Category: Tips and Tricks

We’re headed into the fourth spill season of the year, the winter holidays. The other three are the end of the spring semester, Fourth of July, and the beginning of the fall semester. Typically during these times of the year we see an increase in the amount of machines checked into service because of some…

With so many Macs in everyday use at Small Dog, we’re bound to run into hardware failures from time to time. We also follow our own advice and ensure that every company-owned computer is covered by AppleCare. Last week, I returned from my lunch break and clicked my Magic Mouse to wake my laptop, but…

Do embedded flash movies and other items ruin your browsing experience? Do you find flash as contemptible as Enron? Do you want to stop Flash from loading during a browsing session, or from running down your battery? Well, welcome into your computing experience ClickToFlash. I found ClickToFlash on a whim while reading through blogs and…

Many of us who have Leopard and Snow Leopard have already played around with the great screen sharing capabilities. In both Leopard and Snow Leopard, Apple offers screen sharing using a lightweight VNC client aptly named ‘Screen Sharing.’ It has a similar look and feel to Apple’s more robust remote management software, Remote Desktop, but…

I find myself using the Application Switcher function of Mac OS X dozens of times each hour during the work day. If you haven’t tried it yet, you can view it by holding down the Command key while repeatedly pressing the Tab key. There’s more to the Application Switcher than just switching applications. You can…

It’s no secret that I am a big fan of keyboard shortcuts. If I can keep my hands on the keyboard, and not on a trackpad or mouse, to issue commands, I’m saving myself time and being more productive. Most of the time I navigate the Finder and many dialog boxes without the mouse at…

If you’ve ever called Small Dog or Apple for technical support because your Mac wouldn’t boot, odds are it was suggested that you attempt a reinstallation of your operating system from the disks that came with your computer. The problem here is that if the reinstallation fails for whatever reason, there is no apparent way…

Safari 5 brought a slew of new features but one of the most exciting features that is yet to be officially unveiled is support for extensions. For Firefox and Chrome users, you may already be familiar with the added functionality extensions can provide to the browsing experience. Safari 5 is jumping on board with the…

These are magic words to live by when it comes to cleaning up your computer’s hard drive. As things tend to come in waves, the past week has brought me a slew of clients who began getting the dreaded “Your startup disk is almost full” error and so they started chucking files and folders that…

All versions of Mac OS X have a system called Keychain to store passwords. You can open up the Keychain Access program from your Utilities folder to see just what’s being stored, and to manually maintain the database. One particularly useful feature in Keychain Access is the ability to look up forgotten passwords. It is…