In terminal, enter the following (in several lines here, just for readability):

Log out and back in.

There is no step three.

Every now and then, I’ll get a Dock item with a notification badge that just won’t go away. It has happened with App Store, Calendar, Messages: an annoying red disk alerting me that some number of updates, invitations or conversations require my attention… except they don’t. The badge is stuck, an annoying vestige of some aborted operation, and no amount of relaunching, refreshing or restarting seems to cure the problem. What does appear to work is killing the Dock process. To do this, simply launch Activity Monitor, find the item named “Dock,” and click Quit Process. The Dock will disappear, relaunching a few moments later. And behold! No more phantom badge.

After upgrading to OS X Lion and iCloud, I was disappointed to learn that remotely connecting to drives shared on an Airport Extreme is apparently no longer a supported feature. After a bit of experimentation, however, I found that—at least for now—it is possible to mount an Airport Disk directly by doing the following:

1. In Finder, select Go > Connect to Server…
2. Enter something like this, replacing placeholder names with the real names of your Airport Extreme, .Mac account and shared drive: afp://My Airport Extreme._afpovertcp._tcp.mydotmacaccount.members.mac.com/My%20Shared%20Drive

Whenever I have to reinstall iTunes, I also have to reapply the hacks that make it behave the way I like. Mostly for my own convenience, here is a list of the hacks I use.

To get rid of the Ping drop down menus next to artists and so forth, type this in Terminal:

To enable half stars in track and album ratings:

To restore the little store link arrows removed when Ping was introduced:

And to make the store link arrows filter the library rather than launch the store:

To permanently enable pretty list colors in the terminal, first enter this command:

Once in nano, add the following line to your profile:

If, like me, you like to use a dark background in terminal, also add this line. It’ll lighten up the unreadable blue used for directories: