Keir Thomas

It’s time for me to sign off my tipster post here at Cult of Mac. For my final tip, here’s one of my absolute favorites from my book. It describes how to turn any USB memory stick or storage device into an ultra-secure filestore. When inserted into any Mac, a password prompt will appear, just like with expensive ‘government grade secure’ memory sticks, and the contents will be as equally inaccessible to anybody else.

Here’s how to access a secret setting to make your Mac’s volume very quiet indeed—ideal if you’re trying to listen to something in a very quiet room where somebody else is working or sleeping, for example. As a tip this can be filed under the category, “Cool! I never knew that!”.

Here’s a basic but essential trick that Windows users take for granted—making the mouse cursor bigger, which can help on larger screens of if you simply prefer it that way.

If you have a snapshot of yourself as a login picture, read on to learn how you can make it substantially more funky…

Did you know you can move a window from one space to another by dragging and dropping it to the edge of the screen? If so you’ll know there’s a delay before the space will switch to the new one, but a simple tweak can speed that up. Read on for more info.

Sometimes within an OS X application you might want to search and replace all single tabs with two tabs, for example, or remove double carriage returns. However, if you type a Tab or hit Return in the search field of an app, it won’t have the desired effect. There’s a simple trick that can be used.

There might be certain situations where you need a snapshot of what your computer is doing. For example, if you spot a bug in a program, the developer might need to know what your computer is doing when the bug occurs. Here’s how to send the developer everything they could possibly need to know.

Spotlight is a love it/hate it experience. Don’t stop reading if you hate it, however, because here’s a tip that shows how useful Spotlight can be if used correctly. A simple trick lets you search for emails or documents by a particular author, which can be extremely useful when trying to track down that elusive file or message.

Ever wanted to quit every single open application? Perhaps you want to free up memory for the launch of another app. Here’s one way of doing it quickly and cleanly.

If you regularly use any X11 apps in Lion, such as the Gimp image editor, then you might dislike to the confusion of each X11 app utilizing its own menu bar. A way to make X11 apps easier to work with is to integrate X11 with Mission Control’s spaces and to run X11 full screen. Here are the steps.

If you don’t use Time Machine, you might notice that every time you attach a new and/or blank hard disk to the computer you get asked if you want to use it for backups. Here’s a simple trick that will stop that happening.

If there’s something you’d like to grab from a web page for which a download link isn’t provided, such as a movie file, Safari offers a handful of ways to download it–with no add-ons required. Read on to learn how.

Wouldn’t it be useful to click a link in Finder that showed only files accessed or created today, yesterday, or within the last week? That would make it significantly easier to find files you’ve been working on but forgotten the location of.

Users of OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard already have this at their fingertips in the Finder sidebar, but Apple saw fit to remove it from OS X Lion, its latest release. Here’s how to restore it.

Gotta alotta fonts installed on your Mac, but never know which you’d like to actually use in a document? Most apps show font previews on the formatting menu, but with Microsoft Word and some other apps many people turn off this feature because it massively increases start-up times. The solution is to create (and print off, if you wish) a font sample document that you can refer to whenever you want. This is very easily done on your Mac, as follows.

Here’s a handful of tricks you can use when selecting text within a document or web page. Like many good tricks, these techniques are simple but could potentially change the way you work with your Mac.

Ever get tired of the dialog that appears whenever you run or access a file you’ve downloaded? It can be an annoying halt to a workflow, especially if you already know not to trust files downloaded from questionable websites. Here’s how to turn off the warning.

There’s no need to break-out the calculator (either real or software) when you want to do a quick calculation. Just use Spotlight, as follows.

Trying to get somewhere in a hurry? The folks at Apple figured this might happen, so they built a very neat feature into OS X Lion to help you see a map of any address you’ve been sent via email, or encounter in a web page or document. No copying and pasting required.

Here’s a neat and simple trick that lets you forward several emails at once if you use the OS X Mail application.

If you’ve written a book full of Mac tips, as I have, it’s inevitable people ask what my favourite tips are. So here they are, for one-time only—the top 10 tricks I use every day. They’re not all barnstormers, and they’re not guaranteed to be mind-blowing. They’re just the little things I do to make life easier and more efficient when I’m using my Mac. Please share your own in the comments!

Macs are distinctive among the computing fraternity in the melodious chime they make while booting. While PCs that do nothing more than beep might look on enviously, the fact is that the chime isn’t always welcome—boot your MacBook in a library, for example, and several annoyed faces will willingly hand out censure.

Here’s how to turn off the chime. These instructions are created for OS X Lion but should work with older versions of OS X.

Is your New Years’ Resolution to start video or audio podcasting? Mac OS X Lion includes all the tools you need to produce professional results. Here’s how.

Here’s a neat trick for iCal which can be useful for those who find the default list of views (day, week, month, and year) a little too limiting.

Here’s a quick trick that lets you open files in the application you want, even the app in question thinks it can’t understand that file type. This can be useful with some older word processing files, for example.