How to Automatically Restart a Frozen Mac
Posted 11/23/2011 at 6:43am | by Cory Bohon
I have a Mac mini that I use as a home file server, running Snow Leopard. Occasionally, the computer locks up, but since it’s headless (or running without a display attached), I don’t always realize it. Do you know of any software or web services that could run in the background, and if the machine freezes, alert me via email or text?
Some Macs have automatic restarting features built right in to System Preferences. One such preference, which many Macs have, is the ability to restart after a power outage. But another preference that fewer Macs have is the ability to restart after the computer freezes. (Curiously, Apple doesn’t say why some Macs can do this and some can’t in the Help documentation.)
Mac OS X Lion seems to implement this functionality across many different Mac models.
To see if your Mac has this feature, head to System Preferences > Energy Saver, and look at the checkboxes near the bottom of the screen. If your Mac supports the feature, you will see an option for “Restart automatically if the computer freezes.” We’ve noticed that this feature seems to be standard on most modern Macs running OS X Lion.
With this option checked, the OS will automatically restart the computer if it locks up or becomes unresponsive. It’s an especially nifty feature for servers without a display.
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Wednesday, November 23, 2011
How to Automatically Restart a Frozen Mac | Mac|Life
Thursday, November 17, 2011
How to Locate What's Sucking up Your Hard Drive Space | Mac|Life
How to Locate What's Sucking up Your Hard Drive Space
Posted 11/17/2011 at 8:01am | by Ben Harvell
It’s all too easy to say “oh, I’ll just delete some stuff” and then never do it. Take action today and cut the flab from your file system by locating the major space-sucking culprits.
1. Balancing the Blocks
The first step isn’t always the easiest, but this time it is: determine just how much space you have remaining on your Mac’s main disk. If you’ve read this far, chances are it’s not much. To get the complete picture, click on the Macintosh HD icon (or whatever you call your main drive) in the Finder, then type Command-I to bring up its Info window. From here, you can see the capacity of your drive as well as the amount of space available.
Aim to have a third of your drive free.
If the available storage is less than one-third of the total capacity of the drive, it’s worth freeing up more. The benefits of a healthy hard drive are far greater than just having more room to play with. With around one-third of your drive’s capacity available, you should see slight improvements in drive access as well as application speed. Mac OS X will also be able to use some of that storage as virtual memory to help it perform tasks without using your RAM, a great help to those using older Macs.
2. Find and Delete Huge Unwanted Files
Next, with the Finder selected, press Command-F to bring up a search window. Click on the first drop-down menu and select Other and then Size. From the second drop-down menu, select “is greater than” and then enter an amount in the field to the right of it. A good place to start is 50MB.
Next up: find those big files.
The files and folders that now appear in the Finder window all fit the criteria you entered—if you looked for files bigger than 50MB, these are all the files of that size or larger on your Mac. But wait! Before you start blindly erasing some of them, check out what they actually do on your system. Mac OS X includes some rather hefty system files that are necessary to keep things running smoothly. If you’re absolutely certain that you know what a file is, then chuck it, but it’s worth checking if in doubt. An easy way to find out more is to select a file, right-click on it, and select Open Enclosing Folder for more details on its origin.
3. Printer Pruning
It’s unlikely—unless you’re some kind of ink-on-paper connoisseur—that you have a printer for each of the hundreds of printer drivers stored on your Mac. If you head to Library > Printers, you’ll find a host of folders named after popular printer brands that weigh in at around 2GB in total. Wipe out all brands you don’t use, and don’t worry—if you buy a new printer, the Mac drivers will be included on the disc that comes with it or will be available online.
Drivers for printers you don’t own can take up surprising amounts of space.
4. Trash Apps
It doesn’t take long for your Applications folder to fill up with all sorts of junk you don’t need. All those 30-day trials, any apps you’ve replaced for alternative options, and outdated software you don’t use anymore can all take their toll. Fortunately, uninstalling begins with simply dragging an application’s icon to the Trash. Next, perform a quick Spotlight search for the app’s name to track down any related files, then also check your Documents folder. Better yet, if an app has an uninstall option, use that. The same applies to iOS apps—if there are any you don’t use anymore, delete them from within iTunes. You can always reinstall them at a later date using the same iTunes account you purchased them with.
5. Compress or Burn
If you’re an avid iLife user, you probably have a bunch of iMovie, GarageBand, and even iDVD projects that you’ve either published or shared already. They’re not doing any good just sitting on your drive—and the same’s true for projects and documents from other apps. So gather them all together, label them up into folders, and then compress them by right-clicking on them and selecting Compress from the menu. That reduces the file size a bit, but for even more space reduction, consider shifting these compressed folders to an external drive or burn them to a DVD, then delete the originals.
