Unix & Terminal

The Notification Center was introduced in OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion). Off the shelf OS X and macOS don't have the means to send...

What is Homebrew (for Mac OS, not the homebrew you drink) Homebrew is the Mac equivalent of an application package manager. Package managers are fundamental...

If you wish to run local web services, such as CalDAV, CardDAV, WebDAV, websites, etc., you may want to connect over SSL. Here are instructions on how to generate self-signed SSL certificates, on Mac OS X that have the CA flag set to TRUE, and which will be accepted my Android devices (which are particularly fussy about how an SSL certificate is cooked up).

Hide your Mac OS X username from the login screen. It's a simply security measure I recommend for people with laptops especially. Here's a couple of free and easy ways to do it.

OS X has a built in web server. For some users, especially web developers, it may come in rather handy. You can use it for locally hosting web sites (typically for development purposes), for running a local WebDAV server (which may, for instance, come in handy for local syncing of apps like OmniFocus). Here's how to start and stop Apache on OS X.

Those of us who like to dig below the graphical surface of OS X often end up in Terminal hacking away with Unix commands. Sometimes it's necessary to change file/folder permissions, and to set a file to be executable, etc. It's easy to do in Terminal, but there's also a nice way to do it with via the GUI using this app...