Apps and Tricks Every MacBook Warrior Should Have

Every MacBook comes with a technology that dims your display when it thinks you’re not around anymore – to save power. However, ever find it annoying when the screens dims on you when you’re watching your favourite cam whore video on youtube? You had to move the mouse once in a while to keep the screen fully lit. The guy next to you probably thought you were a mouse fettish.

Fret no more, enter Caffeine. No, it won’t order Starbucks for you so you could stay awake for more cam whore videos. This little app stays in your menubar with a coffee icon, clicking on it will switch it between two modes. When the icon shows an empty cup, your MacBook will act normally as described above. When the icon shows a cup filled with coffee, your MacBook suddenly feel the need to stay awake. Not that it needs to burn the midnight oil to install huge software updates, but rather it needed to stay awake to give you the pleasure of enjoying cam whore videos on youtube without getting a wrist injury.

P/S: This app also prevents your laptop from going to sleep, or screensaver mode. Pretty handy for presentations too I guess.

Download Caffeine from:

http://www.lightheadsw.com/

***

Next, this trick is pretty much an internal blog post I did when I first started writing. This trick allows you to display text messages on your Login Window so that if your laptop ever gets lost, some good samaritan should be able to find out who the laptop belongs to with the info written on the Login Window when he tries booting it up.

Click here  to go straight to the blog post.

***

Next up, ever wonder why on earth is your MacBook Pro so hot? If you’re using the first generation MBP like me, chances are the heat from your laptop got you fantasizing if you could cook bacon and eggs on it. Make sure you don’t put your MBP on your lap for more than 5 minutes unless you’re not planning on having babies in the future.

A good solution to this issue would be to get a laptop cooler, or… you could crank up the fan speed inside your MacBook.

Enter smcFanControl 2, this app allows you to set your minimum fan speed from 1000 rpm up to 6000rpm. Personally, I set mine to 2500rpm when the weather is cool but most of the time I find myself cranking up the speed to 4500rpm especially when my MBP gets into heavy usage.

smcFanControl 2.1 can be downloaded from the following link:

http://homepage.mac.com/holtmann/eidac/software/smcfancontrol2/index.html

***

Next, this app will turn your MacBook into a BMW. Ok, you must be wondering, what the heck am I talking bout?

Enter iAlertU, this app allows you to make use of your (LOL $19) Apple Remote as a…… CAR REMOTE!!?!?!?!

Technically, when this app is run and you hold your Menu button on your Apple Remote, your MacBook will get locked (with some PEWP  BMW sound in action). When your MacBook gets moved (as detected by motion detector), it will go….

PEEWEWEWEWEWEWEWEW@#@@$!@$#$#

Ok, I’m bad at sound-to-text translation – but you know what I’m talking bout. Not only it pumps out a loud noise, you can even set it to send an e-mail with a picture taken with your iSight cam. Pretty cool eh?

Hold your menu button again and your laptop will go.. PEWP PEWP! Just like a BMW!

I haven’t used much of this app but I think it could be useful for some people. The only time I used this app was for showing off purposes ;)

If you’re interested, head on to:

http://www.slappingturtle.com/home/

***

This final app will be an app that you WILL love. Ever wonder if you could speed up the sleep and wake process of your MacBook? Look no further, SmartSleep is here to save the day.

To briefly explain the need for such an app is:

Ever since Apple implemented the hibernate feature onto their laptops to allow people to swap batteries while their laptop is asleep, laptops now take ages to go into sleep mode because it copies all your RAM contents into your hard disk so that everything stays in tact just as it is before you let your MacBook go to sleep and you swap out the battery for another one.

After installing SmartSleep, my laptop sleeps in THREE f**king seconds! Amazing. Before I used SmartSleep, my laptop would take the same amount of time I went to pee and return.

Also, what makes SmartSleep so special is that it helps you to switch back to hibernate mode automatically when your battery level reaches a certain treshold that you’ve set. If you don’t need that, you can even set it to plain sleep mode.

