The following are really useful options to set system-wide for Mac OS X. I'd suggest reading them to guess what they do. You should be able to safely run all of them except the first one which tells spotlight (the search function) to ignore any attached drives forever. If you find that drives take a long time to unmount (eject), then usually it is because spotlight is indexing them (reading them in their entirety) to see what they contain. Hence if you find a disk doesn't want to eject, turn off spotlight for that drive. sudo defaults write /.Spotlight-V100/VolumeConfiguration Exclusions -array "/Volumes" defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-columns -int X defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-columns -int 10 defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-rows -int 7 defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-rows -int 5 defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-rows -int 5 springboard-columns -int 10 defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-rows -int X defaults w...
On some occasions, like myself, you may be forgetful, and forget what you set your bootup ("firmware") password to. Unfortunately for you, if you boot in recovery mode using Command-R, it still wants you to remember your original password to erase the old one. The proper way to do this is to take the computer to Apple with proof of purchase and they will do it for you. However, if like me you only buy their much older machines due to their upgradability, you may find that you don't have proof that you bought it in an apple store, e.g. second hand, or you lost the proof years ago. So, how do you reset it? The answer unfortunately, is with great difficulty. This blog page tells you how. Please note that I disclaim responsibility for the below - if you blow up your Macbook it's your fault. Do not follow these instructions. I followed these: https://blog.wzhang.me/2017/10/29/removing-mac-firmware-password-without-going-to-apple.html However, they are not 100% clear on al...
If like me you have found that sometimes you just want to join a series of videos from your phone together into one video, iMovie is slow and an overkill ... it takes at least as long as each clip to import each clip, then you have to drag and drop them to the timeline, export as, etc etc. This is much faster: on the Terminal, make a shellscript and put this into it. The script just looks at the mp4 files in your current folder and merges them. #!/bin/bash rm -f list.txt for f in *.mp4; do echo "file '$f'" >> list.txt done ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i list.txt -c copy output.mp4 Also, if like me you find that MOV files take up tons of space you can convert them to mp4 which is much smaller, like less than half. In the below, replace input.mov with the movie file name, and output.mp4 with the new file name. ffmpeg -i "input.mov" -vcodec libx264 -acodec aac "output.mp4"