FIX COMMON OS X ANNOYANCES

Every release of OS X has its share of annoyances, but a number of the most common problems with OS X can be fixed with a Terminal command or two. -Disable the Startup Chime You Mac likes to drop a loud tone when you boot up that's meant to tell you that everything is working. That start-up chime is fine for most people, but it's often a problem if you're in class or somewhere else where you need to keep your Mac quite. To disable that sound permanently, just enter this into Terminal: sudo nvram SystemAudioVolume=%80 Now, your Mac will be silent as a ninja on boot.

-Get Rid of the Delay When Showing and Hiding the Dock

By default, the Dock has a slight delay when you mouse over it and have "Automatically Hide and Show Dock" enabled. It's a little annoying, but you can customize the speed of that animation with this command: defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 0 && killall Dock Now, when you mouse over the Dock, it'll appear instantly.

-Stop Quicktime and Preview from Auto-Restoring What You Left Open

Auto-restore is a handy setting that opens up your last used file in your apps. That's fine for most apps, but it could potentially lead to some embarrassing things in an app like Quicktime or Preview. Thankfully, it's easy to disable that feature on an app-by-app basis: For Preview: defaults write com.apple.Preview NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false For Quicktime: defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

-Disable Window Animations to Speed Up an Older Mac

The window animations in OS X are great, but they'll slow down old Mac's quite a bit. If you want to get a little more speed out of your operating system, just disable them: defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false

-Disable Notification Center

Not a fan of Notification Center in newer versions of OS X? You can disable it with a Terminal command and get it out of your menu bar for good: launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.notificationcenterui.plist killall NotificationCenter With that, Notification Center will close down and disappear until you reboot.

-Prevent Your Mac from Sleeping

Your computer goes to sleep so that it doesn't waste resources and power working when you're not using it, but sometimes you need to temporarily keep it awake while you're doing a certain task. To do this, just enter this command into Terminal: caffeinate -t 3600 That will keep you Mac awake for an hour. The 3600 comes from how many seconds are in an hour, so just change that number to however long you want to keep your computer awake for.

-Instantly Generate a Calendar

Need a quick calendar? You can display one in Terminal almost instantly with this command: cal 12 2013 Just change 12 to the month you want and 2013 to the year you need.