Unhide the Library Menu icon – OS X Mountain Lion

By default the library menu option in the go menu is hidden. Although I’ve never quite understood why it needs hiding, this quick tip will show you how to unhide it with just a quick keyboard click.

  1. Make sure you have a finder window active and focused
  2. Click on the Go menu at the top of the screen
  3. Press and hold the ‘Option/Alt’ key on your Mac’s keyboard
  4. The library icon should now appear. Upon releasing the keyboard key the icon will disappear again

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Afloat – adds window features OS X is missing

As a keen Mac user for many years, I’ve often been bugged by the same age-old issue. An that’s the fact that you can’t keep important windows ‘top-most’. This can often be a bind, especially when you spend time in both terminal and GUI applications. Last week this pushed me over the edge, as I was getting tired of flicking between the two. So I finally found what I think is the perfect solution to my problem.

The clever people over at Infitite Labs have produced a handy little utility named Aflot. It’s completely free of charge and offers some pretty impressive features.

Afloat features include:

  • Keep any window ‘afloat’ (aka top-most)
  • Pin windows to the desktop
  • Move windows from anywhere
  • Turn a window into an overlay (transparent<->semi transparent)
  • Show a windows file in Finder
  • Resize windows from anywhere.

Afloat requires OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) or above, and is available to download from here

Once downloaded and installed, the OS X ‘Window’ menu in the menu bar of your favourite apps will include extra options:

This has saved me lots of pain when using terminal. If you know of other methods to ‘pin’ windows let me know.

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How to: ‘Traceroute’ in OS X

Traceroute is an important part of any IT experts toolkit who’s worth his salt.. Traceroute enables you to track down potential routing issues between your Mac/PC/Device to your Router/DNS Servers/Web Host.

If, like me you migrated over to Mac from a PC, you will be used to launching a command prompt and firing off the tracert command. However, in OS X the command is slightly different. Some may say it makes more sense..?

To use OS X Traceroute you need to launch a new terminal session, to do this open Applications > Utilities and click terminal.

When the terminal has launched simply type Traceroute followed by the address you want to trace the route to. So for example, if you wanted to check how your devices browser gets to Google.co.uk you would type:

Your mac will then resolve Google.co.uk to it’s IP address, and then trace each ‘hop’ from your device to the address. This can be very handy when trying to figure out if the routing issue is your equipment, your ISP’s equipment or the web host it’s self.

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Snow Leopard Migration Assistant

With the impending arrival of OS X Lion (set to arrive for download in the Mac AppStore around 13:00 GMT 20th July 2011) you may want to grab yourself a copy of the Snow Leopard Migration Assistant. This update to the current Migration Assistant has been released to address current issues with the assistant when migrating your data to the latest version of OS X, Lion.

The migration assistant is a small download weighing in at only 714KB, and will be imperative for all of you OS X users wanting to migrate rather then start from fresh once your hefty 3+GB download of Lion completes tomorrow afternoon.

System Requirements

  •  Mac OS X 10.6.8

Supported Languages

  • Deutsch, English, Français, ???, Español, Italiano, Nederlands, Dansk, Norsk Bokmål, Polski, Português, Português Brasileiro, P??????, Suomi, Svensk, ????, ????, ???

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FIXED: “AppName” wants to use the “name” keychain

Tired of seeing this window pop up, and having to enter your password every time you use an app? But don’t want to open up all your apps for use?

Here’s a nice and easy fix for you, launch the Keychain Access application (/Applications/Utilities/Keychain Utility) locate the entry relating to the application you want to always allow. In this case, it’s Microsoft Messenger for Mac, double click on the entry to bring up the details window:

Now, select the “Allow all applications to access this item.” click on the save changes button, and enter your password when prompted. You should now find you will no longer be prompted to enter your password when using this application.

NB: The above method comes with it own pit falls, obviously this will now allow anything to have access to this keychain data without prompting you. Bear this in mind when you are authorising items.

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