Mac OS X contains built-in firewall software, known as ipfw. You can use this to protect your machine from outside entry, but it's not trivial nor GUI-friendly. If you want that, go get Brickhouse from Versiontracker.

If you'd prefer to work directly with UNIX, Daniel Cote has published his ipfw configuration file, along with some tips on how to use ipfw in Mac OS X - you can read the article right here.

NOTE: You should really understand exactly what it is you're doing before you going mucking about with the firewall software! For a more simplistic approach, try Brickhouse or any of the hardware routers.

If you'd like to reply to an email quoting just a subset of the original message, it's incredibly easy in Apple's mail.app. Open the email you wish to reply to, select the text you wish to quote, and hit the "Reply" button (or Command-R). Your selection now shows as the only quoted text in the reply.

I spend much of my time in Eudora trimming text I don't want to quote; mail.app makes it quick and easy! I love the subtle touches in well written applications!

I snapped this tip up on Apple's mailing list: projectbuilder-users@lists.apple.com. Full credits to the author, Mike Ferris.

You can modify any keyboard shortcut in any Cocoa app using the very powerful defaults system. The key you want to modify in your defaults database is NSUserKeyEquivalents.

The following example would set the Activity Viewer menu item of Mail.app to be command+shift+A:

defaults write com.apple.Mail NSUserKeyEquivalents '{"Activity Viewer"="@$A";}'

The odd characters before the 'A' in the previous command, specify the modifiers:

• @ = Command
  
• $ = Shift
  
• ~ = Option
  
• ^ = Control

To use other keys, such as Delete, you will have to use their Unicode codes like this:

@U0008 which would mean command+Delete.

This is really good, since it does not involve modifying the original application, and only applies to your environment, leaving that of others unchanged. I will try to make an app to handle this proceedure some time in the future.

Be aware - after troubleshooting an IE/QuickTime problem I had, I noticed that the AOL X Client installed two old Quicktime 5.0b11 plug-ins in my "Internet Plug-ins" folder, inside the "Library" folder.

It completely screwed up all QuickTime content, along with making IE screwy every now and then. I think that there are some other old files lurking in plug-ins (Shockwave or Flash?) or maybe elsewhere, so if you know of any or find any, reply!

Just to be safe, check both your user/Library/Internet Plug-ins Folder and the /Library/Internet Plug-ins Folder.

Within Terminal, you can set the cursor position in most UNIX text editors (vi, pico, emacs) by pressing Option and clicking on the character at which you want to place the cursor.

You can run the Classic Finder as default under the Classic environment instead of as an application. I've found this to work better than running it as an application. Instructions with screenshots are at my site:

http://www.grandpanjandrum.com/hacks.finder.html

Since the 10.0.1 update has been released, one of the new features is the implementation of SSH/SSHD. First thing I always do after an install of SSHD is edit a few items in the sshd_config file.

- At your terminal, 'su -' to your root account
- 'pico -w /etc/sshd_config'
- Look for the line containing "PermitRootLogin yes"
- Simply change this line to read "PermitRootLogin no"
- Save your changes and exit the editor
- Open your "System Preferences" from the Dock, and choose "Sharing"
- If the check box beside remote access is not selected, turn it on if you wish for SSH access to be enabled. If it is already selected, then just cycle it. Click it off, then back on.

...unless of course you want to allow someone one step closer to controlling your machine remotely. ;)

-J.

If you paste pictures into your Address Book, and then receive an email from someone with an address book picture, that image shows up with the email - quite nifty! You get the images into the address book by dragging the file containing the image into the right-hand square on the Edit screen of the Address book.

And if you don't have handy pictures of all your email acquaintances, just pick your favorite cartoon characters, download some icons, and create some stand-ins!!

If you haven't checked out desktopper.net you are missing out. Although the site is almost completely in Japanese, you should be able to make sense of some of the OS X GUI hacks from the pictures and scant English text.

For instance: This link points to a GUI hack to replace the "Initializing network" text at startup with whatever you want.

Navigate to '/System/Library/StartupItems/Network/Resources/English.lproj' with the Terminal (substitute the other languages for 'English' if necessary). Now type 'pico Localizable.strings'. Replace 'Initializing network' between the String tags with whatever text you want.

You will need a restart to see this one, a logout doesn't show this window.

When running the autoconf configure script, it will likely fail to identify the host type using its config.guess info. The error message it will produce is the following:

configure: error: can not guess host type; you must specify one

To get past this error, run the script with the host argument:

./configure -host powerpc-apple-bsd

This should allow the configuration script to complete, and when cc (the one that Apple ships, based on gcc) runs, it should compile.