Cheat Sheet

Sleep all displays: Shift-Control-Eject

Invert display: Control-Option-Butterfly-8

Zoom in/out: Control-scroll

Advanced screenshot options.

Macintosh computers can be mounted as external drives by other FireWire equipped Macs. Turn on the Mac to be used as a disk. When you hear the startup sound, press `T' for target-disk. You can then access the computer as a FireWire HDD or optical drive.

Full instructions are on the Apple Support page.

One key feature of Macs is the ability to do share one computer's drives as if they are external FireWire drives connected to a second computer. This is useful for large file transfers. One of its best uses is of FireWire sharing is installing OS X on a computer with a faulty optical drive. Unfortunately, some newer Macs do not include FireWire.

• How we installed 10.6 Snow Leopard an a MacBook with no DVD drive
• Install Tiger from an iPod
• Installing Mac OS X 10.4 without DVD
• Create a hard-drive based OS X installer

Useful Apple page

Even OS X will occasionally lockup.

If the computer has stopped responding, try these steps, in order, until the computer responds:

1. Force Quit (Option-Command-Escape)
2. Restart (Control-Command-Power)
3. Force Shut Down (press the power button for 10 seconds)

(from various Apple.com support pages: 1, 2)

• Open multiple instances of the same program: open -n /Applications/foo.app
• Customizing Mac OS X PDF Services

This feature is not immediately obvious for refugees from Windows, but saves lots of time. The title bar for windows in OS X does more than just identify the window. Try right-clicking the title. (Or Control-click or Option-click if you only have one mouse button.) The document will display a stack showing its path. This is very useful for opening the containing folder. If you need to paste the file name into a text document, just drag the icon in the title bar to your text file.

We often experience problems using file sharing on MacBooks (running 10.5). The issue seems to be a bug in the firewall. We tend to keep file sharing disabled unless we are actually using it. When sharing is enabled, the proper hole in the firewall between local computers is not opened. To get around the problem, turn your firewall off, start your connection, then turn your firewall back on. This doesn't appear to me a problem on the PowerPC based Macs we have used.

Preview.app is a nice application for viewing PDF files but selecting text can be a pain. Snow Leopard greatly improved selecting, but in earlier versions and for some PDFs, this hint is still needed. Many PDFs are multiple columns, but selecting text highlights all the way across the page. If you want to select only text within a specific area hold down option to highlight a rectangular area.

I don't know why I didn't try this earlier, but you can select a file in Finder.app by command-clicking (butterfly+mouse button) a file in a Stack. This works just like it does in Spotlight and other programs.

To remotely enable or disable screen sharing in 10.5 execute the following commands on the desired computer from within /Library/Preferences

to enable: echo -n enabled > com.apple.ScreenSharing.launchd

to disable: rm com.apple.ScreenSharing.launchd

To update to the latest build of Chromium, use this bash script.

#!/bin/bash
tempfoo=`basename $0`
TMPDIR=`mktemp -q -d /tmp/${tempfoo}.XXXXXX`
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
	   echo "$0: Can't create temp file, exiting..."
	   exit 1
fi
LATEST=`curl http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-continuous/Mac/LAST_CHANGE`
curl -L http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/chromium-browser-continuous/Mac/$LATEST/chrome-mac.zip -o $TMPDIR/chrome-mac.zip
unzip -qq -d $TMPDIR $TMPDIR/chrome-mac.zip
cp -R $TMPDIR/chrome-mac/Chromium.app /Applications