GarageBand for iPad – Overview

Working in the store, I always hear people talk about how using keyboard shortcuts makes them feel more productive or efficient. The other…

A long-time Small Dog customer asked me about an item that fleetingly appeared in his dock. It was a generic-looking green icon with a zipper on it called Archive Utility, and when he used Spotlight to search for it, it was nowhere to be found.

Many of the items you download and receive in your email are compressed files. File compression is nothing new, and is exactly what you think it is: when you compress a file, you make it smaller. This reduces bandwidth loads and expenses on the server side, and can help you save disk space on your computer. However, compressed files cannot be directly accessed; they must first be decompressed.

Back in the days of twenty megabyte hard drives (my LC II had a 20 megabyte drive in the early nineties), file compression seemed more relevant for conservation of hard disk space. These days, it’s more often used to shrink email attachments and other downloads. Mac OS X always included a built-in compressor and decompressor. By right-clicking on any file or folder in the Finder and selecting “Compress” from the contextual (pop-down) menu, your Mac will create an archive in zip format.

When you open a compressed file, Mac OS X launches an application called Archive Utility. Its sole purpose is to compress and decompress files. It’s located in /System/Library/CoreServices, and Spotlight doesn’t search there. If you poke around the /System/Library and /Library areas of your hard drive, there’s plenty to learn if you Google intelligently and use extreme caution when moving or deleting anything. Actually–don’t move or delete anything. Just explore and learn!

I’m in love with my hard drives. They really are miraculous devices, storing billions of bytes and copying that data to and from drive to drive at amazing speeds. I realize that the world of external storage is pretty vast, with lots of names and terms and numbers, and thought it would be good to do a quickly summarize the differences between external drives.

The first distinction I make between external drives is their physical size. The case around the actual drive may vary in size but there are only two sizes of hard drives–2.5-inch laptop drives and 3.5-inch desktop drives. Desktop drives require more power than can be supplied via USB or FireWire, and so they are considered “desktop” hard drives because you need to plug them into power separately.

Laptop drives often can run off USB power supplied by a USB port, so they are considered more portable. Just like comparing laptops and desktops, you will generally get more performance and space out of a desktop drive than you would from a laptop drive.

If you ever work with large amounts of video or want to play media off of an external drive, then a faster RPM (revolutions per minute) is worth buying. If you are just trying to keep your files backed up, then a lower RPM drive will work fine. The two specifications of drive speeds on the consumer market right now are 5400 and 7200 RPM.

The third thing to check is the connection type of the external drive. Most drives use only USB, but some drives offer FireWire 400, 800, and/or eSATA. For general backup, USB is perfect because it’s fast, reliable, and can be plugged into almost any computer made in the last 5-10 years.

FireWire is a connection also known as IEEE 1394. As anyone who works with video knows, FireWire is often required to download video from a camcorder or videocamera. Drives that have FireWire are generally more professionally geared because FireWire is a lower latency connection that makes transferring lots of small files faster than USB.

eSATA is a very fast data connection but does not supply power. eSata is the fastest type of connection commonly seen in external drives, but Apple does not build this port into its computers at this time.

How many times have we all forgotten to either plug in either our cell phone or iPod? Hapy did just that not too…

Did you know that Small Dog Electronics offers Parallels Desktop for Mac pre-loaded on a 512MB Kingston Flash Key? It works just like…

I’ve been a trackball user most of my computing life. I never liked mice. Too much movement required and not particularly ergonomic. That…