Category: Tips and Tricks

The past few months here at Small Dog we started carrying Flip Video Cameras. These small, lightweight and power cameras can record in HD and are as easy to use as… well… your Mac. Here’s a cool modification you can make for your Flip Camera to create a wide-angle effect without having to buy an…

Emailing entire webpages (complete with graphics, formatting, links, etc.) is very easy in Safari. I often email entire webpages to myself to reference later—for example, recipe pages, confirmation forms, and directions. It can also be useful to email an entire webpage to a friend or client. There are two ways to do this in Safari:…

For about a year now I’ve been using a Mac mini at home as a consumer-level entertainment server. It’s a baseline model that I added a 320GB internal hard drive and an external 2TB RAID to. It’s a very basic setup, the Mac mini is connected to my television for video output, a receiver that…

My mailbox swelled to the point that the “comparing notes with server” function seen in Mail’s Activity viewer (found in the Window menu) would take almost a minute to complete. I looked into it a bit, and found that I had saved over 40,000 messages in the past few years. This included communication with customers,…

Today we had a wonderful customer in the store who had just switched to Apple by buying a new MacBook, and was finding difficulty utilizing his company’s web-based calendar and communications website. The site in question required Internet Explorer(yuck!) 6.0 or higher to operate. When browsed to using Safari or Firefox, the site would propagate…

A friend recently sent me an email, questioning why his MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM was “getting slower and slower, with an increasing frequency of the appearance of the SRWOD (spinny rainbow wheel of death).” This is something I occasionally hear about, but haven’t experienced (except for Safari randomly bogging down for several seconds).…

After reading Ed’s article a couple weeks ago about the “Paste and Match Style” feature, I was reminded of two of my absolute favorite applications that enhanced my copy and paste capabilities and generally just made me an even happier Mac user. The first application, PTHPasteboard by PTH Consulting, has become such a vital part…

The dock got spiffy with the release of Leopard, but there have been mixed reviews of the new design. I’m mostly a fan of the new look, but I wish there was a better way of visually distinguishing between visible and hidden applications, like making hidden items darker or transparent. So, I rummaged around my…

My MacBook Pro was acting strangely last week: slow application launch times, incessant beach-balling, fans at full speed all the time, hot to the touch, and miserable battery life. The battery gave out on me in the middle of a Keynote presentation, after which I set aside all else that needed doing so I could…

Since I bought a MacBook Air from our first delivery of them earlier this year, I’ve grown more and more attached to it. I take it with me when I travel, and it serves as my main home computer. Combined with the AirPort Disk functionality of the newest AirPort Extreme Base Station, the MacBook Air’s…