I have a Mac mighty mouse [ed note: actually, it's an "Apple Mighty Mouse"] device and am going crazy without my right-click capability. Is there some solution or something I can hack, or am I stuck having to buy something third-party?

I have an Airport Express device and would really like to use it to enable a wireless printer on my local network. I know it can do that, but I have no idea how to hook it all up. Can you advise? I have a Mac running Mac OS X 10.4.9 and an older Apple Airport Express.

I have a ton of mp3 format audio files on my Mac OS X system and want to chop a short segment out of it to use as a custom ringtone for my Apple iPhone. What's the solution?

I keep getting errors about not being able to establish a secure connection with my mail server in Entourage because of a bad root certificate. My ISP has sent me the necessary "trusted root certificate" file, but I have no idea how to install it. Help!

Okay, this is driving me crazy! I applied an update a few days ago to my Mac OS X system (version 10.4.10), I think it was for a SuperDrive driver on my MacBook Pro, and it came up with an error message indicating it wasn't necessary for my system. No problem, but now I get that error each time I boot my computer!

I'm trying to install Windows XP on my new Apple MacBook Pro using Apple's Boot Camp utility, and I'm finding a very weird issue: when I start up the WinXP installation within Bootcamp, it goes through various steps then finally gets to a screen where it needs me to press Enter to proceed. Problem is, my keyboard's completely dead at that point and I can't ever proceed! How do I fix this?

Bought a Sprint PC Card for my Mac PowerBook so I can get onto their high speed EVDO network throughout the United States and found that it's a nice, new Sierra Wireless AirCard 595, which is apparently the fastest card available. Nice. But when I plug it into my PowerBook, nothing at all happens. What's the trick to get this card to work with Mac OS X?

Last month I was visiting a friend's office and was given the password to access their wireless wifi network. I want to use it again, but they've changed the access point (base station) name and now I don't have the password. I can ask, but surely there's some cool Mac way to recover the old password?

Dave, we have a server security problem in Mac OSX, it is being remotely accessed by a former sys admin who has been stealing our business and the webfiles that go with them. Could you work with me to help lock down this machine?

He set the machine up, it is one of several we run. As a result, he knows the root level password. I am finding when we try to change the MySQL root password, which is the same, the websites which rely on MySQL can no longer "see" their data tables. We also must shut out this fellow's access through terminal, or change the server's root name and pass.

Help!

Hello, I'm using a Linksys WRT54GS Router to connect my G4 Mac PowerBook w/ OSX 10.4.2 to the Web, and it's working great. However, I created a closed WPA network internally with Airport and now I can't seem to change the security setting without losing that WPA signal. This WPA network is all the router/Powerbook recognizes, and I can't lower the setting for friends with WiFi laptops. I know my SSID and lil' password but not the WPA. So where or how can I change the security setting with Airport? Or is it permanent?

I've fallen in love with Dashboard on my new Mac OS X Tiger system, but I hate having to type f12 to get them to show up. Is it possible to have my dashboard widgets show up on my regular desktop?

I bought a used PowerBook G4. The original owners have moved to Canada and I do not have their phone number. The problem is that I do not know the administrator's password. I am unable to make changes on the computer or add software without a password. How do I get a new password when I don't even know the existing one?

Dave, I'm following your setup for installing Ubuntu, Yellowdog, and OSX on a G4. I purchased a new secondary hard drive and have successfully installed OSX, Ubuntu Linux and Yellowdog Linux 4.0.1.

I've installed the three OS's and have reached the step where Yellowdog now takes precedence over ubuntu and Ubuntu is no longer visible to the boot sequence. Please tell me exactly how to get YaBoot to recognize both OS's.

Dave, I need to conduct a number of searches through more than 2500 text files. Each search is for a different specific text string. The text files are on my Mac hard drive (Mac OS X 10.3.7) and are arranged into folders within folders within folders. I want the result in a new text file. I think I should be able to do this using some sort of grep or script but cannot figure out how to do it. Please help.

I keep hearing that if any of my programs start to act oddly within Mac OS X that one culprit can be the preferences file for that particular program. That's all well and good, but what if the corrupted preferences file is messing up things I can't see? Surely there's some way to check or verify the preference files to ensure all is well?