Download SmartSleep from:

http://www.jinx.de/SmartSleep.html

P/S: Make sure you install it for all users on the computer, because the writer of this app claims that Apple stocks will fall furiously if you don’t.

***

Alright! That’s all for today’s tech tip. Hope you’ve enjoyed it. If you liked it, kindly donate me a new 4th generation MacBook Pro. ;)

***

Image Sources:

Egg on MacBook – http://sillydog.org/forum/sdt_11750.php

Tech Tip: How to Change or Reset your Windows Account Password (2000/XP/Vista)

Before you put this tip to test, please make sure you know how to:

1. Burn a CD Image (.iso file)
2. Boot from your CD/DVD Drive
3. Think of an excuse for resetting your gf’s password

Pictured is the bios page for changing the boot sequence of my crap ass pc (that I only spend time with 2 months a year).

Your bios will probably look different than the one pictured above, if they looked the same then you should consider upgrading.

OK MOVING ON……

So apparently you need to reset or change your windows account password because…

• You magically forgotten about your password
• Your gf is locking your pc because you are spending too much time on it
• You woke up 10 years into the future from your frozen sleep, not knowing who you really are and the only clues are buried within your password-locked pc

Fret not chumps. I have tested this method on both XP and Vista installations and it worked fine.

Sure, there are other methods out there that can help you reset your password, but I feel those take too many steps to achieve the same goal.

Also, some methods require you to be LOGGED IN to reset/change your password. Those methods will be totally useless when you can’t even access the computer.

***

So, are you ready!?

First, download Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK) from

http://trinityhome.org/Home/index.php?wpid=5&front_id=12

Or click here to download version 3.2

Burn it to a CD or DVD.

Reboot your PC and boot from your TRK. You should see a bunch of texts on your screen – Don’t panic! If you’re a linux savvy dude then operating TRK is a piece of cake for you.

After TRK is fully loaded, you will be shown a “command prompt” and this is where the fun begins. Here you need to know which account that exists in your Windows installation that you wish to hack. If you don’t know the account username then your best bet is to reset the password for Administrator.

EDIT: You can execute “winpass -l” to find out the list of usernames in your Windows installation!

The account username can be found out by running Task Manager and looking at the list of processes. Your account username should be there in the user column. But then again, you’re probably locked out of your account so you won’t be able to find out your account username ;D

Now, let’s try to reset/change your account’s password.

type “winpass -u Administrator”

OR

“winpass -u [your account username]” (without the quotes and brackets)

TRK will then proceed to search for the installations that exist in your PC. When you’re prompted just type the number of the windows installation. If you only have one installation like I do in the picture above, don’t bother typing in anything, just hit enter and it should do the trick.

You will then be prompted if you want to disable SYSKEY. I have no f**king idea what’s that but TRK assures you there’s no need to do so and even warns you that if you turn it off in Windows 2000 then you could be in deep shit.

Just hit enter with nothing keyed in and move on.

Boom! TRK asks you to enter a new password. But in most cases the best way to hack into an account is to reset the password. To reset the password, just type * (this is an asterisk A.K.A SHIFT+8) and hit enter.

TRK does its shit and the password should be RESET! Reboot your PC and see if the trick worked!

To reboot, just type reboot and hit enter or you can be old fashion and hit the reset button. Make sure you remember to eject your TRK cd/dvd before you boot into Windows.

Till the next tech tip, I hope you found much use with this one. ;)

P/S: I hold no responsibility if your PC decides to explode. Please state your gender in comments before you ask for help (Just kidding!)

Tech Tip: Read/Write both NTFS and HFS+ volumes on both Windows and Mac

If you’ve been itching to know how to access ALL mainstream/default Windows and Mac formatted hard disks on both platforms, you sir have come to the right place. I’ve done my research and have been using this solution for a few months now on my external hard disk, which is a Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus 500gb.

This tech tip is pretty much noob-proof because it doesn’t involve any system hacking – it just involves installing a few apps.

