Mac

Since moving back to Canada, I haven’t been able to get my music fix with Pandora (listeners located outside of the U.S. can’t use Pandora). I’ve never been a huge Last.fm fan - the catalog of streamable music doesn’t include a lot of my favorite bands. In general, I’m just not a huge fan of online music services. Until now. Spotify, a lightweight Windows and OS X client, connects you to a vast collection of music. And it works outside of the US. Keep reading for my brief overview. [click to continue...]

Usually re-sizing twhirl is a walk in the park. Just grab the bottom-right corner and drag it to your preferred size. What happens when that corner moves itself off-screen and you can’t get it back? (eg. you opened a Virtual Machine in Parallels and went full-screen - then when you returned to OS X your apps decided to resize themselves). This brief tutorial will show you how to reset twhirl so it can be properly sized. [click to continue...]

Using the small and free app Volumizer, you can have your hard drives (internal, external, flash etc) and DVD/CD drives displayed in your Dock or Menu. Keep reading for brief usage instructions and more screenshots.

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When you click the Edit button with an image selected in iPhoto, the internal editor opens. If you’d like to use a different image editor when clicking edit, follow the steps outlined below. [click to continue...]

Yes, just like in the movie Along Came a Spider, you too can hide messages inside of jpg, gif, png and other picture files. [click to continue...]

This tutorial will guide you every step of the way through installing and setting up Jinzora, a very robust streaming media server - in OS X. [click to continue...]

Using MAMP, you can quickly and easily install Apache, PHP and MySQL on your Mac. Installing each package separately is totally possible, but MAMP offers a number of advantages vs. individual installations. MAMP will not alter or interfere with an existing version of Apache already running on your Mac. If Apache/MySQL/PHP are no longer needed, delete the MAMP folder and everything returns to its original status. Keep reading for a walk-through of the installation and initial setup. [click to continue...]

Does your Mac suddenly wake up, often just for a brief moment, when it should be in sleep mode? The instructions outlined in this brief tutorial will resolve the problem. [click to continue...]

This tutorial will guide you through editing the Services menu in OS X. Unfortunately, if you’re using Leopard, only some of the items in the services menu can be modified (as explained here). If you’re still running Tiger, you’ll be able to completely customize the Services menu.

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Using the free software VideoSpec, you can determine which audio and video codecs are required for watching a video file, the audio and video bitrates, and much, much more. [click to continue...]

This tutorial will guide you through the process of setting up Macfusion. After installing Macfuse (easy) and then Macfusion (even easier), you’ll be able to mount a remote FTP or SSH host as a local drive. This allows you to access, read/view, write/edit and transfer files to and from your local hard drive to the remote one - as if it was local as well. Keep reading for the complete walk-through. [click to continue...]

Update: all invites are spoken for. If/when I get more I’ll be sure to offer them up here as usual. Cheers!

If you’d like an invitation to the (currently beta) online backup and file sharing service Dropbox, leave a comment below. Dropbox offers 2GB of free storage, and you can easily set files to be private, public or shared only with people you specify.

Dropbox requires a 32 or 64bit version of Windows XP or Vista, Mac OS X Tiger or Leopard, and either Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari. It may very well work with other browsers or platforms, but they’re not officially supported, yet.

Note: when leaving a comment, just use the email address you’d like the invitation sent to in the E-mail (will not be published) (required) field. Don’t leave your email address in the actual comment box (unless you like spam). Thanks David for the invite!

If you have Windows installed on your Mac via Boot Camp, there are probably times when you wish you could access your OS X files and folders. This tutorial will guide you in doing just that - using free and open source software. [click to continue...]

This tutorial will walk you through every step required to jailbreak your iPod Touch running the latest (2.0) firmware. Note: this tutorial uses the Pwnage Tool v2.0 - which is currently Mac only. The Windows version of this tutorial (Jailbreaking the 2.0, 2.0.1 and 2.0.2 firmware) can be found here. Update: if you’ve upgraded to the 2.1 firmware and you want to jailbreak your iPod Touch (using OS X) - see this tutorial. [click to continue...]