feature of another piece of software I've been using, namely OSXPlanet. OSXPlanet creates almost 'live' views of planet Earth on your desktop, including such things as clouds, satellites and volcano eruptions. What I didn't know, however, was that it seems to keep a cache of every desktop picture it has generated, which, if you have the refresh rate set particularly high, can result in numerous redundant images being created. I can see where some people may find this us...

I had never thought of using my Mac in this way, but thought it was a good use of a computer in an unusual way. Yesterday I had gone to talk to a co-worker who was getting ready to head out the door for lunch. Rather than take out a compact, or find a mirror with which to check her hair, she just fired up PhotoBooth and used it as a mirror. [robg adds: I've had this on sitting in the queue for a while, just waiting for a quiet hints day on which to run it...and that day is today. It will be interesting to see how many have done something similar -- personally, I never would have thought about doing this, mainly because I avoid mirrors whenever possible :).]

Four years ago, I wrote a hint about how to remove a PDF password using ColorSync from those PDF files than you can view, but not copy or change. It did not apply to files that were encrypted with a password and could not be opened. To my surprise, it has been one of the more popular hints, with over 112,000 hits. However, since Tiger, Apple has progressively tightened the PDF DRM, so that the hint does not work in Snow Leopard any more. There are several third party programs that will do it, but here's how to do it in Snow Leopard for free. Note that this hint will not decrypt PDF files that cannot be opened without a password. The following do not work: copying the old ColorSync from Tiger, ...

I do a lot of podcast listening and I hate the long sync times in iTunes to get the freshest content on my iPhone. As a result, I do most of my podcast downloading directly on my iPhone. When you have old episodes in your Podcast section, you can touch the Get More Episodes button to get thrown to the iTunes app and download a new one. But if you always delete shows when you're done (to save precious space), the quick link is gone -- instead, you have to type the relevant podcast name into the iTunes app's Search bar. What a pain! So here's a way to make podcast links list in Mobile Safari that toss you right to the show's page in iTunes: Go to iTunes on your Mac/PC, look up the podcast you want to bookmark in the store. Right next to the Subscribe button is a down arrow; click that and choose Copy Link. Paste this link into an email addressed to the account you access on your iPhone (or any other method for getting text snippets from your compute...

After upgrading to Mac OS X 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard) from Mac OS X 10.5.8 (Leopard), I found that the Tahoma font was not displayed by any Office 2004 or Office 2008 application. Surprisingly, the Tahoma font (and many others) were found in my user's Library/Fonts Disabled folder, instead of in my user's active fonts folder (Library/Fonts). Thankfully, simply moving all the fonts from the Fonts Disabled folder to the Fonts folder fixed the issue. After that, I used Font Book to resolve duplicates, and FontDoctor and Font Finagler to fix any remaining font issues. So far, so good!

In my recent Thunderbird 3 usage, I've come to rely on search almost exclusively. I leave messages in my inbox until they are dealt with, and when they are dealt with, I just hit the 'A' key to archive them. Now I can do that with Mail.app, too. When you hit 'A' in Thunderbird, it archives each message in a folder based on the date of the message, e.g. INBOX/Archives/2010 for messages from this year. The following AppleScript also does this in Mail. (The script will also mark archived messages as read -- Thunderbird's 'A' key does not do that.) Copy and paste the following into AppleScript Editor: on run tell application "Mail" set selectedMessages to selection repeat with selectedMessage in selectedMessages set msgDate to date sent of selectedMessage set msgYear to...

You may be surprised to learn that if you follow the detailed 136 page instructions for setting up an NFS disk server that Apple provides for the OS X server machines, it won't actually work. The problem is the firewall. Unlike the non-server OS, which has an application firewall, the Server OS uses IPFW, which is port-based not application-based. This means every service that takes inbound connections has to have fixed port range assignments so you can tell IPFW which port to open. NFS required the RPC deamon, and by default, RPC takes whatever ports are free at the moment and does not keep them fixed. You need to fix these to specific ports by hand because the GUI won't do it. This can be confusing to diagnose because if you start NFS with the firewall down and then put it up, you find the server continues to work for about 30 minutes, bec...

For you iPhone/iPad/iPod touch developers out there, did you know you can change the name of the carrier that appears in the iPhone Simulator? The default carrier name is Carrier, but you can change this to a custom name of your choice. In Terminal.app, run this command, replacing your_user with your user's short username: defaults write "/Users/your_user/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/User/Library/Preferences/com.apple.springboard" SBFakeCarrier "AT&T" [robg adds: I haven't tested this one.]

