In this post on Apple's discussion site, user dearlt posted a great tip on how to get Safari to use a default zoom level of your own choosing (instead of the standard 100%). I've edited the post a bit to make it clearer, but the basic instructions are unchanged.

1. Create a file (using a pure text editor) named defaultzoom.css, or any name you like -- just make sure it has a .css extension.
2. Copy and paste the following code into the file:

   body {
   zoom: 130%;
   }

   Change 130 to whatever number suits you. Anything greater than 100 means zoom in; less than 100 means zoom out. Don't forget the % percent sign!
   
   If you're using TextEdit on a Mac, be sure to have it create .txt documents by default (not .rft) before copying and pasting the above text. You can set this by going to Preferences » New Document » Format. When you save the file, a warning will come up stating that .txt is the standard extension, but you will be given the option of .txt or .css.
3. Save your file and close the editor.
4. In Safari, go to Preferences » Advanced. Under Style Sheet, select Other, and point it to the file you created. You may need to restart Safari for the change to take effect.

Voila. Hope that helps someone. (Note that this should work on both OS X and Windows versions of Safari.

Ever thought that Photo Booth doesn't provide enough image effects? Probably not; there are sixteen (very cool) effects built in. However, there are a couple of ways to get more effects. You could use this hint to add more effects directly to Photo Booth. If you'd rather not do that, though, try these alternatives.

If you want to make a new image, first open Automator and make a blank workflow. Drag the Take Video Snapshot action from the Photos library into your workflow (strangely, Take Picture does not work). Choose your file name and location, and select Take Picture Automatically, then run the workflow. Click the effects button next to the snapshot button, and choose your effect. There are twenty-nine effects there that aren't in Photo Booth, including Blur, Pixelate, and City Lights.

Alternatively, if you want to simply modify an image and don't care too much about size, here's another way: Open Address Book and create a new contact. While in Edit mode, drag your image into the picture well. Then, choose effects again and go to town. When you're done, drag it back out. You can apply more effects by dragging in again, choosing another effect, and dragging out. Of course, this can also be used to apply multiple effects to existing contact photos.

Over the weekend, in preparation for an upcoming review of the newest versions of Fusion and VirtualBox, I needed to set up a new Boot Camp partition on my MacBook Pro. Because Windows 7 isn't yet officially supported by Apple, and Vista isn't widely used, I chose to install XP Pro. My XP Pro disc is a Service Pack 2 release, so after booting into Windows, the system found and downloaded a bunch of updates to apply, chief among them Service Pack 3 (SP3).

The update process went smoothly, until the system tried to install SP3. The update process started, then died with this error:

An error occured while copying file osloader.ntd. Cannot copy file to destination directory. Click Retry to retry the operation or click Cancel.

At that point, the only solution was to bail on the update, and have Windows back out the changes it had already made. I tried a few times, but always got stuck at the same point. After a fair bit of digging and hair pulling, I found this Apple Support document that describes the problem, its cause, and (most importantly) the solution.

You can read the details in the support doc, but in case that ever vanishes, here's a quick recap. The problem is caused by Windows' insistence on writing the SP3 update to the first partition it sees. Because Boot Camp 3 mounts your Mac OS disk as a read-only disk in Windows, this is the first partition the system sees, and the SP3 install fails.

More pointing out a new feature (though it is one that's not documented) than a hint.

In Mail 4.1, you no longer need to type the http:// part of a URL to make it clickable for the recipient. In previous versions of Mail, the text would not become a link without http://. Unfortunately, Mail still does not show your URL as a link while composing the email.

I was working on a software organizing database in Bento, and I discovered that you can use the 'Choose custom image' window, available in a media field, to extract the icon of an application by dragging and dropping it onto the picture frame. I tested it in Address Book (the only other application I was sure had the same media field) and it worked, too.

In Address Book, for instance, edit a contact, then double-click on the picture field to bring up the custom window for setting that contact's picture. Drag and drop an application into the box, and its icon will appear. Or click the Choose button, and navigate to the Application in the file dialog. Once the icon is there, it can be copied and pasted.

This works in, at the least, 10.5 and 10.6.

