In my quest to soil my Mac Pro for the sake of science, I decided to install Windows 7 via BootCamp yesterday. One thing that I felt was a necessity was read and write access to both systems from either system. Snow Leopard has NTFS read support out of the box, but in order to enable write support you must get out the chicken bones and voodo stick.

Here’s how:

1. Open Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal)
2. Type “diskutil info /Volumes/volume_name” and copy the Volume UUID (bunch of numbers).
3. Backup /etc/fstab if you have it, shouldn’t be there in a default install.
4. Type “sudo nano /etc/fstab”.
5. Type in “UUID=paste_the_uuid_here none ntfs rw” or “LABEL=volume_name none ntfs rw” (if you don’t have UUID for the disk).
6. Repeat for other NTFS partitions.
7. Save the file (ctrl-x then y) and restart your system.

And that’s it!

[UPDATE]

After a few days of running with NTFS write support using Boot Camp, I started to experience random lock ups and program crashes. My Mac became completely unresponsive at times. Especially when running Disk Utility permission repairs.

If this happens to you, I suggest removing, or renaming /etc/fstab

Here’s how:

1. Open Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal)
2. Type “sudo rm -f /etc/fstab” to remove fstab, or “sudo mv -f /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak” to rename it.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard

The Apple Store has come back online and its pretty obvious announcement is confirmed. Snow Leopard will ship out starting August 28th as a $29 upgrade. The Friday launch should make for a wild, crazy weekend. [Apple] Full press release:

Apple to Ship Mac OS X Snow Leopard on August 28

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Sad old Mac

The good news is that upgrading to OS X Snow Leopard is going to be pretty cheap for people who wisely sprung cash for Leopard. But before you buy, you better check your situation and plan the right move, money-wise.

You may have a few questions: Am I eligible for a cheap upgrade? How about a “free” upgrade? What’s this about family packs? Should I be shopping for a new Mac? Not to worry, Prof. Dealzmodo will help clear things up.

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If you’re switching from Windows you may be familiar with an old friend, the Task Manager. Apple provides a similar tool, with an easy way to force unruly applications to quit. I’ll get to why you’d want to do this in a moment. To access Force Quit, you can either go to the Apple menu in the top left corner of your screen, and choose Force Quit… Alternately, you can press three keys at once: Control + Option + Esc. It’s sort of the Mac version of Ctrl-Alt-Delete.

Why would you want to force an application to quit? Sometimes applications get “stuck” for whatever reason and can’t recover. If you notice the “rainbow wheel” spinning when you try to access the application and it just won’t do anything, check the Force Quit tool and see if the name of the application is red and there’s a parenthetical warning “not responding.” This is your cue to use Force Quit — just be aware that sometimes an application might not be responding, but might still be “alive.” Typically what I do is go grab a cup of coffee, or stretch, and give the app 2-5 minutes to get itself together. If it is still stuck, I force quit.

For more on Force Quit, check out this Apple tips article on “Knowing When to (Force) Quit.” And knowing is half the battle.

via TUAW.

If you can’t remember a password for a website (or anything else for that matter), all your passwords are saved in the Keychain Access utility (which probably isn’t news to you), but the cool thing is you can do a Spotlight search from right within Keychain to quickly find the password you’re looking for.

Start by looking inside your Applications folder for the Utilities folder, and inside of that double-click on Keychain Access. When it opens you’ll see a search field in the upper-right corner. Type the name of the site you’re looking for, and it will appear. Double-click on the result and an info dialog will appear, and to see your password, turn on the show Password checkbox.