Pardon me for paraphrasing Douglas Adams, but it seemed a most fitting way to begin this announcement. Over 13,250 hints, written with something in excess of three million words. The internet's smartest and friendliest community of OS X users. An incredibly helpful forum site renowned for its civility and useful answers. A career change. Uncountable articles for Macworld magazine and macworld.com. Two books. Two Geek Cruises. A couple of iWork video training projects. Handfuls of Macworld Expo presentations. Hundreds of people I consider friends (not "Facebook friends," but friends in the truest sense), even though I've only ever met a handful of them in person. Nearly ... ten ... years! I expected none of the above when I launched macosxhints.com back in November of 2000. At the time, I'd been married...

If you'd like to take any block of text and have it easily transferred as spoken text to your iPhone or iPod, I found this feature is now built in to Snow Leopard as a Service. To use this feature, first enable it in System Preferences » Keyboard » Keyboard Shortcuts » Services. In the left-hand column, select Services, then scroll down to the Text section in the right-hand window and enable 'Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track.' Add a keyboard shortcut, too, if you wish by clicking in the space adjacent to this services' name. Now whenever you have a block of text highlighted, Control-click on it and choose Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track from the pop-up menu. Alternatively, you can press your defined keyboard shortcut, or get to the command from the Services menu item. The quality of the speech is quite acceptable! [...

I was working on a video project a while back, and needed to show a URL being typed into the Firefox 3 URL bar. However, the (usually very useful) auto-complete drop-down messed up the capture; each time I started typing www, a long list of URLs appeared in the drop-down. I tried to clear it out by using the Tools » Clear Private Data menu item, but alas, even after wiping everything, the drop-down list still appeared. After some Googling, I found the solution in this article in the MozillaZine Knowledge Base: The secret is the browser.urlbar.maxRichResults key in the Firefox about:config screen. To remove the auto-complete drop-down in Firefox 3, type about:config in the URL bar, then press Ret...

Yesterday, I had problems restarting my Mac mini, so I booted off an external hard disk with a clone, and fixed the startup problem. This morning, I needed to find a file in my Time Machine backup, but all my backups prior to the moment I booted from the external disk were dark in the Time Machine timeline (at the right of the screen). In the Finder, I could only access those created since last night. The backups were still there, though, and the Time Machine System Preferences pane recognized the date of my first backup as the oldest backup on my Time Machine disk. I searched for solutions, and found none. Then I recalled an older hint about browsing other Time Machine backups by holding down the Option key while clicking the Time Machine icon in the menubar. So I tried that. Only the one Time Machine disk showed up, and I selected it, and was able to access all my backups in the...

The following AppleScript will display a dialog box showing the names of every identified face in a selected photo in iPhoto: tell application "iPhoto" activate set the selected_items to (get the selection) repeat with z from 1 to the count of the selected_items set this_photo to item z of the selected_items select this_photo set the query_results to my extract_face_record(this_photo) if the the query_results is not false then set AppleScript's text item delimiters to return repeat with i from 1 to the count of the query_results set the info_list to item i of the query_results if i is 1 then set the dialog_text to the info_list as text else set the dialog_text to the dialog_text & return & return & the info_list as tex...

Aperture 3 includes a neat font called HopperScript, which you can install for use on your Mac. The hidden font is located within the Resources folder of Aperture. To get it, go to wherever Aperture 3 is installed, Control-click on Aperture, then select Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu. Navigate into Contents » Resources » Fonts, and there's the font! For faster access within the Resources folder, tap the F key, or if Aperture 3 is in your Applications folder, paste this in the Go To window in Finder: /Applications/Aperture.app/Contents/Resources/Fonts [robg adds: I can confirm the font is there after installing Aperture 3.]

HP's printer software and utilities were replaced with built-in items in OS X Snow Leopard, after a few tense days where HP initially declined to support the new operating system. Many of us remember our outrage when some HP spokesdrone actually stated that users should buy new printers if they wanted Snow Leopard support. Those of us who didn't run screaming to Canon or some other brand have made do with a reduced feature-set for our HP printers. In particular, OCR functionality is no longer supported by HP. I tried the following, and not only did it work for me, but it was a really sweet solution. At its heart is Tesseract, an open-source OCR engine that originated at HP (how's that for irony) and is currently maintained (and used) by Google. I found that some of the online instructions...