Your dock currently looks something like this

You would like it to look something like this

1. Launch Terminal and enter the following defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
2. Relaunch the Dock by entering in killall Dock

Behold it’s 2D beauty! Should you decide to switch back, enter the above commands but replace YES with NO.

Warning: Be very, very careful with what you do in this tutorial. Unwanted things could happen to your User account if you don’t know exactly what your doing. Have a backup before trying anything!

1. Open up the Accounts area in System Preferences and authenticate as an Administrator.
2. Once authenticated, right click (Control click) on the user you want to edit. Select “Advanced Options…” from the drop menu.
3. As you can now see there are several options you can edit. You have your standard User ID, Group ID and Short Name. Now you can even edit your Home Directory (make sure you have a backup!) and even apply Aliases to your user.

There you are, quick and easy to get to and edit, but it can be a very powerful tool if used correctly. Be careful with what you do here and ALWAYS make sure you have a backup of all important data before you try anything!

1. While in Safari, left click on the History menu from the Menu Bar. Make your way down to “Reopen All Windows From Last Session” and left click this.
2. You’ll notice all your windows from the last session are restored.

Quick and simple. If you need to open the last closed window, select “Reopen Last Closed Window” directly above

1. Open up Terminal and type in defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES and hit enter. Then type in killall Finder and hit enter.
2. Open up a new Finder window and you should see the full path of your directory displayed at the top of the window.

There you go, quick and easy. To turn this feature off, follow the same steps but type in NO instead.

1. Right click (or Control click) on your screen where you would like your burn folder to be placed (on the desktop or somewhere in Finder) and left click on “New Burn Folder” from the drop down menu.
2. Now that you have your burn folder and it is named appropriately, drag the files you would like to burn into the folder. A burn folder is essentially like a normal folder however it doesn’t actually keep any data in it. A burn folder keeps aliases (shortcuts) to files which it plans on burning to an optical disc. You can tell these files are aliases because they have a small arrow on the bottom left corner of the files icon.
3. Once your ready to burn your disc, left click the “Burn” button on the top right corner of the burn folders window.
4. If you do not already have a CD or DVD in your drive, you will be prompted to insert one that can be written to. Once you do so your CD or DVD will be burn
5. Once your disc has successfully burnt it will eject from the optical drive. You can either keep the burn folder you created to burn another disc or you can delete the folder. Deleting the burn folder will not delete your original files.

There it is, you can now easily burn data to CD or DVD. Almost too simple isn’t it?

1. Open System Preferences by left clicking on the Apple icon on the menu bar in the top left corner of your screen. Left click on “System Preferences…” from the menu that drops down.
2. Left click on the CDs & DVDs icon in the System Preferences window that appears.
3. You will now see several drop down boxes. When a CD or DVD is inserted you can specify what action you would like to take place.
4. Select your preferred action from the drop down box. You can even specify a custom Application to be run if you have a 3rd party program that you would like to use. Once you have things setup the way you want you can quit System Preferences.

1. First we’re going to download and install a great little tool called Perian. Click here to download Perian.
2. Once you have it downloaded, double click on the the disk image and double click on the Perian.prefPane icon.
3. After you’ve successfully installed Perian you’ll see it’s perference pane. Here you can change some of Perian’s settings.
4. Next you’ll want to download Flip4Mac. Click here to download Flip4Mac.
5. Double click on the disk image and then on the installer package to start installing Flip4Mac. Go through the wizard to install it. Once you’ve finished the install your set to go.
6. Flip4Mac also has a preference pane that you can access through System Preferences. You can use the preference pane to tweak Flip4Mac’s settings to suit your needs, but everything should be setup by default for you to start enjoying your video files.

There you have it, quick and easy. You may have to log out and in again from your User account, but things should work from the get go. Now go enjoy your videos!

This tutorial is done using Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, however 10.4 Tiger is much the same and can be found under the Sharing section of System Preferences.

