Play Alerts Through Alternate Audio Device

If you have multiple sound-output devices, such as a Griffin iMic and your internal speakers, then you can control where your alert sounds come from quite simply.

Step 1: Open System Preferences.

Step 2: Go to the Sound preference pane. (On laptop Macs, you can hit Option-Volume_Up to open System Preferences to the sound pane.)

Step 3: Go to the "Sound Effects" section if you did not go there by default.

Step 4: Under the list of available Sound Effects, there is an option for, "Play alerts and sound effects through:". Select your preferred sound device and you're good to go!

Disable Front Row Plugins

While Front Row has some problems, it is very nice for hooking up your Mac to your TV. One of my problems with Front Row is that it has a lot of extra options I don't want. Fortunately, I recently read of way to remove different sections from the Front Row interface. It's actually quite simple, although, you'll need to be using an administrator's account.

Step 1: Open Finder and go to Macintosh HD/System/Library/CoreServices/Front Row.app.

Step 2: Right click on Front Row.app and select "Show Package Contents".

Step 3: Go to the Contents folder.

Step 4: You'll probably want to create a backup folder for the plugins you don't want. So open up Terminal.app and run this command and enter your admin password:

sudo mkdir /System/Library/CoreServices/Front\ Row.app/Contents/Disabled_PlugIns

This will create a folder called "Disabled_Plugins" in the Contents folder.

Step 5: Go back to Finder and move plugins from the Plugins folder to the Disabled_Plugins folder. You should be able to use drag and drop. When moving the items, you'll have to enter in your admin password.

If you haven't launched Front Row since you last logged in, you should now be able to launch Front Row and the plugins you removed will be gone. If you haven't, use the following command to quit Front Row:

killall 'Front Row'

Force Empty Your Trash

It's really irritating when you go to empty your Trash and an alert pops up telling you that there is a locked file that you're trying to delete.

Fortunately, this problem has been fixed in Leopard. When you empty your Trash, hold the Option key. This will force your trash to empty ignoring whether files are locked or not.

Pool All Your Downloaded Podcast Episodes

I recently subscribed to the TED Podcast. However, once I subscribed to it, I only wanted to watch a handful of the 42 available episodes.

The problem I ran into was that there was no way to sort my podcast list by episodes I have and episodes I didn't have. Fortunately, I found a way to list all the episodes I had: create a smart playlist.

Step 1: Hold the option key and click on the +/gear button in the lower-left corner of the iTunes window. This will create a new smart playlist.

Step 2: For the argument of your playlist, select the first menu and select "Podcast". If you want only unwatched podcasts, add a "Play count is less than 1" argument.

Step 3: Save your playlist and go!

Welcome2Mac: Controlling iTunes and Locking Your Mac

Welcome2Mac is The MacTipper Blog's weekly tip where all the people new to Apple's latest operating system can get Mac tips to help them better use Mac OS X.

In this week's Welcome2Mac, we'll be taking a look at controlling iTunes and securely locking your Mac.


Controlling the basic functions of iTunes is really easy. The spacebar plays and pauses the music and the left/right arrow keys skip to the previous/next song. Selecting a song and pressing enter will play that song. What you probably didn't know is that hitting Cmd-Option-Right_Arrow will skip ahead a bit and hitting Cmd-Option-Left-Arrow will skip back a bit.


Setting your Mac to require a password when waking from sleep or screensaver is actually not the most secure method. In this case, any administrator can enter in their username and password to access your account. Instead, you ought to go to the fast user switching menu and select "Login Window…"