In my opinion, the best first step to speeding up your Mac is to repair your permissions and run disk repair as outlined in my article Speed Up Your Mac Article HERE.
The next step is to clean your caches, rebuild your indexes, and run your macs daily, weekly and monthly maintenance scripts. This can all be done easily with the FREE and very powerful ONYX.
Once you have ONYX downloaded and installed, its a good idea to make sure that you have backed up ALL of your stuff. Like using any cleaning program, things can get moved or lost, so make sure you don’t get caught!
When you are satisfied your files are safe, go ahead and open ONYX. The first thing you will see is a alert box that asks if you want ONYX to check the S.M.A.R.T status of your hard drive. S.M.A.R.T stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology. Most hard drives these days monitor their own performance and try to anticipate if a failure is imminent, and if their is something wrong with your drive, you will be notified after this test. It is well worth doing.
Once this has completed, the next alert will ask if you want to verify your drive. If you have already performed this task because you are following on from my first “Speed Up Your Mac” article this is not necessary. If you haven’t already done this, it is well worth doing as it will find any drive errors. This process can take some time, and it will require all other programs to be closed, so if you decide to run it, go get yourself a coffee and some fresh air after you begin.
When Verification has finished, ONYX will ask you to type in your password to give it permission to make changes and clean thing up.
You will now see the main menu bar for ONYX.
As you can see, this program has a lot of in depth features and can do a lot of different things, but for this tutorial, we will focus on cleaning up quickly and easily. To start cleaning, press the “Automation” button. You will now see the Automation screen.
The safest way to proceed is to accept the defaults and press “Execute”. If you are following on from my first “Speed Up Your Mac” article you might want to un-check “Repair Permissions” as you will have already done this. Other wise, leave it checked. If you are like me and like living on the edge, you can go ahead and check/un-check the items you feel necessary.
*BE WARNED* – As with every clean up program, there can be unwanted side effects, so proceed with caution!
For me personally, I do change it up as I like to clean my system deeply, and I am happy to put things back how I like them after the cleaning (such as re-arranging my icons how I like them on my desk top again). I also like to execute my Macs built in daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance scripts. Below is how I use ONYX.
*NOTE* – I take no responsibility if you copy my settings and loose something.
When you are happy with your cleaning options, its time to press execute.
ONYX will tell you it is going to close any other programs that are open, so again, make sure you have saved your work.
ONYX will now start performing maintenance. In most cases this will take some time, so if you didn’t stretch your legs, get a coffee and some fresh air before, now is the time. When ONYX has finished, a dialogue box will appear. Click OK.
If you have a camera capable of taking 3D photographs, and a Apple Computer, I have just found the simplest, quickest, easiest way to view your photos, It’s called ShowMe3D. Ever since I got my 3D camera I have been longing for a way to just unload my pics, and view them in 3D straight away, without having to jump through a million hoops, and this is it!
Open up App Store on your Mac and search for ShowMe3D, or click this link to Download ShowMe3D from the Mac App Store. It’s not free, but at just $4.99, it really is a bargain.
Once you have downloaded and installed ShowMe3D, open it up and you will see the main screen.
Now, open the folder that contains the .mpo files (Multiple Picture Object) from your camera, and drag the pics you want to view onto the open window and put on your 3D glasses.
Instantly, you can view your 3D photos in 3D, and scroll through them in the same way you would using the “Preview” app. A feature of this program that I really like, is it also allows you to Export your .mpo files as Anaglyph Jpegs, so you can quickly and easily convert your .mpo’s to regular jpegs – cool huh!
Here’s a Anaglyph 3D Jpeg I converted from an .mpo file using ShowMe3D – It’s my dog Benson.
There’s nothing I hate more than dropping new music into my iTunes library only to learn once it has finished importing that it doesn’t have meta-tags (No Song Name, Artist, Album Title etc etc). So now, before I add new music, I run it through MusicBrainz Picard. Here’s the programs description from their site:
“MusicBrainz Picard is a cross-platform (Linux/Mac OS X/Windows) application written in Python and is the official MusicBrainz tagger.
Picard supports the majority of audio file formats, is capable of using audio fingerprints (PUIDs, AcoustIDs), performing CD lookups and disc ID submissions, and it has excellent Unicode support. Additionally, there are several plugins available that extend Picard’s features.
When tagging files, Picard uses an album-oriented approach. This approach allows it to utilize the MusicBrainz data as effectively as possible and correctly tag your music. For more information, see the illustrated quick start guide to tagging.
Picard is named after Captain Jean-Luc Picard from the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
To get started, download and install MusicBrainz Picard HERE. Once you are up and running, drop the music files you want to tag anywhere in the window. They will then populate the list on the left called unmatched files.
When you have finished adding files, click the line of text with the folder icon next to it that says “Unmatched Files” to make it active. When it is active it will become highlighted. Now, go ahead and press the “Lookup” button, and MusicBrainz Picard will start scanning your music and comparing it to their database for identification.