For the sake of this tutorial we will assume that your computer is connected directly to the Internet and there are no routers or hardware firewalls.

1. Open System Preferences and left click on the Security icon.
2. Left click on the Firewall tab. You’ll notice 3 different bullets to select from. “Allow all incoming connections” will allow any traffic that requests access to your computer in, this is the most open setting. This is the default mode for Leopard. “Allow only essential services” will only allow a few specific system services to be accessed by incoming connections. This will great limit the use of services such as e-mail.
3. The option we want to select is “Set access for specific services and applications.” This will provide us with the most amount of security and flexibility. Select this bullet and click on the + button near the bottom of the window.
4. Select the Applications you want to allow or deny access to. To select multiple Applications at once hold the Command button (beside the spacebar) while you left click on the Application. Click the Add button once your ready.
5. Now specify whether you want to allow or deny access for your Application. Do this for each Application you add to the list.
6. Once your done, test out each of the applications on your list and make sure it’s doing what you specified. Keep in mind for the future, if you have any issues with one of these applications accessing the Internet you can always check out the Firewall Log located under the “Advanced…” button and apply the appropriate action to debug the issue.

You should now have your Firewall setup to your liking. Should you add new Applications that access the Internet, remember to add the appropriate actions for your Firewall. If you find that the Firewall isn’t working smoothly with your set of Applications, you can always return it to the default setting which is to “Allow all incoming connections”.

Warning: Using Terminal can be very dangerous and is for advanced users only. Be very, very careful with what you do in Terminal as you can cripple your Operating System.

The mv (move) command is your key to moving files and directories around the file system. Your basic command will look like mv path/to/file.ext path/to/newlocation/file.ext

In the example below I am going to move a file from my Documents folder to my Desktop.

1. First I cd (change directories) into Documents by entering cd Documents/
2. Now that I’m in my Documents folder I’ll move my file to the desktop by entering mv myFile.txt ~/Desktop/myFile.txt
3. Next I’ll change directories to my Desktop folder and use the ls (list) command to see that my file has been successfully moved.

As you can see the file has been successfully moved to the Desktop. In this tutorial I used the cd command to change to my desired directory before moving my file, but technically I could just issue the command from any location as long as I know the path. For example, to do the same command if I were in a different directory, I would enter mv ~/Documents/myFile.txt ~/Desktop/myFile.txt This is great because you don’t have to actually navigate to the directory as long as you know the path.

Warning: Using Terminal can be very dangerous and is for advanced users only. Be very, very careful with what you do in Terminal as you can cripple your Operating System.

The cd (change directory) command is your best friend. With the cd command you can navigate to any part of the Mac file system (as long as you have permissions to do so). This command is used by typing cd path/to/directory For example, to navigate to my Documents folder I would launch Terminal and type cd Documents/

The pwd (print working directory) command is also very useful. This command will tell you the exact path to the current directory you are in. As you can see in the image below, after typing pwd and hitting enter, my current directory is displayed as a path.

A quick way to navigate backwards one directories is to use cd ../. For example, if my current directory is Documents and I want to navigate up once to my user folder I would enter cd ../

The ls (list) command will show you the files in the directory you specify. For example, if I want to view the files in the directory I am currently in, I would type ls

If you want to view all your files (including hidden files), their permissions, owner, group, size, and date you would enter ls -al

Here’s an extremely useful tip to use for many commands in Terminal. You can issue any command from any location so long as you know the directory to the file(s)/directories you want to issue the command on. For example, if I wanted to use the ls command on my Documents directory, but I’m no where near it. Rather than using cd to navigate to it and then ls to view my files, I could just enter ls ~/Documents The ~ is a shortcut command to navigate to your Home directory (rather than typing /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Users/username).

Terminal has so many different commands and command options that you will never memorize them all, but these few ones you will use all the time when navigating around terminal. Happy navigating!