Dave, I remember in MacOS 9 that it was pretty easy to disable guest access to your Macintosh, but in Mac OS X I can't find any clue how to change this so that while I offer file sharing off my server, it's only for people with actual accounts. Can you shed some light on this?

Please HELP !! My G4 PowerBook was in an auto accident. I'm running OS X Panther. It booted once just fine. NOW all I get is ":/ root#" One time a guy gave me a script that got me up and running, but I don't remember what it was.

Dave, prior to my finding your great article on Can I selectively Remove Safari Favicon Icons? I took the brute force strategy of deleting all the cached icons in the Safari library folder so that the browser would see my new favicon. But now instead of showing the favicon.ico graphic, crazy Safari doesn't show me any favorite icons at all. What could be wrong?

I've been slowly adding all the nifty features to my new Web site and am going a bit crazy with Safari. I changed my favicon.ico favorites icon for my Web site, but Safari insists that it's not right, though when I view the site in Firefox, Camino or any other browser it's fine. How do I get Safari to be happy?

Alright, this is pretty geeky, but is there a way I can grab all my Mac OS X Safari bookmarks using a shell script so I can manipulate the data? I've peeked into the bookmarks file and yow, it's one hairy data file!

Dave, I have a pile of addresses in my Palm Desktop address book on my Mac, but I'd really like to be able to use them from within some shell scripts, particularly to be able to build a quick reference of names and phone numbers. Is that even possible?

I recently bought a very nice device, a 512MB Lexar JumpDrive Secure USB flash drive. Only barely bigger than a pack of gum, it not only lets me carry lots of data in my pocket, it also includes software from Lexar that makes it a breeze to partition the disk to have an encrypted disk that's portable between Mac and Windows. Except I couldn't get the application to install on one of my Mac OS X systems, my PowerBook.

Dave, I've recently bought a little USB flash drive and am finding it is a great way to transport files between my office and home. And it's tiny! However, my only concern is that if I lose it, someone else can easily get access to all of my stuff by plugging it into their own computer. What can I do to minimize this? Encrypt or secure the data? Or...?

If you've been reading my entries, you already know that I've been working on installing different Linuxes on my Mac OS X PowerBook system, with success. All works well until you actually have more than one Linux installed on the system, creating a tri-boot, rather than dual-boot Apple computer. The problem is that, by default, each Linux installs its own version of yaboot which only knows about Mac OS X or itself. So I needed to figure out how to significantly modify the yaboot configuration file to support both Ubuntu and Yellow Dog Linux simultaneously.

I've been working on installing some different Linux operating systems on my G4-based Apple PowerBook as alternative operating systems to the (elegant) Mac OS X. Why? Because they're there. :-)

Once installed, Ubuntu Linux and Yellow Dog Linux both add something called yaboot which then controls the boot-up sequence. This boot control application that lets you pick which operating system you want to have run gives you about 15 seconds to pick between Linux and Mac OS X then defaults to launching Ubuntu. Not what I wanted at all.

I've spent a lot of time poking around with my extensive iTunes database and had lots of fun figuring out different ways to address my needs with a fully digitized music collection. When a reader asked whether there was a way to just list those artists in her iTunes collection for whom she had more than one album, I thought "ah, this sounds up my alley", and so it is.

This is a fun question: "How do I change the icon shown for my hard disk on my Mac? I used to know how to do this with the older MacOS, but not with Mac OS X."

A reader who is rather quite technically inclined writes to me saying:

I'm experimenting with installing Ubuntu Linux on my Macintosh, and it's working great except now the default operating system upon boot is Linux, not Mac OS X. How do I fix that??

A reader writes:

I've started to go through your shell script book Wicked Cool Shell Scripts but there is still something I'm unclear on. I'm showing my ignorance here, but how exactly do you save a shell script so you can use it later?"

Here's an interesting question I received from a reader:

"In Mac OS X, have you ever done "Get Info" on a shell script, made it open with Terminal, and had it forcibly execute every time you open the Terminal app and then exit? Any idea how to fix this? I've changed the path to the script and now it complains that the script is not there but still forceably exits after failing to execute the original script."

A reader writes:

"I've really learned a lot from reading your book Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther, but I'm still unsure what's involved in tweaking my WiFi configuration from the command line. Help?