Category: How-To

You might be thinking, “Well, just pop in the OS X disc and click ‘Install.’” If it were that easy, I wouldn’t bother writing about the various methods one can use to install OS X! Most people are able to install with no questions asked, but what if you don’t have a DVD drive? Or…

Of all of the programs I use on my computer, Apple Mail is definitely the one constant. At work, flurries of emails shoot back and forth feverishly about new product releases, upcoming events, and interoffice bocce tournaments; at home, they move at a somewhat slower pace, but they remain my connection to the friends and…

I enjoy all of the Take Control ebooks. They are among the best instructional books I’ve used in any format. Take Control titles are mainly Mac-related, though a few non-Mac topics sneak in too – for example, “Take Control of Thanksgiving Dinner.” The experts who write the Take Control ebooks seem to totally understand what…

by Matt, matt@smalldog.com What do you do when you suspect your Apple remote is broken, and you have only one Mac to test with? All Macs, except the Mac Pro, now ship with Apple Remotes, and very few remotes have required battery replacement in my tenure as a repair guy. However, some remotes have simply…

With the release of iWork ‘08 there is little reason to stick with MS Office. Pages is a great word processor with page layout capabilities and it will do something that MS Word for Mac will not do – open MS Word for Windows ‘07 documents! Numbers is also a great alternative to Excel with…

MacTreat #26 All Intel Macs (with the exception of the Mac Pro) ship with a small Apple Remote, which is intended to control Apple’s Front Row application. Over the weekend, Kali reported that Apple posted a tip that mentioned that you can use the Apple Remote to control your Keynote ‘08 applications. The problem is…

If you want to type the stylized Apple logo that Apple uses in all it’s advertising, simply hold down the option-shift-k keys all at the same time. This only works on Macs, and it doesn’t look good in plain text, so try it in a rich text document, such as a Word document, Pages document,…

This little trick is something I just discovered this morning. If you select a file that you’ve downloaded from the web and hit Apple+I you get a little window that shows information about the file. I use the Apple+I command mostly on the Macintosh HD icon to show how much space I’ve used and how…

by Matt, matt@smalldog.com (Posted by Ed) I’m in the middle of a move right now, and perhaps the worst part is disassembling (and reassembling) the home theatre. 250 pounds of speakers, about 180 pounds of amplifiers, big heavy furniture, miles of cable, a Mac Mini, a giant television, and a whack of hard drives make…

Many people have asked us how to “reuse” a regular blank CDR, so they can burn data to it multiple times. This is typically called session burning. You can purchase dedicated applications do this (such as Toast or Disco), but you can also use Disk Utility which is built into OS 10.4. It takes a…