Once MusicBrainz Picard has identified the album and added all of the songs to it, the CD icon next to the album name will turn gold in color. If you don’t have all of the songs from the album, it doesn’t matter, you can still proceed, but the CD icon stays silver. The next step is to click Album Name next to the CD icon to make it active, and highlighted. You can now click “Save”.
MusicBrainz Picard will now write the Meta Tag Data directly into your music files. Once it has completed, you can close out of the program, and then drop your music files into iTunes, and everything will be correctly categorised and ready to play.
**NOTE** – THIS ARTICLE VERSION IS WRITTEN FOR MAC USERS – WINDOWS VERSION COMING SOON
PART 1 – Setting up MAMP (Experts Shortcut – Install MAMP and proceed to step 2)
If you have a WordPress Blog or Web Site, it can be VERY handy sometimes to be able to take your live published site and copy onto your local computer. This enables you to play with, set up and assess plugins, try out new themes and layouts, and generally mess with your site without affecting your real live site.
To get started you need to create an environment that will allow your site to function on your computer. The two main ingredients to a WordPress installation are PHP (web language) and SQL (Database). To get these two engines running on your computer you need to download some free software that installs them as part of a server. MAMP (Macintosh + Apache + MySQL + PHP) is excellant for this. It is available free from MAMP.info HERE. The free version and the paid version are bundled together, but for our purpose here, the free version will be fine, so lets go ahead and install that. Once you have downloaded MAMP, Unzip the zip file and run the installer package.
Click continue.
Click Continue.
If you agree, click continue.
Confirm you Agree……click continue……And once you arrive at the screen below, we will tell the installer not to worry about MAMP PRO, and to just install MAMP Free. (If you want to try MAMP PRO free for 14 days, skip the following 2 steps).
Click the “Customize” button in the left.
Uncheck the “MAMP PRO” option.
Type your password to allow the installer to run.
Once the installer has finished, click “Close” in the lower right hand corner. You can now open a new finder window, and in your Applications folder you will see a new folder called “MAMP”.
Double click the “MAMP” application to start it up.
Now click the “Start Servers” button.
Once you have green lights, click “Open Start Page’. this will open your browser to a page that will tell you if all your services (IE PHP and SQL) are up and running on your machine.
WOOHOO! We’re ready to start copying our web site!
PART 2 – COPYING LIVE SITE
Its now time to copy over the files from the site we want to clone. To get started, log into that site, For this tutorial, I am going to use my Photography and Design site Gruffpuppy as an example. Once logged in, click “Plugins” and select “Add New”
In the search field type “Duplicator”.
Once Duplicator is found, Install and then Activate the plugin.
When activated a new item will appear in the Column Menu on the left side called “Duplicator”. Click it, and you will be brought to the main screen of the plugin. To begin downloading a copy of your live site, the Duplicator asks you to name the back up package. You can change the default name, but in my experience the default auto generated name that is already in there seems to work without error. If you are happy with the name, click the “Create” button, the first in the top right row.
You will now be asked to confirm, and Duplicator will start compressing your entire site into a zip file, ready for download. This can take a while, so now is a good time to stretch your legs and get a drink. Once it has finished compressing, the screen will update automatically with your available downloads.
You will need to download both files (Installer and Package) to your desktop. If you have a large site, the package file can take some time to download. Once your files are downloaded, there’s one more small task.
Select “Settings” from the column menu on the left and then “Permalinks”.
Although no action need be taken, It is important to take note of the setting. As you can see, mine is set to “Day and Name”, but yours could be different. We need to know this setting when we recreate and activate the copy/clone of our site later. Once you have written down or memorized your permalinks setting, you can log out of your site.
PART 3 – SETTING UP A DATABASE FOR YOUR CLONE
The next step is to set up a blank SQL database on your computer. With MAMP running, click the “Open Start Page” button again, and click “phpMyAdmin” from the top menu of the page that opens.
Now, click “Databases”.
In the create databases field, type a name for the new database. It can be whatever you want, but it is important that you write it down, as we will need to use the name later. Im calling mine “gruffpuppy”, one word, all in lower case. Then click the “Create”. Once this is done, close out of the web browser window. There is no need to create “Users” for the database as we will use the root/default user account, which is automatically created for every database.
PART 4 – CREATE THE COPY/CLONE OF YOUR SITE
With MAMP still running, and your server active (Green Lights) , its time to move the files “Duplicator” created to your local server directory.
Open a new finder window, and go to “Applications”, open the “MAMP” folder, and then open “htdocs”.
Drop the zip folder and the “installer.php” file Duplicator created in and close the finder window.
Open up your favorite web browser (For this tutorial I will be using Firefox, as there’s a little bug I want to show you, that doesn’t seem to appear in Safari) and in the address bar type “localhost:8888” and you will see a directory listing of your “htdocs” folder.
