Mac Hacks

Preface

Ostensibly, you buy a computer to get something done. The something might be as simple as listening to MP3s you’ve ripped from your CD collection or as challenging as editing a full-length feature film. Apple is happy to sell you products to meet your needs. The trouble is, your needs aren’t exactly the same needs as the next guy, and that’s where hacking comes in. With a little (or a lot) of effort, you can make your Mac and software perform in the manner you wish them to. Macs that do things exactly the way you want makes the Apple experience that much better.

There are over 50 hacks in this book, and a passel of quick tips and tricks. Some are simple enough—you’ve probably already pulled them off—while others are a bit more challenging. All, to the right person, can be fun and useful.

So what can you expect? There is a wide range of hacks here. Get your iMac to hover with a VESA mount, swap in an SSD for that tired hard drive, hear a different sound when you start your Mac, and a lot more. Tired of the look of OS X? Discover ways to tweak interface elements. Worried about your Mac’s security? You’re covered.

How to Use This Book

This is a book about hacking, so deciding how to use this book is completely up to you. You could, if the inclination hits you, use the pages for interesting origami projects. If you want to use the book in a more traditional manner, just start reading—it doesn’t matter where. Each hack is as self-contained as possible (and points to other hacks when not) so there isn’t any reason not to crack open the book at random and start reading. Chapter 1 contains some hacks that provide background for a lot of the other hacks in the book, so many people will find that a useful place to start. Others might leap to the specific chapter that seems most interesting. A lot of the hacks depend on the command-line interface available via the Terminal program, so Chapter 6 is a good place to start if you haven’t used that in a while.

How This Book Is Organized

This book isn’t a mere tips-and-tricks compendium that tells you where to click, where to drag, and what commands to type. It takes advantage of OS X’s flexibility and new features, recognizes that there are specific tasks you want to accomplish with the operating system and related hardware and software, and offers bite-size pieces of functionality you can put to use in a few minutes. It also shows how you can expand on their usefulness yourself. To give you this kind of help, the book is organized into 11 chapters:

Chapter 1, Before You Hack

This is the place to start. It covers the steps you need to take to protect your data and prepare your Mac before your start hacking.

Chapter 2, Mountain Lion Hacks

Mountain Lion is the Mac’s latest and greatest operating system, but just because it’s the newest version of OS X doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Make your Mountain Lion experience better by investigating this chapter.

Chapter 3, Customize Your OS X Experience

Your Mac is yours, so why use it exclusively the way Apple intended you to? Discover slick ways to blog, change the startup sound, and make (almost) any app full screen.

Chapter 4, Hacks for a More Informative Mac

Want to get information delivered right to your desktop? Want constant access to a widget? Stop by this chapter and keep yourself up to date on the world around you.

Chapter 5, Make It Automatic

Computers are great at doing things without your intervention. This chapter explains how to make your Mac automatically do drudge work for you.

Chapter 6, Fun with Unix

There’s a ton of power hidden on the Unix side of your Mac. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to safely tap into this power.

Chapter 7, Lock Down that Mac

Security isn’t just a good idea—it’s essential. Learn how to protect your Mac from prying eyes (and sticky fingers) with the useful hacks in this chapter.

Chapter 8, Other OSes

Got multiple Apple devices? Learn how to manage them from a centralized location. Ever fancy playing a video game made for a Nintendo on your Mac? This is the chapter for you.

Chapter 9, Networking Hacks

Check your WiFi signal with a hidden app and then lock it down (you want a secure network!).

Chapter 10, Multimedia Hacks

Make your music sound better, never miss your favorite show, and discover how to keep your iTunes library on a separate disk. If any of those ideas appeal to you, this is your chapter.

Chapter 11, Hack Some Hardware

Hang that Mac from a VESA mount, get auto recognized by your iPhone, destroy your kitchen with dye! All your daring hardware hacks are in this chapter, so haul your toolbox next to your Mac and get started.

Conventions Used in This Book

This book uses the following typographical conventions:

Italic

Used to indicate new terms, URLs, filenames, file extensions, directories, and folders.