Monday, September 26, 2011
The Best PDF Viewer/Editor for Mac
There are plenty of ways to view and edit PDFs on a Mac, but Apple's built-in Preview application is phenomenal and often overlooked. While Lion didn't wow the crowd with most of its features, it brought some amazing additions to Apple's PDF viewer/editor that puts it over the top and makes it our choice for the best.
Note: There are a few ways you could define a PDF viewer/editor, as features can range from simple form-filling to complete PDF manipulation. For this post we're concentrating on the features the average person would use, meaning viewing, form completion, annotation, and so on.
- View and edit images in addition to PDF files
- Annotate, highlight, and mark up PDFs in several ways
- Digitally fill out forms
- Sign PDF documents with your webcam (read on for more info)
- Super-fast performance
- Super-fast search
- Insert new pages into PDFs
- View and edit PDF metadata
- Add and edit hyperlinks in a PDF file
Preview is fast. Mac OS X isn't exactly known for its speed and efficiency, so Preview's ability to blow through PDF documents is pretty impressive. But among its many handy highlighting and annotating features, which are all solid, its ability to fill out forms is especially impressive. This may seem like a mundane thing, but when you get to the signature line it is hard to eschew at least a little reverence. Preview (in Lion) has a feature where you can sign a piece of paper, hold it up to your computer's webcam, and it'll turn it into a high-quality signature you can place in a form. It can also save multiple signatures so you don't have to continuously repeat this process. Preview is solid all-around, but it's those sorts of features that make it amazing.
As incredible as Preview's webcam signature feature is, it seems kind of strange that there is no ability to sign with your trackpad as well. After all, Apple Stores let you sign for purchases with your finger on an iPod touch. Additionally, Preview wasn't exactly perfect prior to Lion and Lion isn't exactly perfect on its own. It's hard to justify upgrading to OS X 10.7 if Preview is the only draw. If you're sticking with Snow Leopard, your version of Preview isn't bad but it's certainly not the best PDF editor/viewer you can find. Apple fixed a lot of quirks in Lion, which make it a pleasure to use, but if you're not running Lion you're pretty much out of luck.
PDFPen costs $60 but is pretty great. If you need more features than Preview can provide, it'll get the job done. PDFPen makes page rearrangement, editing, multi-document assembly, and more very easy. While it's on the expensive side, consider it a cheaper alternative to Adobe Acrobat ($200). We've never loved Acrobat and it likely provides more features than you're going to need.
Wondershare PDF Editor ($50) is another pricey option, but it has the ability to convert PDFs to Microsoft Word documents. We're not sure how well this works, but you might want to give it a try if that's something you need.
Skim is a great choice if your primary focus is annotation as that's what it was design to do. It has an impressively long list of features to make annotation easy.
Got any other favorite PDF editor/viewer apps for Mac that you love? Share 'em in the comments.
Lifehacker's App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.
You can follow Adam Dachis, the author of this post, on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook. Twitter's the best way to contact him, too.
Monday, November 8, 2010
MacX Video Converter Pro available free until November 15
MacX Video Converter Pro available free until November 15
by Sam Abuelsamid (RSS feed) on Nov 8th 2010 at 4:00PM
There is no shortage of video source material available both on and off-line these days, but not all of it is playable or editable on every platform. Free tools like Handbrake (here's our look at Handbrake 0.9.4) are great for ripping content from DVDs but the number of available output formats are limited.Back in the day, VisualHub was the ultimate tool for converting pretty much any video codec into another. Plus, it allowed you crop, resize, adjust video quality and even stitch files together. Unfortunately, it's no longer available.
There's also good news. Digiarty is currently making its MacX Video Converter Pro software available for free until November 15. Video Converter Pro offers what is probably the widest codec support we've seen in a while including output to FLV, WMV, MPEG4, H264 and more. There are dozens of pre-defined profiles for portable devices like phones, the Sony PSP and even DVD VOB files. It lacks some of the capabilities of Visual Hub, like cropping and ability to define a maximum size for the output video and let it pick the encoding settings.
However, if you have Final Cut (express or pro) you can convert odd-ball formats into files that can be edited and then crop and set export settings. MacX Video Converter Pro is available for free until November 15, 2010.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Installing Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) on Mac OS X Using VirtualBox posted by Jun Auza
As some of you may know, I've upgraded or should I say tried upgrading my Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) desktop to 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat). Sad to say, the result was a disaster. Although the whole installation process was successful, I ended up having an unbootable system. Since I'm not yet in the mood to fix it, I decided to just try Ubuntu 10.10 by installing it on Mac OS X as guest OS using my favorite free virtualization software VirtualBox.
To those of you who would also like to install Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) on Mac OS X via VirtualBox, here is a step-by-step guide (with screenshots) on how to do it:1. Download the latest version of VirtualBox for OS X from HERE, and then install it.2. Run the VirtualBox application and create a new virtual machine.
