How to disable services you don't need and get rid of alerts like "gamed wants to connect to static.gc.apple" in Mac OS X Yosemite & El Capitan.

If you use Little Snitch and are annoyed by constant alerts like this...

.... as the system tried to connect to Apple Game Center there are a couple of things you can do:

1. Add rules to Little Snitch – you can tell Little Snitch to allow or deny this process forever.
2. You can disable the gamed process so that it won't try and connect.

If you have no interest in Game Center, particularly if you are running OS X server, it may be more efficient to disable the gamed process, as well as others you may not be using.

A look at the different approaches to showing/hiding hidden files on Mac OS X Mavericks, Yosemite & El Capitan and some thoughts on what might be the best.

If you are a serious Mac user or (more likely) admin Mac servers you may need to be able to switch back and forth between showing and hiding files that would normally be hidden by default. The .htaccess file on web servers is a greta example of a hidden file you might need to see and then hide again.

There are a few approaches. Probably the most common is to just use native commands in Terminal, but this is time consuming. Another is to use Automator to create a script that toggles back and forth. Another approach involves setting up some very streamlined commands that can be called from Terminal.

This post takes a deeper look at the different ways to show/hide hidden files on Max OS X.