When you’re using Safari and you’ve only got one tab open the Tab bar disappears. For those who want the Tab bar to be visible all the time, whether you’ve got one or one-hundred tab open here’s the terminal command you’ll need to tell Safari to always show you a Tab bar. Just enter the following text into the Terminal, press Enter and relaunch Safari.

defaults write com.apple.Safari AlwaysShowTabBar -bool YES

Should you not like how this makes Safari act, you can always revert back to the previous setting by chaning the YES to a NO like what follows.

defaults write com.apple.Safari AlwaysShowTabBar -bool NO 

What do theses commands do? Well, these sets the attribute AlwaysShowTabBar of Safari’s preferences file (com.apple.Safari.plist) to a boolean value of yes or no (or basically true or false). Using the terminal is much easier than opening the file itself.

While I was writing another post for OS X 411, I mistakenly added the word Cyrsis to Leopard’s built-in spell checker, I wasn’t paying attention, but after looking at the word more carefully (after it was added) I noticed it was misspelled. The proper spelling is Crysis, which I assumed Leopard didn’t know anyway, thats how this started… 

Most applications in Leopard that use the built-in spell checker allow you to add words to the dictionary, but not all of them allow you to remove or “unlearn” the learned words. Pages is a perfect example, it will allow you to add words to the spell checker but not remove them. Below I have an example of where I’ve added “Robetr” to the spell checker.

I’ve found two ways to remove a “learned” word from the Leopard spell checker, the first is to open TextEdit and type the word, right-click the word and select “Unlearn Spelling” from the popup (thats it, you’re done). 

If you used the TextEdit method above this is not needed (just an alternate way of removing learned words for the more curious). The second way I’ve found is to edit a file located at ~/Library/Spelling/en (en is the file name (for English I assume), and the Library folder located in your home folder). Open this file in any text editor (TextEdit even works) and remove the word from the list. Once the file is saved logout and you have just unlearned a word. This would also be a practical way to unlearn all the words known by Leopard. Note: The Spelling directory is only created if you have learned words, on a fresh install of OS X the Spelling directory doesn’t exist. It also seems that this file is not synced with the spell checker live, if you delete a name it will still show up as correct until you logout.

Having the ability to change the text on Mac OS X’s Login window is not an explicit feature of Apple’s operating system, it is however possible. Some of the reasons you may want to add text to your Mac’s login window are: security, lost/found and identification. Adding text to the login window is easy, simply add a key and value to a .plist file and logout. 

First you’ll want to navigate in Finder to the following location: /Library/Preferences/ (the Library folder in your hard drive’s root, not your home folder).

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Once there, find and open the file com.apple.loginwindow.plist in a text editor like TextWrangler.

Because this file, com.apple.loginwindow.plist is outside of your home folder and effects all users on your system, you must have administrator access on the computer you wish to modify.

Make a backup copy of your original com.apple.loginwindow.plist incase something goes wrong in any of the following steps.

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Insert into com.apple.loginwindow.plist somewhere after the <dict> and before the </dict> the italic text exactly how it is shown here: <key>LoginwindowText</key> Once that has been added, directly below it on a new line enter <string>Your Custom Text Here</string> Replace the Your Custom Text Here (red) with your message. Image: The text you will be adding is highlighted in yellow (the end of the line was omitted).

Save the file and logout to test your new login window text. TextWrangler or any other text editing program will ask for an administrator password when you attempt to save this file.

To remove the text you just added, simply remove the two lines of text you added.

For those out there who have EA’s Battlefield 2142 for the Mac, you might want to know this. It offers the option to toggle the following settings:

• Full Screen Mode - Tells BF2142 to start in Fullscreen mode, unchecked it will open in Windowed mode (enabled by default).
• Use FBO for Backbuffer - No idea, but it seems to have little no affect on performance (also enabled by default).
• Fixed Function via Vertex Programs - No idea but it seems to help, and its enabled by default.
• Show FPS - Displays the current FPS in the top-left corner of the window or screen (disabled by default).
• Display this on subsequent starts - Do you want this settings window to open next time you launch the game (disabled by default).

The settings window also has two buttons, Play which starts the game and Quit which closes the settings window.

To get this window, navigate to ~/Library/Preferences/Battlefield 2142 Preferences/. Open the file config with a text editor and find the line “DisplaySettingsDialog” = “N”, replace the N with a 1. Save the file and start the game.

Time Machine is an excellent feature, its done in true Apple style, simple yet powerful, but there is one downfall to Time Machine, and thats the hardware it requires. Like most people, I use an external drive for Time Machine, the Porsche designed LaCie 500Gb USB drive.

My problem with the Porsche designed LaCie drive is its noise. This drive has a fan that kicks in after the drive’s been on for a while, it’ll turn off after it’s cooled down, but its annoying either way. I’ve been reluctant to to pull the drive apart because there are no visible screws or access points.

For those wondering, the Porsche designed LaCie 500Gb USB external drive has a 7200 RPM 3Gb/s SATA drive with 16Mb of cache (here’s a link to the drive on newegg).

Originally, I was just going to disconnect the fan inside the drive, but once I saw it had a SATA drive I decided to move the drive inside my Mac Pro. If that’s what you want to do, here’s the instructions to do so.

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