Double click the “installer.php” file and the Duplicator installer will open. YAY! This means your server is all working great, and you are viewing your first web page on your local server. Now it’s time to set up the database connection. In the MySQL Server area, leave “Host” set to localhost. in “User” type “root”, as we will be connecting using the automatically created user profile I mentioned earlier. In “Password” type the word “root” again, and for “Database Name” you need to type the name you specified earlier in phpMyAdmin. I used “gruffpuppy” so that’s what I am typing here. When your done, press “Test Connection”.
As you can see, my connection is good and I am ready to move on to the next step. If you receive an error here, you need to go back and check your credentials. It’s usually a typo of your credentials or database name. Once you have a successful connection click the “Close” button.
Check the warning box and click “Run Deployment”.
Another warning will pop up, which is irrelevant to this project, so go ahead and click “OK”.
Duplicator will now start building the copy of your WordPress Web Site. This can take a while so be patient.
Once installation has finished, you are given an opportunity to change some parameters. Unless you have some special circumstances outside of the scope of this tutorial, your fine to accept the default settings. Click “Update Tables”
The next screen means the duplication of your site is now complete, and there’s just a little bit of house keeping to be done before you can use your site.
STEP 5 – FINISHING UP THE INSTALL
At this point, I recommend closing all open windows of your web browser and opening one new window with your default homepage showing, and then clear your browser history, cache and cookies etc. More often than not in Firefox the next step will yield an error in the process and you will not be able to continue. It looks to me like something that is kept in your browsers memory blocks the CSS (cascading Style Sheets) from loading and your site looks like this:
If you are using Firefox, Select “Tools” from the menu bar and then “Clear Recent History” gets you going, and in Safari, Click “Safari” and then “Reset Safari” to bring up the browser cleaning options. Once you are all cleaned up, type “localhost:8888/wp-admin” in your web browsers address bar and VOILA!
Log in to your site with your regular username and password.
From the menu column on the left select “Settings” and then “Permalinks”.
Referring back to the note we made in step 2, make sure the appropriate setting is selected (mine was Day and Name) and press “Save Changes”. Even if your setting is already selected, it is still important to press the “Save Changes” buttons so the option is written to the database.
Your site is now completely cloned/copied to your local machine and you can mess with it until the cows come home without affecting your live site in any way.
STEP 6 – HOUSEKEEPING
The last step is to delete your install files from your “htdocs” folder.
Locate the “installer-data.sql”, “installer-log.txt” and “installer.php” files, move them to the trash and give yourself a pat on the back! YOU DID IT!
I have just discovered the EASIEST way yet to download, save and keep videos from Youtube! Its SO easy that it is scary.
To use Flash Video Downloader you need to be using the Cool, Free, and really awesome Mozilla Firefox web browser. In Firefox, open the “Tools” option from the menu bar, then open “Add Ons”. Do a search for “Flash Video Downloader”, then click install once the plug in is found. Once it is installed, restart Firefox and you will now have a new “Download” button.
All you need to do when you find something you want to keep, is to click the download button, select the format you want, choose where you want to save the file, and download away!
In PART 1, we looked at how to listen to internet radio (specifically 181FM 80’s Hairband Station) on the go. In this part, we will look at two ways to listen at the office on your computer with a web browser, assuming your computer has sound capabilities. The quickest and easiest way to listen is to simply navigate to www.181.fm.
Once there, you will find a list of ALL of their cool stations down the left hand side. There’s SO much good music to listen to there. But if its Glam your looking for, Just navigate down to “80’s Hairband”, and click it. A new window will open with a player in it, and it should start playing immediately.
Another way to listen to internet radio through your web browser is to go to Tunein.com, and in this case, again, we will search for “80’s Hairband” in the search bar at the top.
Once 181FM 80’s Hairbands appears, click it to open a new window which contains a player, and even the album art for the songs it is playing.
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
In my opinion, the best first step to speeding up your Mac is to repair your permissions and run disk repair as outlined in my article Speed Up Your Mac Article HERE.
Once this has completed, the next alert will ask if you want to verify your drive. If you have already performed this task because you are following on from my first “Speed Up Your Mac” article this is not necessary. If you haven’t already done this, it is well worth doing as it will find any drive errors. This process can take some time, and it will require all other programs to be closed, so if you decide to run it, go get yourself a coffee and some fresh air after you begin.
When Verification has finished, ONYX will ask you to type in your password to give it permission to make changes and clean thing up.
As you can see, this program has a lot of in depth features and can do a lot of different things, but for this tutorial, we will focus on cleaning up quickly and easily. To start cleaning, press the “Automation” button. You will now see the Automation screen.
When you are happy with your cleaning options, its time to press execute.
ONYX will tell you it is going to close any other programs that are open, so again, make sure you have saved your work.
ONYX will now start performing maintenance. In most cases this will take some time, so if you didn’t stretch your legs, get a coffee and some fresh air before, now is the time. When ONYX has finished, a dialogue box will appear. Click OK.
Restart your computer and you are all done!
