Macbook Pro 13″ comes with a default resolution of 1280 X 800 which is smaller than most of the smart phones out there. Even smaller than its cousin Macbook Air 13″ which boasts a resolution of 1440 X 900. Well the only reason being Apple installs low-grade screens in Macbook Pro. As the Macbook physically has only 1280 X 800 pixels on it you cannot actually change the resolution of the screen as physics does not allow it. But if you are clever there are ways around it. If you can’t change the resolution of the screen you can certainly scale it to a higher resolution of same aspect ratio.

To increase the resolution of Macbook Pro all you would need id SwitchResX This software installs in your System Preferences.  To add a new resolution, I would prefer 1440 X 900, Open SwitchRexX from System Preferences. Goto Color LCD -> Custom Resolution. At the bottom you would see a “+” sign. Click on it and select Scaled Resolution from the menu. Enter the resolution 1440 X 900. You would need to restart your computer to apply the settings.

Once restarted again open System Preferences go to Displays and select Scaled. The new resolution would be available there select it and you would have an increased resolution on MacBook Pro 13″

The website is called Is This An Earthquake.

If the website doesn’t works on your laptop or your mobile device then it probably is not supported on it. You can also embed the plugin into your website just for a cool effect.

Spotlight has one of the best made search algorithms of all times. It gives you instant search results so as you start typing in something relavent data starts showing up. All this is true for the mac but for any resource outside the mac spotlight does not work by its self. If you try to use spotlight in a network drive or folder it will show no results.

You can over come this problem by manuallytelling spotlight to index certain network drives.

Open terminal and issue the command
mdutil /Volumes/{volume_name} -i on

Replacing {volume_name} with the actual name of your network drive or folder.

You can check the status if spotlight is indexing the drive by

mdutil /Volumes/{volume_name} -s

Apple devices have a feature called AirPlay in them which allow you to stream audio as well as video (from newer devices) to some AirPlay enabled device such as an Airport Extreme. But buying an airport device and also a separate set of speakers unique with it just to stream music seems useless. To get around this condition all you need is an old windows machine. You can disguise your windows machine as an Airplay device and the mac or your iphone will wirelessly send the audio to the windows machine.

To do this all you need to do is download ShairPort4w from here. Download the zipped files extract it and run it on your windows machine. Once up and running come back to your Mac and while pressing alt/option key and clicking the sound symbol in the notification area and then select Shairport4w.

Turn on your iTunes and play any song. You will notice the the audio is been streamed to the PC wirelessly.

There is a way to convert your sleep mode into hibernation on Mac OS X. It will work on all macs including Macbook Pro , iMac , Mac mini or anything that runs Mac OS X even a hackintosh.

To enable hibernation

1. Go to terminal (Applications -> Terminal )

2. Copy and paste this command in the terminal

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 25
Enter your password when it asks for it.

Now every time you put your mac to sleep or close the lid of your MacBook Pro or Air instead of going to sleep mode your Mac will go to hibernation.

To switch on your mac from hibernation just press the Power Button. It will take just a few seconds to some back to life so don’t panic.

If you want to reverse this process and put your Mac to only sleep mode.

Open Terminal and paste the following command

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3

This will bring your Mac to the default settings of apple

This might be a useful feature for average users who visit Facebook and YouTube dozen of times a day as it reduces the time the browser takes to download pages from the servers of the websites by eliminating the need for a DNS server by caching the most visited url.

So if you are a server admin like me or are a newbie in this field and are facing the same problem clearing/flushing your DNS cache may do your job.

To clear dns in windows: Go to All Programs -> Accessories -> Command Prompt or Go to Run and type cmd. Once in there type

ipconfig /flushdns

Mac and Linux both being UNIX based system have the same method to do this.

For Mac go to Applications -> Terminal

For Linux press Alt+F2 and type in gnome-terminal

Then give the command

dscacheutil -flushcache

This will clear all your DNS cache and should solve your problem If not have a look at your DNS server.

Once you know the setting for your carrier now lets proceed. Go to System Preferences – > Network click the small plus sign and choose Bluetooth Dun. You can name it any thing like in my case I named it vodaphone which is my carrier.

Once created turn your bluetooth on and click setup bluetooth device. This will search for your bluetooth device and pair with it.  It will detect the type of your Vendor, now according to your carrier settings fill your Username Password and APN. CLick Continue this will configure your mobile. If you carrier uses some a proxy to connect to the web ,click the advanced button go to Proxies -> Web Proxy (HTTP) and fill in the detail. Now you will be able to connect your mobile as a modem to your mac.

Okay so let’s get started. So first find out how to forward ports on your router. This tell your router to allow traffic from certain ports and redirect it to a given IP. Go here and find out how to forward ports on your router. Click on the Default Guide for a general instruction guid for port forward.

Now go ahead and forward ports 137(TCP/UDP) , 138(TCP) , 139(TCP) , 445(TCP) to the ip of the computer you are hosting the SMB server on. This pity much completes the job the only thing you now need is your external IP. You can go to ip.pixeltine.com or if you are a Linux/Mac user you can give the command

curl ip.pixeltine.com

Now mount the partition using this external ip and you are done.

If you want help mounting these partitions I found these posts helpful.

• Linux
• Mac

Just use the external ip the we derived above instead of the local ip suggested in these posts.

n them. If you are like me you might have gigabytes of these things but the storage on my MacBook pro is just 500 GB. So I store all these files on a drive on my Windows system. To access the content in the drive I had to every time mount the drive on my mac.

But there is a really simple way to automatically mount the network drive on startup in lion.

STEP1: Go to System Preferences -> User & Groups -> Login Items

STEP2: Now from the desktop drag the drive you want to automatically mount every time at login into the list amongst other items.

This will mount that drive every time you login into your account.