Mac OS X Hints

My workflow is very email-centric and I’ve often wished I could start a new email in Mail by pressing a keyboard combo in any program. I use QuickSilver, and the regular way of searching for a contact’s email address and then creating a new mail that way seems awkward to me compared to the email address completion Mail.app offers

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Start a new Mail message from anywhere

To turn Spotlight Indexing off and on in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and to remove the Menu Bar Icon, follow these steps…

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10.6: Disable Spotlight and remove Spotlight icon from menu

I run an FTP server on my machine, using Pure-FTPd . Lately, I was getting a lot of noise in my logs about unknown people trying to gain access on my FTP server. I wanted to automate the task of looking through the log and banning the bad IPs, so that my logs will be kept clean from all those try/fails attempts

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Ban Pure-FTPd login attempts by IP after three failures

The function to delete the selected page (or pages) from a PDF file disappeared from the Edit menu of Preview in Snow Leopard. Even worse, it was replaced (using the same Command-Delete shortcut) with a command that moves the entire PDF document to the trash.

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10.6: Delete selected page(s) from a PDF in Preview

If you have a laptop that supports multitouch gestures, you probably are aware of the fact that a three-finger swipe in Preview will go to the next or previous page in a PDF. But you may be annoyed at how Preview insists on animating each page switch with a small scrolling action.

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Faster three-finger swipe navigation of PDFs in Preview

Locating an email message in your Mail folder hierarchy is now a snap. As of Snow Leopard’s version of Mail, if you open a message in a new window, Command-clicking (or Control-clicking) on the icon in the title bar of the message window will reveal the path to the enclosing folder for the message (just like it does in the Finder). Select the folder from the drop-down menu, and it will open in a new Mail browser window.

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10.6: View an email message’s folder path in Mail

Viewing Microsoft Entourage email messages in the Finder with Quick Look doesn’t work — it merely displays an icon image. If you have Entourage 2008 and 10.5 or 10.6, there is a way to display the contents of the message in Quick Look. Download the file named Entourage QuickLook Plug-In.dmg from this site , and place a copy in the /Library/QuickLook folder.

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Use a Quick Look plug-in to view Entourage email in Finder

To use the old-style contextual menus when you click-and-hold on an application’s icon in the Dock (i.e.

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10.6: Display contextual menus on Dock click-and-hold

Not a big of the yellow background in Apple’s Mail.app Notes? Handy with a text editor? You can change the background with a few simple steps

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Change background color of Notes in Mail

As someone responsible for supporting Macs, I carry around an external drive (LaCie Rugged with USB2, FW400, and FW800 connectors) that holds all my tools, as well as different versions of OS X, reaching from 10.3 (PowerPC) to 10.5. Recently, I had the time to finally add a 10.6 partition to the drive, and noticed that Snow Leopard won’t install on a non-GUID drive — the Installer simply won’t let you continue.

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10.6: Create a bootable 10.6 partition on an APM drive