Category: How-To

Audio books have been around much longer then iTunes so it’s possible you have a couple Audio books you’ve purchased and ripped onto your computer. Unfortunately these audio books won’t really work as well as the audio books purchased from the iTunes Music Store. The audio books from iTMS allow bookmarking, you can pick up…

By Matt@Smalldog.com Recently the menus for fast user switching and the menu bar clock have been malfunctioning on on my PowerMac at work: I would get the spinning beach ball whenever I’d move the mouse over them. It seemed very odd to me to have just a few menus lock up. I fired up terminal,…

By Jimmy@smalldog.com Do you have a dead iPod Mini, maybe the screen is cracked, the battery is dead, or the logic board is fried? Well I’ve had that happen to me and I pulled mine apart and made good use of the hard drive inside. If you iPod works fine, I don’t recommend pulling it…

By Art@Smalldog.com There are a number of people who prefer to obtain full manuals for their new computers and become upset when they find nothing substantial in the box with their purchase. For a number of years now, Apple has chosen to reduce the amount of printed materials that come in the accessory kit. This…

Mac Treat #7: There are a couple of ways to make your Mac shut down or go to sleep immediately, without a pop-up dialog or spinning beach ball. To put your Mac to sleep in jiffy: Hold down the Option-Eject-Command (the key with the Apple on it) keys all at the same time for about…

Apple recently released a firmware update for all Intel Macs. This update fixes problems with Boot Camp, and resolves start up and wake-from-sleep issues. This firmware update is sometimes referred to as an EFI firmware update, as it updates the Extensible Firmware Interface used by Intel on their current generation of processors. EFI provides the…

Here are the different types of user accounts that can be created and operated in OS 10.4. Knowledge of the different account types can help keep your computer secure. 1) The User account is the least privileged account. It allows a user to modify settings for their own account but not for others and they…

UPDATE: Find our Thom Hartmann Podcast Page here. It is now updated with both the iTunes Podcast and the direct KPOJ Podcast. Thanks for listening! Small Dog Electronics is a supporter of the Thom Hartmann show. A listener named Judith S. suggested we remind people it’s possible to download more than music on the iPod…

By Todd@Smalldog.com In our internet and computer driven lives our entire livelihood could exists as a string of 1’s and 0’s on a computer’s hard drive. As much as I trust my mac to the full extent (which is more than I can say for the paperweight windows box next to it) I understand the…

Emptying the trash in OS X can be a pain. It’s simply one of those easy-to-do-but-ever-so-arduous tasks that devour microseconds of life (actually, many computer-related tasks do that.) Here are two ways to empty the trash moderately fast, and a third way to empty the trash in a flash. Method one: make sure you are…