3. Allocate RAM to your virtual machine. The recommended amount of memory is 512MB but I decided to portion out 1024MB since my total RAM is 4GB.
4. Create a new virtual hard disk for Ubuntu.
5. Select the type of virtual hard disk. I recommend you use dynamically expanding storage for a more flexible disk space.
6. Decide on the size of disk space that will be allotted to your virtual machine.
7. The virtual disk will be created once you click on the "Done" button.
8. Turn on the virtual machine by clicking on the "Start" icon.
9. The first run wizard will appear to help you install the OS, in this case Ubuntu 10.10.
10. Select the media that contains the Ubuntu 10.10 ISO installer.
11. Since the installer was saved on my hard drive, I added it using the virtual media manager.
12. Once you are done, the Ubuntu 10.10 installation process will follow. If you are already familiar with Ubuntu, just install it like you normally would.
For those of you who have not used Ubuntu before, watch out for the Ubuntu 10.10 installation walkthrough on my next post. I will also give a screenshots tour and share with you my first impressions of using Maverick Meerkat.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
How to Reset Your Forgotten Mac OS X Password
It happens to everyone at some point—you create a new password and don’t remember to save it somewhere, and then before you know it you’ve forgotten what it was. Here’s how to reset the password on your Mac OS X computer.
If you’ve got a Windows PC and you want to reset your password, you can do so easily with the Ubuntu Live CD or the System Rescue CD in just a couple of minutes. Or you could always crack your password if you wanted.
Luckily for us, OS X has some very simple tricks that can reset a forgotten password without going to a lot of trouble.
Method One: Using the Install Disk
The first method we will look at is the OS X Installation Disk, so grab yours and put it into the drive. Once you have booted off the disk you will need to choose your language, and then OS X will prepare the installation environment.
Then you will choose the Utilities menu and choose Reset Password.
Now you need to choose the volume with the account you need to change the password for, choose the account from the drop down, and generate your new password and password hint if you wish to use one.
Note: You may want to reset the ACLs while you are here since you have changed your password. Once you are done, you can save and restart the computer.
Now you can login to your OS X computer with your newly made password.
Method Two: Tricking OS X Into Running the First Boot
The other, and possibly easier way to get around a forgotten password requires booting into Single User Mode and removing a file that tells OS X that the first boot setup has run.
To boot into Single User Mode, you’ll need to reboot the computer while pressing and holding the Command and S keys after you hear the startup gong.
Once you have booted into Single User Mode you will need to mount the volume you need to get into. Most of the time this will just be your boot disk and can be mounted as “/”. This command will mount that for you:
sudo mount -uw /Next we need to remove the file that tells OS X that its already done the setup:
rm -rf /var/db/.AppleSetupDoneNow we need to reboot using the very logical reboot command.
rebootOnce we boot back up it will be just like the first time you boot after install and you will see the Welcome screen, and just click through the first two screens.
When you reach the screen that asks if you already own a Mac, make sure to choose “Do not transfer my information now” since we’re not doing any migrating of data.
Once you reach the “Enter Your Apple ID” screen, you can press the Command and Q keys at the same time to get past the rest of the prompts. Click Skip when asked.
Now you will create a new Administrator account. You can choose to name it something you wish to keep or anything since you just need this account to get into the OS and to System Preferences.
Click through the next screens until you reach the Thank You screen, and we’re finally done with that part of the process. Click Go and you’ll be brought into the new account.
Once the new account has loaded you can now go to your System Preferences. We will want the Accounts pane.
Now select the account with the password you want to reset and click Reset Password…
Choose your new password, and password hint if you desire, and click Reset Password.
You can now logout and login to the account with the new password.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
How To Set Up A Static IP in Mac OS X
When organizing your home or small office network sometimes it can be easier to assign each computer it’s own IP address rather than using DHCP. Today we take a look at how to do it in OS X.
Previously we showed you how to set a Static IP in Windows, and you have a Mac machine on your network, you might want to assign it a Static IP as well.
Set Static IP in OS X
You will need to open System Preferences, once there open Network
It would be a good idea to to edit the Locations so that you can easily change from DHCP to manual IP simply. You will need to go to Edit Locations… with in the Network Preference Pane
Name it something that will let you remember what it is for.
Once you have named the new location you will click on the connection you want to set manually. In this example we will use Ethernet. From the Configure IPv4 drop down we will choose Manually.
Now we will add the IP Address, Subnet Mask, Router, DNS and Search Domains. In this example we will use Google’s DNS which is 8.8.8.8 and your Search Domain will depend on your network.
This is a handy little option to use if you are setting up your own small network for home office or even LAN parties. It can be helpful when troubleshooting networks as well.
Another OS X networking article you might be interested in is how to mount a Windows share in OS X.
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