Picasa Web Albums have RSS feeds which can be subscribed to directly in iPhoto. The feed downloads the high-resolution pictures (with EXIF data) to iPhoto, where they can be organized into events, albums, etc. Follow these steps to import an entire Picasa gallery into iPhoto on your Mac: Go to the specific gallery on […]

Recently I was asked to change my friend’s system language from Chinese to English. Changing the language in account was not the problem but the log-in screen language was a bit of a challenge. In Terminal: sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/Language\ Chooser.app/Contents/MacOS/Language\ Chooser The same language window that comes up during installation will appear, select the new language, […]

If your Google Chrome browser is acting awkward with fonts (displays all “A” characters, or default font turns into Times New Roman) instead of serif fonts, you may need to clean your Mac OS X Font Cache. Quit all running applications (otherwise, you may see font oddities after using the command), then open Terminal (in […]

Power users will be quick to discover that Mac OS X Lion has made the users library folder (~/Library) invisible. Copy/paste directly into terminal: chflags nohidden ~/Library/

If you like Front Row and are disappointed in Lion leaving it behind, you can easily get it working again just by copying a couple files over from the prior OS version. Manually Enabling Front Row for OS X Lion This will require access to a Mac OS X 10.6 installation. The following Front Row […]

On Mac OS X Snow Leopard and below it was possible to access the Hosts file using this command: sudo /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit /etc/hosts In Mac OS X Lion this is no longer possible due to sandboxing. The best option to access hosts file on Lion is Terminal: sudo vim /private/etc/hosts Any terminal editor will do (vi, […]

There are several reasons why someone might want to enable root login on their Mac. From a security perspective, setting a root password is a way to “take ownership” of the super user account and effectively restricts the possibility for someone else to do so in your place. In some other cases, you may need […]

Edit your /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and make sure the line: LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so …exists. It’s commented out by default in the standard OS X config, but you just need to uncomment it, then re-start Apache: sudo apachectl restart And you should be good to go.

The delightfully useful Disk Utility built into OS X can burn disk images to optical media in a few easy steps. Read on for how to go about burning your new disc. Launch Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities). Insert your blank DVD or CD. Drag and drop your .dmg or .iso file to the left […]

This one is a weird one, as it depends on whether you upgraded to Lion or bought a new system running Lion out of the box. If you upgraded, your running apps will have the glowing dot indicators you’re used to seeing in the dock. If you’re on a new Lion system, they won’t. With […]