A hidden user is a user that can login to the system, but the account will not be displayed in the Login Window, where all of the other accounts on the machine are listed. In lab or work environments, it's often desired to have a hidden user that has Admin rights for administrative functions and/or other special circumstances.

Proponents of Adobe Flash insist that Apple's iPhone 4.0 restrictions amount to "restraint of trade," that the company's Flash platform covers the vast majority of computers, that Adobe doesn't need Apple and could bury it by cutting off its apps for the Mac in retaliation, that Apple really owes Adobe a hand, and that by not offering Flash, Apple is violating a universal doctrine demanding Choice. They're wrong, here's why.

What does Apple get that Sony, HP, Microsoft, Dell, Samsung, and LG don't?…. Usability in software.

Apple added a "feature" to Leopard which restricts non administrator users from managing printers on their Macs. While this is desired behavior on a public machine such as a classroom, it is a problem for single user machines such as faculty, staff and 1:1 deployments. By default in Leopard, a non-admin user can not add or remove printers. They are also not able to hold or resume a print job. This is a problem if you want users to be able to add printers themselves, especially if they're bringing their laptops home.

One of the classrooms I maintain is comprised of 2.4Ghz iMacs (MB323LL/A) that are dual booted with Windows XP and Mac OS X. Sometimes when the workstations are restarted from XP to OS X the display brightness gets changed to its dim power saver setting. This requires the user manually increase the display brightness by pressing the F2 key, which is inconvenient. I haven't been able to determine the cause of this issue so I wanted to create a login hook to increases the brightness as a temporary fix. OS X doesn't ship with a command line utility that let's you change display brightness. Fortunately, Nicholas Riley has written a utility that uses OS X frameworks to accomplish this quickly and easily. Here's the code

Inklet allows your trackpad to emulate a pen tablet. When you're using a Pogo Sketch, the trackpad even becomes pressure sensitive.

The iPad is now officially available for pre-order, which means that news is going to be flowing in all day about its various specs and features. We'll keep you updated on said news with this handy-dandy, ever-changing post. Keep your eyes here for the latest.

Using PMSET on Mac OS X, you can prevent your external hardrive from going to sleep (or spinning down). If you rock a notebook, and rely on an external enclosure, you probably know how annoying it is when your drive goes to sleep on you and it takes a good 30 seconds for it to spin back up again. More annoying is when Finder becomes unresponsive until this happens. If your drive is set to spindown every 15 minutes, then this ends up being downright maddening, and seriously cripples your workflow.

Macs in the enterprise aren't just cheaper to manage-they're a lot cheaper, according to a new survey released today by the Enterprise Desktop Alliance.

Mac OS X 10.5 requires you to enter an administrator's password to pause/resume a print queue, where no previous version of OS X has done so. This is extremely annoying in a lab setting -- if there's a paper jam or something, the queues on all the computers need to be restarted by an administrator, instead of the user just clicking Resume. I haven't seen a solution to this elsewhere, so here's what I came up with:

...basic instructions for using Console to check for clues that may help in troubleshooting

This FAQ discusses a procedure for uninstalling or removing Mac® OS 9.

This extract from a chapter of our book Troubleshooting Mac® OS X describes several ways to free-up space on your Mac OS X startup disk, also known as your Mac OS X boot volume.

OmniDiskSweeper is another quality product from The Omni Group, it's a Mac OS X utility for quickly finding and deleting big, useless files and thus making space on your hard disks. OmniDiskSweeper makes this easy by highlighting the biggest files on your disks, and by noting which files are used by the system, so you don't accidentally delete important files.

GrandPerspective is a utility application for Mac OS X that graphically displays the disk usage of a file system.

WhatSize allows you to quickly measure the size in bytes of a given folder and all subfolders and files within it. You would be surprised at how many useless files might be laying around on your hard disks. The files and folders are automatically sorted by size, with the biggest sizes first. WhatSize helps find out what files are taking up all of that space.

Thank you to those of you who attended my workshop, "RTI:  A Complete Apple Workflow" at the CUE conference this weekend.   I spoke about using Apple Software to address your Response to Intervention program.  This post contains the links, resources, and ideas that I shared.  Rather than simply posting the keynote file (which is much easier) I prefer to recap and flush out some of the ideas so that it's beneficial even to those who weren't there.

Mac OS X only: GeekTool is a nifty utility that incorporates text files, the output of shell commands and images onto your Mac's desktop. GeekTool ranks up there with Quicksilver in my "Oh my God, why doesn't this exist for Windows" list. Especially indispensable for command line lovers, GeekTool is fantastic for keeping tabs on your system or tracking your life in .txt right on your desktop.

Upon becoming Principal of New Milford High School over three years ago, it was decided after a needs assessment that more resources and professional development had to go into the area of educational technology.  I was fortunate enough to participate in two television shows that resulted in funds that normally don't just fall into the hands of a high school administrator.

So, you bought an iPhone. You love the phone and all its features, but wish you didn't have to pay for your songs twice to get a ringtone. There are plenty of songs in your music library, but no way to make ringtones from any of them. Or are there? Actually, with a little bit of trickery (nothing illegal) you can create ringtones from any one of your non-DRM songs in your iTunes library easily and for free. This works on both Mac and Windows PCs.