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OS X Daily: “6 Ways to Force Quit Mac Applications” plus 2 more

OS X Daily: “6 Ways to Force Quit Mac Applications” plus 2 more

Link to OS X Daily

6 Ways to Force Quit Mac Applications

Posted: 02 Mar 2012 04:52 AM PST

Force Quit on a Mac

Is your Mac seeing the infamously dreaded spinning beachball of death? Is an app failing to respond? Maybe you have an errant process or two? Here are six ways for apps to be force quit on a Mac, remember a few keyboard shortcuts or sequences now and save yourself a hassle later.

1) Force Quit Currently Active Mac App with the Keyboard

Hold down Command+Option+Shift+Escape for a second or two until the app forcibly closes. This is the quickest way to force quit the foreground application in Mac OS X and a very good keyboard shortcut to remember.

2) Bring Up the “Force Quit Applications” Window

Hit Command+Option+Escape to bring up the simple “Force Quit Applications” window, then click to select the app name, followed by clicking the “Force Quit” button to end the app immediately. Think of this as a simplified version of Activity Monitor, and it’s also a great keystroke to remember to use since it allows for quickly ceasing multiple apps.

3) Force Quitting Apps from the Dock

Option + Right Click on an apps icon in the Dock to bring up the “Force Quit” option, selecting this will kill the app without any confirmation.

4) Force Quit from the Apple Menu

Hold the Shift Key and click on the  Apple menu to find “Force Quit [Application Name]“. This is easy to remember but not necessarily the most powerful method, since sometimes an application is completely unresponsive and the menus are inaccessible.

5) Use Activity Monitor to Force Quit Apps

Bring up Spotlight with Command+Space and then type Activity Monitor. Select the process name or ID you wish to kill (unresponsive apps will usually appear as red), and hit the red “Quit Process” button. Think of this as the Mac equivalent to a task manager from the Windows world and a more complex version of the second tips Force Quit window. If one of the previous methods fails, this will almost certainly work.
Force Quit Mac Apps from the Activity Monitor

6) Using the Terminal & kill Command

If all else fails, using the command line is a surefire way to force an app or process to quit by issuing the low-level kill command. Launch the Terminal and type one of the following commands:

killall [processname]

For example, “killall Safari” would kill all instances of the Safari process. If you know the process id, which you can find with the ps or ‘ps aux’ command. Aim kill at that process specifically:

kill -9 [pid]

The kill commands will take out just about anything, and sometimes have the side effect of not honoring Versions, Window Restore, and Auto-Save, so be cautious of potential data loss.

Bonus: Force Quit on iOS

OK it’s not quite the Mac, but it’s useful to know for mobile users: from the iOS side of things, you can force quit apps on iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, by holding down the Power button until the slide to power option appears, and then hold the Home button until the app closes.


Change (Spoof) a MAC Address in OS X Lion & OS X Mountain Lion

Posted: 01 Mar 2012 01:08 PM PST

Change a MAC Address in Mac OS X

A MAC address is a unique identification number assigned to network interfaces, these can be attached to physical hardware like NIC and Wi-Fi cards or assigned to virtual machines. On some occasions, you’ll need to change a MAC address to another ID.

We’ve received a few questions about this recently because the process of changing (sometimes called spoofing) these addresses has changed slightly from version to version in Mac OS X. With that in mind, we will show you how to change a MAC address in the latest versions of OS X 10.7 and 10.8. Launch the Terminal found within /Applications/Utilities/ to get started.

Get a New MAC Address
The first thing you’ll want to do is retrieve the intended MAC address. If you have one in mind then use that, but if you aren’t trying to spoof a specific address and just need a random one, use the following command to generate one with openssl:

openssl rand -hex 6 | sed 's/\(..\)/\1:/g; s/.$//'

MAC addresses are always in the format of xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx, yours must conform to this format in order to work. For the purpose of this walkthrough the randomly generated address of “d4:33:a3:ed:f2:12 ” will be used.

Changing the MAC Address

If you aren’t in the Terminal yet, open it now. We’ll use the interface en0 for this, but yours could be en1 (read notes at bottom). The command for changing the MAC address is as follows:

sudo ifconfig en0 ether xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx

Replace “xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx” with the desired MAC address, in the example case this will look like:

sudo ifconfig en0 ether d4:33:a3:ed:f2:12

Hit return and enter the administrators password to set the new address. To confirm it has been changed, type the following:

ifconfig en0 |grep ether

You can also find it in Network preferences, though the GUI doesn’t always report the MAC change immediately, instead waiting until the network connection has been cycled.

Notes & Troubleshooting

  • If you aren’t sure which interface to use (en0, en1, etc), type “ifconfig” and find it that way. For MacBook Air without an ethernet port the en0 is usually the Wi-Fi interface, whereas a MacBook, iMac, Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, or any Mac that has an ethernet port will probably use en1 for Wi-Fi instead
  • You may want to note the default hardware MAC address before beginning
  • Some Macs will use the following command instead:

    sudo ifconfig en1 Wi-Fi xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx

    OS X Lion and later renamed ‘airport’ to Wi-Fi and thus the naming change

  • You will need access to an admin account or have the root user enabled
  • This has been tested on a MacBook Air and MacBook Pro running OS X 10.7 and OS X 10.8, older versions of OS X can go here

The whole process should take no more than 15 seconds or so, as demonstrated in this video:

How to Enable Caps Lock on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch

Posted: 01 Mar 2012 12:56 PM PST

Enable Caps Lock on iPhone and iPad

CAPS LOCK is widely hated but sometimes necessary. If you find yourself needing to use caps lock on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, get access to the touch keyboard and:

  • Turn on CAPS LOCK by double-tapping the shift key
  • Turn it off again by tapping once on the shift key

You’ll know caps lock is enabled because the shift key turns blue.

Caps Lock is actually a fairly new feature to be enabled by default in iOS. Prior to iOS 5, users had to tap through to Settings > General > Keyboard and then manually enable the ability to turn on caps lock this way. Now this process is reversed, with the double-tap feature enabled by default. Nonetheless if you hate caps lock or find yourself accidentally enabling it, you can still disable it completely by flipping the “OFF” switch in Keyboard settings.

Now the next time you feel the need to virtually yell from iOS you can do so.


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