[robg adds: While this works, it seems more of a curiosity than anything else -- you can copy any application's icon by just copying the application in the Finder, then opening a new window in Preview. I know we've run that tidbit as a hint before, but I couldn't find it when searching.]

Have you ever had to move your iTunes library, or done any other task that popped up a lengthy progress window? If so, you know that this dialog prevents you from using iTunes, as you can't get to any of its menus or controls.

This is very annoying -- especially as I'm currently consolidating my library to a network volume over a wireless connection. Although all the songs have all been moved, iTunes is checking them all. Thus, I'm looking at being locked out of iTunes for about 10 hours.

The good news is that iTunes is extremely multi-threaded. So even if it's busy on some task that blocks the UI, you can use the iPhone's iTunes Remote application to control music playback (or connect from another copy, and play from there). It also responds to AppleScript events in this state, so you still use most alarm clock software as well.

If you have already installed Rosetta on your Intel Mac in Snow Leopard, you may want to disable it, so as to prevent the system from running PowerPC apps without informing you that they are non-native to your system's architecture. The reason for disabling Rosetta is not so much to save space (as it's only 2.1MB), but more about keeping your system running native apps for higher performance.

To disable Rosetta, simply run the following command in Terminal:

sudo sysctl -w kern.exec.archhandler.powerpc=/usr/libexec/oah/RosettaNonGrata

To re-enable Rosetta after it's been disabled, just run the following command in Terminal:

sudo sysctl -w kern.exec.archhandler.powerpc=/usr/libexec/oah/translate

These commands set a system environment variable that tells the system which program to run when you try to launch a non-native app: to ask you to install Rosetta, or to run it using Rosetta.

[robg adds: I tested these commands, and they work as described.]

If you use the emacs-app port from MacPorts to run a GUI version of emacs (called Emacs from here on), there's a problem with the app: TextExpander won't expand abbreviations in Emacs buffers, since it wants to transmit the expanded text using a Command-V event -- which is paste in OS X apps, but scroll-down in Emacs.

But if you happen to have a keyboard remapping utility, such as QuicKeys, there is a way to get these two to play together:

1. Add the following to your .emacs file:

   (setq ns-alternate-modifier 'alt)
   (define-key global-map [(alt ?v)] 'scroll-down)
   (define-key global-map [(meta ?v)] 'yank)

2. Restart emacs.
3. In QuicKeys, or some other key remapping utility, remap Command-V for emacs to generate the keystroke Option-V instead.

The result of this little hack is that when the user types Command-V, the system sends Option-V, which does what Command-V used to do. And when TextExpander sends Command-V, it causes 'yank' to be invoked, which pastes in the expanded text.

After upgrading to OS 10.6, I noticed that Microsoft Word and Excel were slow to launch. They would each go through the 'Optimizing Font Menu Performance' task every time they were launched; normally this is done only after the apps are installed or updated. The problem turned out to be duplicate fonts installed on the system, and this can be easily resolved using the Font Book application.

If any duplicate fonts are present, they will be identified by a yellow warning triangle in the Font column, and these can be safely disabled. The easy way to do that is to choose Edit » Select Duplicated Fonts (to select all duplicates) and then Edit » Resolve Duplicates (to disable the duplicates).

Note that Snow Leopard has changed font handling in many ways; that link contains detailed information on the changes.

[robg adds: You can disable duplicates in 10.5, too. I marked this one Snow Leopard Only due to the menu item that doesn't exist in 10.5, and it seems the duplicate fonts weren't causing a problem in 10.5.]

I use Apple's Backup.app to back up files to my iDisk, and this has been working successfully for years. Recently, though, I started getting backup failures. After a lot of head scratching, it seems that Backup was failing because of a series of files that were user read-only, and had no permissions at all for group and other.

Quite why this should matter at all, I've no idea -- especially because the files get bundled into a DMG, and it's the DMG that gets uploaded to iDisk, yet it was the upload bit that was failing. Maybe keen commenters can get to the bottom of it!. Anyway, I've not done any further proofing, but suffice it to say that running the following Terminal command on the directory of files to back up solved the problem:

$ chmod -R +r .

Alternatively, you could use the Finder's Get Info window. (This is all on OS X 10.6.1, by the way.)