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1. Let Menu Bar show today's Date The Mac OS X Menu Bar shows time and the day of the week, but doesn’t show the date information. To show today's date on the Menu Bar, do the following:

• System Preferences -> International -> Formats
• Select Dates and click “Customize”; choose one of your preferred date format; highlight and copy the date part (use Command-C to copy); click “Cancel”
• Select Times and click “Customize”; choose Medium; paste the example date just copied in front of the time; click “OK”

2. Stop Mac OS X from automounting all the drives Mac OS X normally automount all partitions it recognises at boot time. Sometimes you may not want this to happen (e.g. you have Windows XP, Tiger and Leopard installed, when you boot one OS, you don’t want the others to be automounted).

This can be resolved using the file /etc/fstab. This file may not exist, so you may need to create this file. First, find out the partition’s volume name when mounted, e.g. Windows XP is mounted as winxp (on your desktop, or /Volumes/winxp), Tiger as tiger, and Leopard as leopard.

When you are booted into Leopard, if you don’t want winxp and tiger to appear on your desktop (suppress automounting), issue the follow command:

sudo pico /etc/fstab

and add the following content:

LABEL=winxp none ntfs ro,noauto
LABEL=tiger none hfs rw,noauto

3. Set up PPTP VPN System Preferences -> Network; click “+” on the bottom left and choose VPN as “Interface”; provide server’s IP address/username/password (this information is provided by your company); optionally add a DNS server’s IP address used within your company (e.g. 192.168.254.1) (this would help resolve links on your company’s Intranet).

4. Use Adium for email notification Adium can be used as an email notification too for all your hotmail, yahoo, google mail accounts, even if you don’t use it to chat with your friends.

Start up Adium; Preferences -> Accounts; double click on an account (you can add all your accounts) -> Options -> check “check for new mail”.

Now you need to create new mail notification event: Preferences -> Accounts -> Events; double click “New Mail Notification” -> choose an action (e.g. “Bounce the dock icon” “Repeatedly”).

5. Extended attribute com.apple.quarantine Sometimes when you download an application (e.g. useful.app) from the Internet, Leopard may add an extended attribute com.apple.quarantine to the application package, and you may have difficulty to run the application.
Issue the follow command at a terminal:

ls –ld useful.app

You will see something like this “drwxr-xr-x@”. The trailing @ indicates some extended attribute on the package.

Issue the follow command at a terminal:

xattr useful.app

You will see “com.apple.quarantine”

You can remove the attribute by issuing the following command (if the file/package is owned by root/admin, add sudo to the command):

xattr –d com.apple.quarantine useful.app

The attribute is likely set for all contents within a package (e.g. .app, .kext). In this case, run the following command:

find useful.app –exec xattr –d com.apple.quarantine {} \;

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