Turns out, there’s a nice, easy way to get a solid color background of your choice that doesn’t involve making a new image for each color you want. OS X supports transparency in PNGs used as wallpaper, showing the desktop color through the transparent parts. If you use a small transparent PNG and set it to “Center”, you’ll get a solid color desktop, and you can change the color using the color picker next to the “Center” pull-down.

I’ve conveniently attached a 128×128 totally transparent png file below:

Right-click above me!

Save this file to your “Pictures” folder, open up System Preferences, pick Desktop & Screensaver, select the blank picture, and choose “Center” from the orientation pulldown menu. A color selection will appear to the left – click it, and select the color you want your desktop to be.

Simple, but this has been periodically bugging the hell out of me for about a decade now.

Note: This is based on a tip on MacOSXHints, found here:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20021002055217828

Why Digest?

Standard HTTP auth sends the password in plaintext, which is generally bad. On sites with an SSL cert, this is less of a problem, since the traffic is encrypted to begin with, but on smaller sites, it’s a lot of overhead to set up SSL.
Digest authentication hashes the password before sending it – it’s an MD5, which isn’t great, but it’s also not your password flapping in the breeze, so to speak. It’s a good intermediate step to make sure you’re not transmitting plaintext passwords anywhere.

What’s the drawback?

There’s a very small performance hit, and it’s not as easy to set up, but the biggest drawback is that you have to rebuild your apache users file.

So how do I do it?

Digest is very similar to standard Apache access configuration, with just a couple changes.

1. Make sure you have digest enabled – if you have shell access, type:
   a2enmod auth_digest
   otherwise, in your httpd.conf or apache2.conf file, include the line:
   LoadModule auth_digest_module modules/mod_auth_digest.so
2. Create your new Digest authentication file. At the shell, type:
   
cd /var/www/
htdigest -c .digest Internal Admin

   Note: This code creates a user named Admin in the realm “Internal” – we’ll get to realms later.
   You’ll be asked for a password, and then asked to confirm the password.
3. Create your .htaccess file in the directory you want to protect – in this case, we’ll assume it’s http://(yourdomain)/Private:
   
BrowserMatch "MSIE" AuthDigestEnableQueryStringHack=On
AuthType Digest
AuthName "Internal"
AuthDigestDomain /Private
AuthUserFile /var/www/.digest
Require user valid-user

   The first line is necessary to make Digest work for IE6. IE7 seems fine.
   AuthName is the realm you chose earlier – Digest allows you to make multiple “realms” to protect different directories.
   Also, note the AuthUserFile line – Apache docs swear that line should read AuthDigestFile. It shouldn’t.

That’s it – you’re using Digest!
The code is interchangeable anywhere you’d normally use standard Apache password auth, and you can use all the other normal .htaccess commands as well. It’s just a mildly more secure, and horrendously documented, alternative to standard HTTP authentication.

Apache.org: Authentication, Authorization and Access Control
Apache.org: Apache Module mod_auth_digest