19
Utility Chest
In This Chapter
Crunching numbers with the Calculator
Setting up lots of stuff, including AirPort Base Stations and Bluetooth devices
Plumbing your Mavericks’ innards
And much, much more . . .
OS X Mavericks comes with a plethora of useful utilities that make using your computer more pleasant and/or make you more productive when you use your computer. In this chapter, I give you a glimpse of the ones that aren’t covered elsewhere in this book.
The first item, Calculator, is in your Applications folder; all the other items in this chapter are in your Utilities folder, inside your Applications folder (or you can use the Utilities folder’s keyboard shortcut, +Shift+U).
Calculator
Need to do some quick math? The Calculator application gives you a simple calculator with all the basic number-crunching functions that your pocket calculator has. To use it, you can either click the keys with the mouse or type numbers and operators (math symbols such as +, –, and =) using the number keys on your keyboard (or numeric keypad, if you have one). Calculator also offers a paper tape (Window⇒Show Paper Tape) to track your computations — and, if you want, provide a printed record. It can even speak numbers aloud (Speech⇒Speak Button Pressed and Speech⇒Speak).
Check out the Calculator in Figure 19-1.
Figure 19-1: The Calculator (left), Convert menu (middle), and Paper Tape (right).
In my humble opinion, the most useful feature in the Calculator (after the Paper Tape) is the Convert menu — more specifically, the currency-conversion feature. It actually checks the Internet for the exchange rate before calculating the conversion for you. That’s very cool.
Beyond that, Calculator has three modes: Basic, Scientific, and Programmer. Basic is the default, and you access the other two modes as follows:
Pressing +2 (View⇒Scientific) turns the formerly anemic calculator into a powerful scientific calculator.
Choosing View⇒Programmer (+3) turns it into the programmer’s friend, letting you display your data in binary, octal, hexadecimal, ASCII, and Unicode. It also performs programming operations such as shifts and byte swaps. (If you’re a programmer, you know what all that means; if you aren’t, it really doesn’t matter.)
Activity Monitor
In Unix, the underlying operating system that powers OS X, applications and other things going on behind the scenes are called processes. Each application and the operating system itself can run a number of processes at the same time.
In Figure 19-2, you see 78 different processes running, most of them behind the scenes. Note that when this picture was taken, I had half a dozen or more programs running, including the Finder, FaceTime, the Mac App Store, and Activity Monitor itself.
Figure 19-2: Activity Monitor window, two little CPU Monitors, and the Dock icon.
To display the two CPU Monitor panes on the right side of the Activity Monitor window as shown in Figure 19-2, choose Window⇒CPU Usage (keyboard shortcut +2) and CPU History (keyboard shortcut +3).
You also select what appears in the Activity Monitor’s Dock icon — CPU Usage, CPU History, Network Usage, Disk Activity, or the Activity Monitor icon — by choosing View⇒Dock Icon. All but the Activity Monitor icon appear live, meaning that they update every few seconds to reflect the current state of affairs.
To choose how often these updates occur, choose View⇒Update Frequency.
Finally, the bottom portion of the Activity Monitor window can display one of five monitors. Just click the appropriate tab — CPU, Memory, Energy, Disk, or Network — to see that particular monitor.
Geeks and troubleshooters (and even you) can use Activity Monitor to identify what processes are running, which user owns the process, and how much CPU capacity and memory the process is using. You can even use this feature to quit or force-quit a process that you think might be causing problems for you.
AirPort Utility
You use AirPort Utility to set up an AirPort Base Station, AirPort Extreme, AirPort Express, or Time Capsule and configure its individual settings, such as base-station and wireless-network passwords, network name, Internet connection type, and so on.
When you first open AirPort Utility, select the AirPort Base Station you want to work with by clicking its icon on the left side of the window.
If you want assistance with setting up your base station, just click the Continue button in the bottom-right corner of the AirPort Utility window. You’re asked a series of questions, and your base station is configured accordingly. If you know what you’re doing and want to change your base station’s settings manually, choose Base Station⇒Manual Setup (+L) instead.