This tip has been fully tested to work under Mac OS X 10.5, however it should work fine in older Mac OS X’s. You just have to install the appropriate app version.

First, let’s look at how you can take FULL control on NTFS partitions from your Mac.

This is actually very simple. Install the following apps in order.

***

1) MacFUSE – http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

look for MacFUSE-Core-10.5-1.3.1.dmg if you’re using Leopard, and MacFUSE-Core-10.4-1.3.0.dmg if you’re using Tiger.

2) NTFS-3G – http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

the latest blog post should provide you the latest version with download link, i.e. the latest version is 1.2129 at time of writing

***

The installation for both of these apps should be plain simple and straightforward.

Whoa-la! After installing both these apps you should be able to Read and Write data onto your NTFS partition!

Pictured here is a NTFS partition (duh!)

Notable Limitation of the NTFS-3G partition: deleting stuff will not move them to the Trash, you will be prompted to permanently delete them.

***

Now on to Read/Write support for Mac volumes on Windows.

As of date, there is no free alternative for such capability, one software that I have fully tested for the past few months is MacDrive by Mediafour (http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/). However, it doesn’t come cheap. Retailing at $49.95 USD, you might wanna think twice before deciding wether you want your hard drive to be in NTFS or HFS. I think you already know the answer.

Notable Limitations of this software: You HAVE to soft eject your HFS+ Journaled volume before you try to mount it with MacDrive. Else, you will have trouble mounting it. Also, if you got Daemon Tools installed, make sure it’s updated to the latest version because older versions seems to have conflict with this software, that can prevent your volume from mounting.

Pictured here is a HFS+ Journaled volume mounted in Windows XP (it should also work in Vista according to MediaFour).

Any questions? Feel free to post in comments and I’ll try to help.

Also, if anyone finds a better/free alternative for the MacDrive solution feel free to post in comments as well.

P/S: If you’re wondering why my hard drive is so empty. It’s because I was playing with the diskutil command in Terminal, trying to split my partitions into two. The command did the job well, so well that it wiped my data ;(

Tech Tip: Insert text message on your login window (Mac)

So you got that spanking new [Macbook Air?] laptop. So freaking light [yet so easy to get stolen, or lost]. You would like to somehow “watermark” your laptop so that if an Apple technician OR a good samaritan boots up your laptop, he/she would see a message on the login window….. so he would know who to return this laptop to.

Example: “This is a property of Mike Cannon, if found please contact me at +6012-345-6789. Thanks.”

Behold….

This is a tip I’ve submitted to Macosxhints.com but the editor insisted that it is a dupe when clearly the 2 years old hint does not work anymore on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Also, please note that I’ve only tested this method on Leopard but it should work on older versions of Mac OS X such as Tiger.

Before you apply this tip [especially on non-Leopard machines] please note that I take no responsibility whatsoever if your computer decides to explode into pieces or refuse to play your porn videos anymore.

1. First, navigate to /Library/Preferences folder.
2. Right click on com.apple.loginwindow.plist and click Get Info.
   
3. Click on the lock icon on the bottom right (under Sharing & Permissions) and authenticate.
   
4. Now, you should see that the ‘+’ button is un-greyed. Click the ‘+’ button and choose your account name. Give your account name ‘Read & Write’ priveledge. (NOTE: This will only give your account temporary read & write access to the current file until you log out.)
   
5. Open this file with Property List Editor. (You need to install Xcode Tools from your OS X Installations discs if you don’t have this)
6. Expand Root and click on Root. Click on New Child. Name this child ‘LoginwindowText’ without the quotes. Make sure the class for this child is String.
   
7. Insert whatever message you would like your login window to display in Value. (NOTE: If you would like line breaks in your message, the workaround is to open a text editor such as TextEdit and craft your message there first, then paste it back into the Value box.)
   
8. Save the plist file (Apple+S).
   
9. Finally, log out and check to see if your login window now shows the text message! :)

Sorry about the poor quality picture. I left my digicam back in Aus. Till the next tech tip, I hope you enjoyed this one.