Daily Tech Tip: Forgot your Password? Create a new Admin

This tip is a little more hardcore.

If you’ve forgotten your password, or need to gain access to a mac which you don’t have the password for, you can use the following tip to gain full admin access to the mac.

just remember, with great power comes great responsibility.

also caveat emperor using terminal commands in single user mode can seriously fuck things up if you don’t follow intructions exactly.

in particular the rm command = delete

1) Boot your machine into Single user mode by holding down Command-S (apple-S).

2) Issue the following commands (without double quotes), followed by Enter:

“mount -uaw”

“cd /var/db”

“rm .applesetupdone”

3) This “hidden” file (.applesetupdone) we just deleted tells OSX that the initial setup has already been done. By deleting it, we are “forcing” OSX to do the initial setup process all over again. During this process we create a “dummy” user account. This dummy account will have admin privileges, so we can use it to RESET the password on the other account (the account you can’t remember the password for).

So Reboot the machine (using “reboot” command or “shutdown -h now”) and setup your dummy account, reset the “real” accounts password and optionally delete the dummy account once you get access to the “real” account.

Daily Tech Tip: Forgot your Password? Reset it

This one is really quite simple but generally not known. It might also make you question the sanctity of your passwords.

If your forget your password. Insert your OS install DVD, restart holding down the C key on your keyboard and then in the menu bar of the installation go to Utilities> Reset Password and follow the onscreen instructions.

That’s it. Password Reset. The only thing you won’t have access to is your keychain (where your stored passwords for websites, wifi, email, etc are stored)

Daily Tech Tip: Your Cel & Blue Teeth

As an iPhone user its easy to forget that most cel phones make very good use of bluetooth beyond games and headsets. That along with the fact that most macs come with bluetooth built in gives you incredibly useful setup can be used to send everything from pictures to contacts from a cel to your mac. It’s a simple

first go to system preference and then to sharing

then go turn on bluetooth sharing

and finally click

make sure show bluetooth status in menu bar is checked.

and then click on the bluetooth icon in the menubar to send files or even browse files on your device (phone)

This is very useful if you have a phone and want to back up your contacts to your mac. Just send the card from your phone to your mac using bluetooth and voila a vcard which you can drag and drop into address book.

Daily Tech Tip: Spotlight Calculator

This one is so suprisingly useful. You can plug in any basic equation into spotlight and it will give you the answer.

Daily Tech Tip - Sync Photos from Facebook Contacts To Address Book

This is an iphone/ipod touch only tip: The latest version of the facebook app for iphone has a great little feature. It can grab photos for any of the contacts that you have in your address book that are also friends on facebook. Once that’s done the pictures will also sync back to your mac when you sync your iPhone.

Very neat feature and similar to the way Palm’s WebOs aggregates contact info from multiple sources