ColorSync Utility
ColorSync helps ensure color consistency when you’re scanning, printing, and working with color images. This package includes ColorSync software as well as premade ColorSync profiles for a variety of monitors, scanners, and printers. And the ColorSync Utility has a bunch of tools designed to make working with ColorSync profiles and devices easier. You’ll probably never need it, but I wanted to let you know it’s there, just in case.
A ColorSync profile is a set of instructions for a monitor, scanner, or printer, which tells the device how to deal with colors and white so the device’s output is consistent with that of other devices, as determined by the ColorSync profiles of the other devices. In theory, if two devices have ColorSync profiles, their output (onscreen, on a printed page, or in a scanned image) should match. Put another way, the color that you see onscreen should be exactly the same shade of color that you see on a printed page or in a scanned image.
If you’re compelled to do whatever it takes to get accurate color on your monitor and printer, check out Color Management For Digital Photographers For Dummies, by Ted Padova and Don Mason (Wiley).
DigitalColor Meter
The DigitalColor Meter program displays what’s on your screen as numerical color values, according to two different systems: RGB (red-green-blue) and CIE (the abbreviation for a chromaticity coordinate system developed by the Commission Internationale de l’Eclairage, the international commission on illumination). If you’re not a graphic artist or otherwise involved in the production of high-end color documents, or working in HTML, you’ll probably never need it.
Disk Utility
If you’re having problems with your hard drive or need to make changes to it, Disk Utility is a good place to start. Start by clicking a disk or volume in the column on the left and then click one of the five tabs described in the following sections.
First Aid tab
If you suspect that something’s not quite right with your Mac, the First Aid portion of Disk Utility should be among your first stops. Use First Aid to verify and (if necessary) repair an ailing drive. To use it, click the First Aid button on the left side of the Disk Utility window. Click a volume’s icon and then click Verify. You get information about any problems that the software finds. If First Aid doesn’t find any problems, you can go on your merry way, secure in the knowledge that your Mac is A-okay. If verification turns up trouble, click Repair to have the problem fixed. You can also use First Aid to fix disk-permission problems.
Erase tab
Use Erase to format (completely erase) any disk except the current startup disk.
Partition tab
Use this tab to create disk partitions (multiple volumes on a single disk). OS X treats each partition as a separate disk. When you select an item in the column on the left, you see only a partition tab when you select a disk, such as the 750.16GB Hitachi and 500.11GB Seagate drives in Figure 19-3.
Figure 19-3: Select a disk (750GB Hitachi or 500GB Seagate), and the Partition tab makes itself available.
By the way, you won’t see a Partition tab if you select a volume or partition — Fast ’n’ Small and Mavericks HD in Figure 19-3, instead of a disk (750GB Hitachi or 500GB Seagate in Figure 19-3). Makes sense when you think about it.
RAID tab
By using Redundant Array of Individual (or Independent) Disks (RAID), you can treat multiple disks as a single volume, which is sort of the opposite of partitioning.
Restore tab
Use the Restore tab to restore your Mac to factory-fresh condition from a CD-ROM or disk-image file. In most cases, you install new software on your Mac from the Mac App Store, a CD or DVD, or the Internet. Software vendors typically use an installer program that decompresses and copies files to their proper places on your hard drive. After you’ve installed the software, you’re back in business.
Apple’s variation on this theme is a humongous file called the disk image — everything you’d normally find on a disk, without the disk. These days, more developers are adopting the disk-image format for their downloadable installers and updaters. When mounted on your Desktop (more on what mounting means in a minute), a disk image looks and acts just like a real disk. You can open it and see its contents in a Finder window, copy files from its window to another disk, drag it to the Eject button to remove it from your Desktop — go wild. To make a disk image appear on your Desktop, you double-click the image file. At that point, the Disk Utility application takes over and puts an icon (which for all intents and purposes looks like a disk) on your Desktop.
