Entries tagged with “utilities” from O'Reilly Digital Media Blog

In the comments to my near-desaster story of last week, several readers suggested I should have a look at a utility called AppleJack. In hindsight, I cannot tell whether AppleJack would have been able to fix the problems that caused my Mac to refuse me access to my main user account. I sure wish, though, that I had it installed so I could at least have given it a try.

In the comments to last week's post on the caveats of using invitations with iCal, a reader pointed out John Maisey's iCal Reply Checker. As it turns out, that little utility delivers a set of useful options that should have been built into iCal all along.

Whether it's List view, Grid view, or Cover Flow -- finally, with iTunes 8, album cover art is available in whichever way you view your digital music collection. High time to fill the remaining cover art gaps in your library, if you haven't done so yet. There are numerous software tools available to help you with this task, and this blog post will present three rather different, yet equally noteworthy representatives of that software genre.

Hidden preferences are among the favorite items covered in the Tips & Tricks sections of Mac-related websites, and the method usually presented for setting these preferences is via the defaults Terminal command. Thanks to a utility called Secrets, which compiles an extensive list of hidden preferences for the software installed on your Mac, there is a much more elegant and user-friendly way.

Here's something I've missed since OS 9: a wee program that checks if your other programs are up to date. The App Update widget compares your programs against the listings at Apple, Version Tracker, and MacUpdate, and then offers download links to the programs that are outdated. It generated a few "false positives," but also reminded me of a...

When, three weeks ago, I blogged about Patrick Stein's "SmartSleep" preferences panel, which lets you configure a Mac laptop's sleep and hibernation (aka "Safe Sleep") settings, I explained that I wanted to use this software to switch off Safe Sleep altogether, because that feature had failed on my MacBook so many times that it was basically useless. I didn't expect SmartSleep to restore Safe Sleep's usefulness, but it did.

The Safe Sleep feature in more recent Apple laptops is a good idea in theory: every time the computer goes to sleep, the entire contents of its RAM are written to disk so that the machine's state can be quickly restored in case the computer runs out of juice while sleeping. No data loss, no waiting for the computer to reboot, and very handy for exchanging batteries without having to shut down the machine, too. In practice, though, this feature may not work quite as advertised, so you might just as well want to deactivate it, and you can.

To find out a Mac's serial number, don't bother hunting for the tag on the machine's enclosure, as it's right there in the "About This Mac" dialog box. But what about looking up this information without being logged in?

As much as I love working in a home-office setup, there's one thing I sorely miss: a little quiet corner to retreat to for a quick break from work. Who would have thought that I would find this in the form of a screen saver called Serene Saver 2 HD?

Using templates is a major time-saver for those of us who need to create the same, or at least highly similar documents over and over again. But what do you do if a specific application does not support templates? As long as you're handling text files, there's a solution that works universally across your Mac.