TextEdit, a word processor that comes with all modern Macs, has a little secret. IPhone and Mac sales are way up from the start of the pandemic. Meanwhile, Apple's crucial Services business hit another all-time high. Velazco, 18 hours ago. Twitter Facebook Reddit Mail.
Since the beginning of Apple history, Steve Jobs and his team in Cupertino have been secretly adding tons of fun prompts and games into hidden parts of Mac OS X. In celebration of the Easter holiday coming up, we've collected our favorite Mac 'Easter Eggs' for you to enjoy:
- Find Famous Dates in History: To find a list of 'famous dates in history,' open your 'Terminal' (under Utilities). Enter this line of code into your Terminal window: cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.history. From there, a list of important events on any given day of the year throughout history will pop up for your reference.
- Play Snake, Tetris, or Pong: Also through Terminal (in Utilities) you can open up mini games hidden in your Mac computer. With your Terminal type in: emacs. From there, press 'X' and the escape key at the same time. Enter in either 'snake' 'tetris' or 'pong' depending on the game you want to play (without quotes) and you'll have a fully functioning game open right then and there.
- Enable 'Suck' Minimizing Effect: 'Suck' is one of Mac's hidden minimizing/ maximizing effects. It's pretty simple, but if you're looking to shake things up a bit, it's pretty easy to put into effect. Open 'Terminal' (in 'Utilities') and enter the prompt: defaults write com.apple.dock mineffect -string suck. You will need to restart your 'dock' to turn on this function now. This can be done by restarting your Mac or 'quitting' your dock in 'Activity Monitor.' Once you quit your dock, it will immediately restart, enabling the 'Suck' effect when minimizing/ maximizing windows.
- Speak to a Psychotherapist: Under the same prompt as games (Utilities> Terminal> 'emacs' > press 'x' and the Esc key at the same time), you can enter the word 'doctor' in as a command. A prompt as a 'psychotherapist' will come up. The instructions say to enter 'RET RET' after anything typed to enter text. It works better on older versions of Mac OS X. It also has been described as a caveman version of Siri. Besides that, we still appreciate it.
- Watch Star Wars: Open Terminal and enter 'telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl' to start a screening of Star Wars in ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) art. We know, this is our favorite one too.
- Enable 'Genie' Slow Motion Effect: If you hold down the shift button while minimizing (or maximizing) a window, it will open (or close) in slow motion.
- Bake Cookies: Okay, so your computer won't bake cookies for you, but you can find Mrs. Field's recipe on your Mac. Open your Terminal and enter 'open /usr/share/emacs/22.1/etc/COOKIES.' After that point, you have to bake them yourself, but maybe someday…
- Play a game like 'Mud': Like most of the things listed, you can also open this interaction 'game' through your terminal. Enter: emacs -batch -l dunnet. There are some simple instructions you can use to help you through the prompt given. 'Take the shovel' & 'go North' are a few of them. The game will guide you in a yes/no kind of fashion.If you type a command that doesn't exist in the game, it will simply respond 'I don't understand that.'Type 'Inventory' at any point to take a record of anything you've acquired through this game. This one's a real time killer.
- Donate to charity: Through Terminal, you can open 'Charityware.' Type in: vi. The prompt will tell you ways to donate to needy children in Uganda.
- Find a Lord of the Rings timeline: Also in Terminal, type in 'cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.lotr' for a list of dates, marking important events in the LOTR timelines. For other calendars, start a new Terminal prompt and enter 'ls /usr/share/calendar' from there, you can replace '.lotr' in the first code with any of the listed items.
Besides providing us with countless (possible) hours of entertainment, finding and playing with these 'Easter Eggs' is great because it shows that the Apple team had just as much fun creating our favorite Mac computers as we do playing with them! Have any other Mac OS X 'Easter Eggs' to share? Please comment with them below!
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Running and developing an Ubuntu based workload on Mac OS has never been easier. Canonical has released a new tool called Multipass which allows you to quickly spin up Ubuntu Server virtual machines on Ubuntu, Mac OS and Windows. The following instructions will get you an Ubuntu Server VM up and running, and the Ubuntu file system mounted to Mac OS so that you can work in the Mac OS UI using your regular development tools like VS Code.
Mac OS
You'll first need to get Multipass installed by visiting the Multipass website and downloading and installing the package on your Mac OS host. Once installed, open the terminal on your Mac OS host and run the following to download and install the latest LTS release of Ubuntu Server.
Ubuntu
After the VM has been started we need to connect to it to install the nfs server. #ldjam shapeshift racer mac os.
Now we need to create the folder that we're going to work from in the home directory of our new Ubuntu VM and open up the permissions on it.
This folder needs to be exported from the VM's file system which is done by appending the following content to the /etc/exports file. If your VM has a different IP range than what is shown below you can simply update the command below to match your environment.
Then we have to export the folder and restart the NFS service.
Create a temporary file so you can see if your mount worked successfully later.
Mac OS
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In another terminal window on your Mac OS host we need to mount our VM's code folder. Replace the string for the VM's IP address and the UserName of the user on Mac OS.
To keep the drive mounted after refreshing and restarting the VM
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Now you should be able to see the test file that you created previously in Ubuntu from Mac OS.
From the terminal on your Mac OS host you can now open these folders like they live in Mac OS with your code editor of choice.
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Tips & Tricks
On a day to day basis the most efficient way to work with these files is to perform your heavy IO interactions like git clones and builds from within your new Ubuntu VM. This can be done by leaving a terminal open SSH'd into it.
The services that Multipass use to create the VM on Mac OS allow you to over subscribe the VM's resources so if you want to have the fastest VM possible you can give it all CPU cores and RAM as well as ample disk space. The following command will give the new Ubuntu VM 16 cores, 100GB of disk space and 16GB of ram while allowing the host and other Multipass VM's to share the same resources.
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At the time of writing you cannot resize the VM's disk space so you'll want to give it more than you think you'll need.