Disk Utility not only mounts images when you double-click them but also lets you create your own disk-image files and burn them onto CD-Rs and DVD-Rs.
By the way, you find out more about Disk Utility (mostly how to use it for troubleshooting) in Chapter 20.
Grab
Want to take a picture of your screen? You can use Grab to take a picture of all or part of the screen and save that file for printing or sending around (say, to all your screaming fans who want to see your Desktop pattern or how you’ve organized your windows).
Grapher
Grapher is a venerable piece of eye candy that shows off your CPU’s computational power. A quick, visual math instructor, Grapher can graph equations in two or three dimensions and speaks hexadecimal, octal, base ten (decimal), and binary to boot. You can even graph curves, surfaces, inequalities, differential equations, discrete series, and vector and scalar fields . . . whatever that means. (I found all that information in Apple Help.)
Keychain Access
A keychain is a way to consolidate your passwords — the one you use to log in to your Mac, your e-mail password, and passwords required by any websites. Here’s how it works: You use a single password to unlock your keychain (which holds your various passwords), and then you don’t have to remember all your other passwords. Rest assured that your passwords are secure because only a user who has your keychain password can reach the other password-protected applications.
A special “master” keychain called the Login Keychain is created automatically for every OS X Mavericks user.
To add passwords for applications, just open Mail or another application that supports the keychain. When the program asks for your password, supply it and choose Yes to add the password to the keychain.
How do you know which programs support the Keychain Access utility? You don’t until you’re prompted to save your password in a keychain in that Open dialog, connect window, or so forth. If a program supports Keychain Access, it offers a check box for it in the user ID/password dialog or window.
To add a website password to a keychain, open the Keychain Access application and click the Password button. In the New Password Item window that opens, type the URL of the page (or copy and paste it) in the Keychain Item Name text field, type your username in the Account Name field, and then type your password in the Password text field, as shown in Figure 19-4.
Figure 19-4: Add a URL to the keychain manually by using Keychain Access.
To use the new URL password, use Safari to open the URL. If the account name and password aren’t filled in for you automatically, choose Edit⇒AutoFill Form (+Shift+A), and they will be. Now just click the appropriate button on the web page to log in.
Figure 19-5: The easy way to add to your keychain in Safari.
Migration Assistant
Migration Assistant is pretty much a one-trick pony, but that pony is a prize winner. You use the Migration Assistant to transfer your account and other user information from another Mac or another volume on the current Mac to this one. You need to authenticate as an administrator to use it, but it’s a pretty handy way to transfer an account without having to re-create all the preferences and other settings. When you first installed Mavericks (or when you booted your nice, new Mavericks-based Mac for the first time), the setup utility asked you whether you wanted to transfer your information from another Mac. If you answered in the affirmative, it ran the Migration Assistant.
System Information
System Information (the App Formerly Known as System Profiler) is a little program that is launched when you click the More Info button in the About This Mac window (⇒About This Mac). It provides information about your Mac. (What a concept!) If you’re curious about arcane questions such as what processor your Mac has or what devices are stashed inside it or are connected to it, give this baby a try. Click various items in the Contents list on the left side of the window, and information about the item appears on the right side of the window. Feel free to poke around this little puppy as much as you like; it’s benign and can’t hurt anything.
Terminal
OS X is based on Unix. If you need proof — or if you actually want to operate your Mac as the Unix machine that it is — Terminal is the place to start.
Because Unix is a command-line-based operating system, you use Terminal to type your commands. You can issue commands that show a directory listing, copy and move files, search for filenames or contents, or establish or change passwords. In short, if you know what you’re doing, you can do everything on the command line that you can do in OS X. For most folks, that’s not a desirable alternative to the windows and icons of the Finder window. But take my word for it; true geeks who are also Mac lovers get all misty-eyed about the combination of a command line and a graphical user interface.