Constant width

Used to show code examples, verbatim searches and commands, the contents of files, and the output from commands.

Constant width bold

Shows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user.

Constant width italic

Used in examples, tables, and commands to show text that should be replaced with user-supplied values.

Note: Depending on what kind of Mac you have, you may need to do slightly different things when this book tells you to right-click something. If you have a two-button mouse, then simply right-click. If you have a one-button mouse, then press the Command key and click. If you have trackpad, you can two-finger click if you have that feature turned on (set it up in the Trackpad preference pane).

Using Code Examples

This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, you may use the code in this book in your programs and documentation. You don’t need to contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the code. For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book doesn’t require permission, but selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O’Reilly books does. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example code doesn’t require permission, but incorporating a significant amount of example code from this book into your product’s documentation does.

We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN, like so: “Mac Hacks by Chris Seibold. Copyright 2013 Chris Seibold, 978-1-4493-2558-9.”

If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or the permission given above, feel free to contact us at [e-mail].

Guest Hackers

David Chartier ([Hack #13], [Hack #14], [Hack #26]) learned the ways of The Force on an IBM Aptiva running Windows 95. After building, selling, and supporting PCs for nearly a decade, he switched to a Mac midway through college and hasn’t looked back. Since then he has written for Macworld, Ars Technica, O’Reilly, and elsewhere. You can find his home on the web at http://davidchartier.com.

Charles Edge ([Hack #39]) started looking to share his knowledge of the Mac OS X Server operating system in 2004. His first speaking appearance at a large conference was DefCon 2004. Since then, he has spoken at conferences such as MacSysAdmin, Macworld, LinuxWorld, and BlackHat. Charles has written nine books, including Enterprise Mac Administrator’s Guide, Enterprise Mac Security, and Enterprise iPhone and iPad Administrator’s Guide. For the past 14 years, he has been the Director of Technology for 318, a Mac-first consultancy based in Santa Monica, CA. Charles is also the author of http://krypted.com, a site dedicated to heterogeneous networking.

Phil Herlihy ([Hack #49] and [Hack #52]) started out life as a young mad scientist. He was raised by his parents (A CRAY-1 Supercomputer and a PDP-11) in New York C(ircu)ity. He’s a self-taught engineer who spends his time relentlessly building, rebuilding, and deconstructing, and only sleeps for about two hours a month. It’s rumored that he runs on a quantum-caffeine drive. You can find his work here: http://braindeadlock.net.

Connor Langford ([Hack #37]) is a beta tester at Mac Hacks Labs, a Minecraft super enthusiast, and a Webelos scout.

Todd Long (images for [Hack #18]) is a professional graphic designer and semi-professional backwoodsman residing in Knoxville, TN.

Gordon Meyer ([Hack #47]) is a Chicago-based writer and speaker who has authored dozens of software manuals, numerous articles for Mac users and technical writers, and Smart Home Hacks, a leading book on do-it-yourself home automation techniques.

John “Nemo” Nemerovski ([Hack #46]) is Reviews Editor for MyMac, the leading original-content Macintosh consumer web magazine, for over 15 years.

Nathaniel Seibold ([Hack #37]) is an assistant at Mac Hacks Labs, a Minecraft enthusiast, and a Webelos scout.

Brett Terpstra ([Hack #9], [Hack #23], [Hack #24], [Hack #25]) is a coder, an author, a web developer and a Mac lover. He finds joy in crafting regular expressions and making hardware and software do things they weren’t supposed to do. (Sometimes it’s even beneficial.) Brett shares almost all of his digital hijinks at http://brettterpstra.com.

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Acknowledgments

First I’d like to thank everyone who reads this book and tries something they wouldn’t have tried otherwise. You’re the people who make the book go and you can reach me at [e-mail]. I’d also like to thank all the guest hackers. I also extend sincere and deeply felt thanks to Dawn Mann, who did an especially inspired job with this book, and I suspect this book will appeal (or be usable) to a wider audience thanks to her tireless efforts. This book is much, much better for going through Dawn than it would be if it had gone through an average editor.

—Chris Seibold