fastest way to reboot your mac

If you need to teardown your current login session and get your mac up and running in a hurry, here’s a neat little trick that should take you from login to logout and back again in as little as 10 seconds. And I’m not talking about SSD-only Macbook*’s either. That’s the time I achieved on a clunky late-2014 iMac with a sluggish old mechanical 1TB Fusion drive.

Forget the Apple menu and the ‘Restart…’ menu option and don’t worry about how many login items or startup scripts you’ve got either, this method will slice through them all.

We’re going to leverage a little-known command in the launchctl command line tool that will teardown and rebuild your login sessions in an instant. To see for yourself, execute this in Terminal:

sudo launchctl reboot userspace

I was astonished at just how fast the reboot is. What’s even nicer is you don’t lose any unsaved data either. This command restores all current window sessions (similar to checking the ‘Reopen windows when logging back in…’ option in the normal Restart dialog) but without the delay of the standard restart procedure.

See the man launchctl page for more options on using its reboot command.

Enjoy. 🙂

featured picture: Steampunk boots by Imp0s5ible

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disable captive network assistant

If you use coffee shop wifi services or others that require internet login, you’ve probably noticed in both Lion and Mountain Lion that OS X will produce a pop-up Safari window asking you to login. This can be annoying for several reasons:

1. The window floats on top and gets in the way if you’re trying to do something else

2. The window doesn’t keep cookies or allow plug-ins like 1Password, so you have to enter the login details manually every time

3. Sometimes the pop-up window will simply produce an error message that it can’t connect to the network. You either have to dismiss it manually or wait for it to go (it’ll normally auto-close after about 30 seconds)

If you find this behaviour annoying and want to stop it, there’s a very simple solution (and one that’s also easy to undo if you want to reverse it). Here’s what you do.

1. First go to

[Hard Disk] > System > Library > CoreServices > Captive Network Assistant.app

Click on the app once, and hit ‘return’ on your keyboard. This will make the name editable.

2. Hit the ‘left arrow’ key once to move the cursor to the beginning of the name and to unselect the text.

3. Type an ‘X’ (actually any letter will do, but I like ‘X’ so I can easily find the app later at the bottom of the list even if I forgot its exact name).

4. Hit ‘return’ on the keyboard. At this point, OS X will ask you to provide an Admin password as only Admin users are allowed to mess with files in the System directory. Type in your password and hit ‘OK’.

The name should now read ‘XCaptive Network Assistant.app’.

And that’s it! Captive Network Assistant will never run again unless you decide to change its name back to what it was (to do so, just repeat the procedure above and remove the ‘X’). Of course, you can still login to your internet or coffee shop wifi services by opening a normal browser window. The bonus is now your browser can fill the login details from cookies (if enabled) or your password manager.

🙂



featured picture: illuminated jellyfish by weaverglenn

mac keeps starting in Safe mode

If you see a screen with a progress bar (something like the shot above), your Mac is starting up in Safe Mode. This shouldn’t happen unless the user intentionally wants to do so for troubleshooting purposes. However, if you find that your Mac is defaulting to Safe Mode when you try to start up normally, try the following tips.

1. Stuck Shift key
Check that the Shift key is not accidentally being pressed down or stuck. If you suspect the keyboard may be faulty, plug in a different keyboard.

2. Use Terminal to reset boot-args
Allow the machine to finish booting into Safe Mode, then open Terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) and copy this command into the Terminal window:

sudo nvram boot-args=""

press ‘return’ on your keyboard. Enter an Admin password (type carefully as it will not be echoed to the screen) and restart the Mac.

3. Do a PRAM reset.
In this case, a PRAM reset effectively does the same as No.2 above. However, if No.2 didn’t work, it’s worth trying this way of doing it in case for some reason the boot memory failed to hold the preference setting. You can also do this step instead of Step 2 if you are not comfortable with using the Terminal.

The PRAM reset is done like this:

1. Power down the machine.

2. Locate the following keys on your keyboard in preparation for Step 4:

command–option–P–R

3. Press the ‘power on’ button.

4. Immediately – and before the grey screen appears – hold down ‘command-option-P-R’ all together.

5. Keep them held down until you’ve heard the start-up chime twice. After you release them you should hear it again, and hopefully your Mac will boot up as it should normally.