Okay, you probably already know the ol’ Command-Shift-3 shortcut for taking a screen capture of your entire screen, and you may even know about Command-Shift-4, which gives you a crosshair cursor so you can choose which area of the screen you want to capture. But perhaps the coolest, most-secret hidden capture shortcut is Control-Command-Shift-3 (or 4), which, instead of creating a file on your desktop, copies the capture into your Clipboard memory, so you can paste it where you want. (I use this to paste screen captures right into Photoshop.)

There are a dozen reasons why you might want a written log of your text chats; maybe someone gave you instructions, a recipe, or just typed a bunch of stuff that cracks you up. Well, luckily, you can ask iChat to keep a running log of your text chats — go under the iChat menu, to Preferences, then click on the Messages icon, and turn on Automatically Save Chat Transcripts.

If you found the file you were looking for, and want to know where it is on your hard disk, just move your cursor over the result in the Spotlight menu, and in just a second or two, a tiny dialog will pop up showing the path to that file.

Want the fastest way to put your Mac right into a deep, sleepy-bear hibernation-like sleep (no whirling fan, no dialogs, no sound — nuthin’ — just fast, glorious sleep). Just press Command-Option and then hold the Eject button for about 2 seconds and Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. It doesn’t get much faster than that.

GetMail for Hotmail is a Hotmail mail forwarding program that started life because of the lack of a POP3 server for Hotmail. If you have tried looking for a POP3 server address for Hotmail you’ll know what I mean! From this it has evolved into a flexible mail directing and forwarding program, and not just for Hotmail mail either. By using GetMail with other third party POP3 tools you can also forward on AOL and many other account types making it the ideal tool to use for not only mass migrating all your e-mail (including Hotmail) to Gmail but also to continue forwarding on mail received in your old accounts, whether they be Hotmail accounts or not! For those of you wishing to forward on other POP accounts I’ve created a list of SMTP servers that may help.
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Sort of innocuous in the grand scheme of things, the new update from Apple adds a widget verification program. This program verifies whether the widgets present in the dashboard is authentic by sending an HTTP GET command to Apple’s servers every eight hours.

There’s no way to turn this off (yet, but maybe you could use Little Snitch), and there’s no prompt for the user to allow or disallow this action. People have been giving Microsoft heat for their Windows Genuine Advantage software phoning home, but it looks like Apple’s doing something similar.

It’s like when your neighbors hold a party. You may not care, or want to go, but it’s nice to be asked. – Jason Chen