Category: Tips and Tricks

Time Machine made a backer-upper out of me. For far too long I’d relied on my iDisk to back up important documents, but I never kept an easily restorable backup of my stuff. Now that I have a huge hard drive hooked up to my AirPort Extreme at home, my work and home computers are…

Back in the day, I had a 14” Wallstreet PowerBook and pimped it out with 192MB of RAM. Under the classic Mac OS, it was easy to create a RAM disk, and there were plenty of reasons to do so. I was taking a Photoshop class when I bought the computer, and wanted to get…

Earlier this week I had a near-catastrophic issue with Mac OS X Mail on my work computer (a pretty sweet 24-inch 2.8GHz iMac with 4GB of RAM). Every time I launched Mail, the iMac collapsed to a dead crawl. Beyond an occasional slow-motion tremor, all applications seized up and stopped responding. This included the Finder,…

Most of us know about the simple Apple-Shift-3 keystroke to capture the entirety of your screen to a file on your desktop. I find myself writing documentation to be posted to our internal wiki (hosted by Leopard Server) and also find myself posting images to our blog, and wishing that screenshots were of a higher…

I find the hourly backups performed by Time Machine to be a bit excessive for my needs, and wish the Time Machine preferences offered more flexibility. My backup device is a high-capacity hard drive attached to a first-generation AirPort Extreme (802.11n), and I don’t like to ask the drive to spin up on the hour,…

The MacBook Air and newest MacBook Pros include MultiTouch-capable trackpads that let you rotate, resize, and gesture your way through many common tasks. For instance, you can increase and decrease font size in Safari by making a pinching gesture with two fingers on the trackpad. You can use three fingers swiped left or right to…

Image courtesy dvice.com The Mac vs. PC debate: it seems like a competition as old as time… (can you remember what life was like before computers??) Buying a computer isn’t always easy, and while improved cross-platform compatibility (read: Mac and PC files playing nicely) is a great feature to have in a computer these days,…

The Remote Disk function of MacBook Air works quite well, but not all of us have the external SuperDrive, nor another computer with optical drive and 802.11n, so the function might not be terrifically fast for you. Whenever I buy a new computer, the first thing I do is create disk images of the restore…

Recently with the help of David Boyd, I have figured out how to not only download custom Leopard docks but also create my own dock graphics. The day after the big release of Leopard in the Burlington store we noticed something funny with the 20in iMac. The dock wasn’t the traditional silver color, but was…

In the ever present quest for Mac knowledge, many Small Dog customers have been looking to books, classes and even Small Dog consultants for help. Thanks to a very informative customer by the name of Jeff Marcotte, we have discovered yet another fantastic way to further your Mac knowledge. It comes in the form of…