Category Archives: Mac OSX Tips

Access you iCloud Photo Stream from your Mac

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One of the best features of iCloud these days is it’s ability to automatically sync your photo’s between devices, so if you take a picture on your iPhone or IPad it will automatically appear on any other devices you have.

You can extend this functionality to your Mac too but unfortunately its not necessarily obvious how to do this at first glance.This quick guide will get you accessing your iCloud Photo Steam on your Mac in no time:

Turning on Photo Stream on in IOS (iPhone, iPod or iPad device)

The first step you will need to do is enable iCloud Photo Stream on your IOS device. To enable Photo Stream on your iOS device: Go to Settings > iCloud > Photo Stream. Slide the switch over so it reads “On.” That’s it!

Accessing Photo Stream on your Mac via iPhoto

This is the simplest way to access the iCloud Photo Steam on your Mac device, for this example I am using iPhoto 9.5.8:

1. Open iPhoto. On menu on the left at the bottom, click the “Photo Stream” option.
2. You will see a yellow notice on the screen that explaining what to do next.
3. Click the arrow icon at the end of the notice text, and click the box next to the “My Photo Stream” option. Your photos will begin to load into iPhoto, be patient – If you have a lot of photos already in your Photo Stream, it may take a while before for them all to sync.

 

Jason Vigus

Mac OSX Tips: launch VNC from terminal

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OSX has a VNC tool built in called Screen Sharing, this lets you access other machines running a VNC server.

You can use the GUI but I’ve found the best way to is simply to launch it via terminal (while connecting to a VNC server), here are some examples:

open vnc://www.myserver.com
open vnc://192.168.111.145
open vnc://mylocalserver.com

Safari supports these urls as bookmarks for easy VNC url management or you can use something like quicksilver for quick key stroke launching of VNC sessions.

Jason Vigus

Mac OSX Screenshots – Keyboard Shortcuts

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Here they are, plain & simple!

  • Command-Shift-3: Take a screenshot of the screen, and save it as a file on the desktop
  • Command-Shift-4, then select an area: Take a screenshot of an area and save it as a file on the desktop
  • Command-Shift-4, then space, then click a window: Take a screenshot of a window and save it as a file on the desktop
  • Command-Control-Shift-3: Take a screenshot of the screen, and save it to the clipboard
  • Command-Control-Shift-4, then select an area: Take a screenshot of an area and save it to the clipboard
  • Command-Control-Shift-4, then space, then click a window: Take a screenshot of a window and save it to the clipboard
Jason Vigus

Apple OSX: How to clear your DNS cache with flushdns via command line

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Apple flushdns tool

Apple flushdns tool

DNS requests are usually cached, this is great as it speeds up the lookups on your machine. Occasionally you might want to clear out the cache though, using terminal its very easy to do.

MAC OSX 10.4 And Below:
lookupd -flushcache

MAC OSX 10.5 And Above:
dscacheutil -flushcache 

Tip: To launch terminal click on spotlight & type terminal.

Jason Vigus