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This article will cover how you go about plugging the OverPlay VPN service into Viscosity, for which there are no instructions on how to do anywhere on the net. If you have questions about what OverPlay or Viscosity is, then this article is not for you. Pre-requisites Viscosity installed Download the OverPlay connections list from here. Download the OverPlay CA cert from here. Have your username and password handy Choose the server you want to connect to from the server list. Making it happen Uncompress the connections file Bring up Preferences in Viscosity. Click on the + icon in the …

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Firstly why would you do this? The simple answer is when calibrating your battery, the last thing you want to do is sit around waiting for your battery to drain normally. This procedures accelerates the process. There are a number of ways to drain your Macs battery such as playing a game, or watching a DVD. But I have found a quicker way to do it which doesn’t require you to be at your computer. Just open up one terminal per processor core and run this in it: yes > /dev/null Don’t run it without the /dev/null otherwise it will …

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by Brandon Yap The contenders When I first started out with Macs, one of the more challenging tasks for me was to find the cream of the crop in Mac software. Sure there are lots of applications out there and most of them good, but some stand out above the others and this page aims to capture those excelling in their field. This list includes casual to intermediate level applications which I think represents the best of the best. Professional applications are not covered here. Image editing Pixelmator, Acorn Pixelmator and Acorn are part of a new breed of image …

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by Brandon Yap Did you know that you could resurrect your Mac from a botched firmware update? Apple have available Firmware Restoration CD’s which will do just that. “The Firmware Restoration CD can restore the firmware of an Intel-based Macintosh computer. Note: Restoring your firmware will reset some of your computer’s preferences to defaults. You can only use this to restore the firmware after an interrupted or unsuccessful update. If your computer is already in this state, you’ll need to download the software and create the CD on another Macintosh computer, or you can take your computer to an Apple Store or …

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by Brandon Yap So you’ve used something like TechTools’s Surface Scan only to discover you have bad blocks on your Mac hard drive. Now what? Bad blocks are supposed to be automatically marked as bad by the drive controller and remapped from the drive’s factory pre-assigned reallocation pool, but sometimes this doesn’t work so you end up with bits on the drive which can’t be read from and written to properly. TechTools will not map out bad blocks for you, so what will? The answer is surprisingly obvious. Because bad blocks are reallocated on writes only, erasing the disk in …

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