Currently displaying posts in category Mac OS X...
Unbind OSX Play Button
If you are a fan of Spotify like all of us around the office, you know how pesky it can be if Spotify isn't open and you hit the ►/II button on your Mac keyboard, and iTunes pops up in your face, thus requiring a prompt quit. If you are a fan of VLC, this can also be frustrating when trying to play movies and you get a bouncing iTunes icon eager to interrupt your flick.
To fix this, NoMitsu released a great, fast and easy .dmg installer to unbind the key. It still operates as normally when your programs are open, it just won't try to open iTunes at an inopportune time. You can download the file here. You can uninstall fix just as easily by running the installer again.
Note that if you download any OS X updates, you will probably need to re-install this patch.
View CommentsThrottling Bandwidth in OS X
When you've got a low latency 20 megabit connection that load pages in an instant, it's impossible to see how our unfortunate internet brethren may see your page load. This particular set of commands that throttle bandwidth proved extremely useful to me when getting certain javascript functions to work before the page was fully loaded. "ipfw" is shipped with OS X and is probably present in some linux distros.
sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 40KByte/s
This creates a pipe that only allows up to 40KB/s to go through. If you want to simulate dial-up, set it to 5KByte/s!
sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80
This will attach that pipe on port 80, effectively throttling its bandwidth.
sudo ipfw delete 1
When you're all done you'll want to remove the bandwidth restriction, unless you're old and miss the days of having slow internet, revelling in anticipation as jpegs slowly load.
There you have it! No need to download extra software to throttle your bandwidth.
View CommentsCustom Mac Dock
If you ever get tired of the white, glossy dock that comes pre-installed with OS X, or are looking for that extra little touch to match your icon set, you can install different designs a custom Mac dock (tested in Snow Leapard and Lion).
- Go to finder, and press ⌘+Shift+G.
- In the 'go to folder' box, type /System/Library/CoreServices
- Right click on Dock.app and select Show Package Contents.
- Navigate to Contents > Resources.
Back up all the files you see in the Resources folder so you have a copy of the default dock, and then replace it with all the files in the zip file. I didn’t design this dock from scratch, but I mixed and matched a lot of different dock styles that I found online and ended up with this custom mac dock that looks amazing. It's black, sleek, with a matte finish, and includes a nice strip of reflective gloss. For the open app icons it is a subtle blue glowing LED.
