Category: How-To

By Matt@Smalldog.com Small Dog’s home base in Waitsfield experienced an unexpected power outage this morning. I wrote this on a MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 2.33GHZ 15” machine, which a half hour ago had a full charge but only estimated 1 hour 45 minutes of remaining battery life. I know from experience with my 1.67GHZ…

By Matt@Smalldog.com In Mac OS 10.4 Tiger a new feature was added to Disk Utility that writes random data to the free space on your hard drive. “Who cares,” you ask. Well, if you work with sensitive information of any kind, and delete it at any point, that data is still on your drive even…

I am not sure how I missed these but Parallels has some really great message boards with tons of helpful posts and people. I even saw a thread that someone put together with full images of various Linux distributions. All you have to do is download and unzip the images. Most of them seem to…

Got a Mac with an iSight? Got a buddy who uses iChat, but does not have an iSight? You can still initiate a one way video chat with them. In OS 10.4, to initiate one-way video chatting, launch the latest version of iChat. Right-click or control-click on the green phone symbol next to your buddies…

By Matt@Smalldog.com Spring cleaning is an interesting phenomenon. Many of us feel compelled to thoroughly clean our physical living and work spaces when the weather warms, the snow melts, and the mud takes over. In a few weeks I’ll be packing up my sweaters in a cedar chest and breaking moving warm weather clothing to…

To followup on Art’s helpful post on effective use of the Apple Knowledge Base, here is a helpful article summarizing how one can transfer music from the iTunes library of an old computer to the iTunes library of a new computer via an iPod! This article, accurately titled “how to use your iPod to move…

By Art@Smalldog.com One resource I find myself turning to almost daily is Apple’s Knowledge Base website located within Apple.com/Support. Being able to quickly find help is important as we take tech support phone calls, answer email, and research questions for our customers. I have found that knowing some keywords becomes handy in order to narrow…

Ever wonder how to find and use special text characters such as ©, ™, £, ¢, ‰, ƒ on your Mac? I use a Matias Tactile Pro keyboard that used to have these images printed on the keys – but they’ve since worn away. The Apple Pro keyboards and Apple laptop keyboards don’t have these…

If you’re running low on disk space or just want to slim down the sizes of some applications on your computer then this tip might prove useful! While reading an Ars technica article I found that you can remove languages from individual applications. As an example they use iPhoto. Do note that you will need…

Print it out, fold in two, and trim around the edges – keep it on your desk next to your Mac to master the key board shortcuts today! Update: Some people are reporting that the PDF download won’t open, or is locking Safari up. It works for everyone at Small Dog, and for the vast…