by on September 30, 2010 Leave a Comment

Tell AirPort to Use a Specific Network

In my house, I am using a router that has allows me to setup a 802.11b and 802.11n network. It replaced a router that only supported 802.11G. Some of the devices on my network only support the slower network connect. However, my Macbook can use both the faster and the slower connections.

Now, the problem I run into is that the slower network connection is the one that my Airport picks first. What I need to do is figure out a way to force OS X to pick a specific network. I scratched my head on this for a few weeks but it turns out it’s really easy to do.

What you need to do is tell the AirPort interface what your preferred network is. This is done through the System Preferences.

This video should show you how to do it:

Prioritise Airport Networks in Mac OS X from Simon Thomson on Vimeo.

The first step is to open the Advanced AirPort preferences

  1. Open your System Preferences
  2. Select your Network preference
  3. Choose Airport
  4. Click the Advanced button

Then, you are presented with a list of networks. Basically, the list is all the networks you’ve ever connected to. Actually, now might be a good time to prune some of these.

Next, select your preferred network and drag it to the top of the list.

Close the preferences and now, when you need to connect to a network, it will choose your preferred one first.

by on July 24, 2010 Leave a Comment

Secret to Blocking Porn on OS X

OS X includes Parental Control software and it’s a great way to filter out unwanted content on your family computer. However, sometimes this program causes problems with other applications. We used it for a while and noticed that we couldn’t use the iTunes Music Store or Gmail. In order to use these other applications we had to disable Parental Control.

Searching the Internet for an answer, we found another way to filter out porn and other offensive material on the Mac that is completely free. OpenDNS.

What is DNS?

DNS is a service that translates the a websites name (i.e., www.learningosx.com) to it’s IP address (192.168.1.100). When your computer is connected to your ISP, it sets it’s own DNS server. However, you can override this setting, change it to OpenDNS and in addition to having fast DNS lookups, you can add parental filters.

The filtering works by comparing the website address you are trying to go to to a “blacklist” of sites you want blocked. Any that are found in the blacklist are denied.

What’s really cool about this service is the basic features are totally free. You only need to have some comfort in adjusting your internet settings. The steps below will show you how.

Before you can use the free Internet Porn filter, you need to first sign-up at OpenDNS. Go to OpenDNS.com and create an account now and come on back here when you are done.

Open the System Preferences


Click on Network

Select the network connection marked Connected. It’s likely the first one.

Click the Advanced button

Select the DNS tab


Add 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 to the list of DNS servers.

Click OK

Then, the next step is to go back to the OpenDNS site and setup your filters. Go to the OpenDNS dashboard, signing in again if you have to.

On the top of the Dashboard you should see a Settings tab. Click it. It will take you to the Settings page.

You should then see a Web Content Filtering dialog that lets you adjust the filtering you want for your machine. I leave mine set to Moderate. Change yours and click Apply. Don’t worry, if you need to you can change it again.

At this point you are done. It usually takes a couple of minutes for the filters to kick in. You can test your configuration by going to Google and typing search terms that you think will return inappropriate results. I’ll leave the specifics as an exercise to the reader.

Special Note for Mac Book users. If you carry your laptop around and are often on other networks, you will need to run a utility that tells the OpenDNS website about your web address. You can read how to do this here.

by on July 24, 2010 Leave a Comment

DVD Player

Watching DVDs on your Mac is easy with the built in DVD player. You can launch it two ways.

1. Pop a DVD in your Super Drive and the DVD player launches.
2. Open the Applications folder and click the DVD Player icon.

The DVD Player has an on screen “remote control” that has a button layout similar to a real DVD player. It’s shown below.

However, if you are a real power user, you can use the keyboard shortcuts to control the DVD player.

Transport Controls

If you want to play or pause the DVD player you can do so by pressing the Space Bar. You can fast forward and rewind the DVD by pressing Shift-Command-Right Arrow and Shift-Command-Left Arrow. If you just press the left and right arrows, you can jump backward and forward a chapter.

The volume is controlled by pressing Command-Up Arrow and Command-Down Arrow. You can Mute and Unmute the volume with Option-Command-Down Arrow.

You can go into full screen mode by pressing Command-F. You can bring up the Main Menu by pressing Command-~ (It’s the upper left key of most keyboards).

Finally, the DVD player application has built in support for the Apple Remote that is shipped with some iMac and Macbook computers.

by on July 22, 2010 1 Comment

Can I do Ctrl Alt Delete on my Mac?

or How I learned to kill my badly behaving OS X apps.

This question comes up a lot so I thought it was worth a dedicated post. On Windows, when an application is in a hung state and your system becomes unresponsive you can press Ctrl + Alt + Del to open the task manager. There is an equivalent key sequence on OS X.

If you have a hung application pressing Alt+Cmd+Esc will bring up a list of running applications with a button to allow you to Force Quit the application. Select the application you want to close and click Force Quit should kill the offending applications. You can also access this dialog by clicking the Apple menu and choosing Force Quit.

That’s it pretty simple. Hopefully the Mac applications you have behave so well you never have to do this.

by on July 12, 2010 3 Comments

Saving System Screen Shots to a Specific Folder

When you use the keyboard shortcuts to take screen grabs in OS X the default is to save them to the Desktop. If you are like me and you use these keys a lot, your desktop will quickly become crowded. What you need to do is change the default folder for screen shots.

I don’t know why this isn’t a System Preference but it’s pretty simple to change the defaults with a little Terminal-fu.

1. Open an OS X Terminal (Go to Utilities->Terminal)
2. Inside the terminal, issue the following command

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /DESTINATION

where DESTINATION is the directory you wish to save to.

3. Logout and Log back in.

So, for example, if you create a Screenshots folder inside the Pictures directory your command would look like this:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Pictures/Screenshots

That’s all there is to it. If you have any interesting system tweaks, let us know in the comments.

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