Tips & Tricks

“I just got a brand new MacBook, what should I do with my old Mac?” This is a very common question I get, and I typically give one of four answers depending on who’s asking the question. I’ll go through each choice and hopefully they’ll give you some ideas: 1) Setup the old Mac next … Read More

If your Mac has a SuperDrive or Disc drive, you can boot the Mac from any bootable DVD or CD by using a special keyboard shortcut. The bootable disc can be an OS X system restore disc, an OS X installation disc, or even a third party OS disc like Linux.

You can precisely adjust the volume levels on a Mac by holding down the Shift+Option keys while pressing the Volume Up / Down keys. This lets you adjust the sound level by 1/4 of each notch (as opposed to a full notch), offering precise incremental control to how loud or soft output is from the … Read More

The iPhone and iPod Touch have a built in motion sensor that lets you shake the device to shuffle music, which is a really cool feature… unless you’re running. There are two solutions to this problem, the immediate one is to simply hit the sleep button on the top of the iPhone after you have … Read More

Is a DVD or CD stuck in your MacBook or MacBook Pro? Having a disk jammed in your Mac is really frustrating, but you can usually get it out by using a few different tricks. The methods outlined below are for when a disc is truly stuck in the Mac. Eject a stuck CD/DVD from … Read More

Target Disk Mode is a very handy feature available to use with Mac’s that have Thunderbolt or Firewire ports, and it allows you to use one Mac as an external drive on another host machine. This incredibly useful feature makes troubleshooting, installations, large file transfers, and critical backups extremely easy and very fast. Before beginning, … Read More

You can open a folder into a new window (or tab) by holding down the Command key when you double-click on the folder to open it within the Finder of Mac OS X.

Want to dramatically boost your computing productivity? Get an additional monitor. Whether you have an iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro, Mac Pro, or Mac Mini, you will love it once you have it. I can’t think of a single other addition to a Mac setup that will increase productivity like a second monitor does. You instantly … Read More

“[Name] is an application downloaded from the internet. Are you sure you want to open it?” Starting in new-ish versions of Mac OS X, you may have noticed that when you download a file from the web and go to open it, you will get a prompt saying something along these lines, warning that an … Read More

I was recently asked to do some maintenance work on a relatives iMac, and one of their chief complaints was the speed of Photo Booth, the fun application that takes pictures and distorts them with your iSight. Upon inspection of the machine, I found that Photo Booth was running extremely slow, launching the application would … Read More

The Mac OS X Finder column view is really handy, letting you see multiple folder contents side by side in a hierarchical view. But unless you set the default column width yourself, anytime you launch a new Finder window, the columns size will be reset on a per window basis.

Computer cables are always getting in the way, falling on the floor, getting tangled up, or otherwise becoming some form of hassle, right? Well rather than go crazy, you can use this really neat binder clip solution to organize each cable. There’s not much to this trick, the binder clips are the same ones you … Read More

“Ahhhh my Mac isn’t working! I need to reset the SMC!” You have tried rebooting, you’ve reset the PRAM, you’ve done it all, but your Mac is still behaving strangely. What next? In certain circumstances, resetting your Mac System Management Controller (SMC) can be a solution. This is sometimes necessary to restore normal lower level … Read More

You can set Mac OS X to automatically display file and folder information directly within the Finder windows of the file system, much like the desktop of OS X.

If you’re moving from a Windows PC to a Mac, then you’ll probably want to move your iTunes library with it. This lets you keep all of your music, apps, and downloaded media, and you won’t skip a beat. This article will cover moving an iTunes library from a PC to a Mac OS X … Read More

Renaming a folder in Mac OS X is very easy, and there’s a few different ways you can do it. We’ll focus on the three most common tricks to quickly rename any file or directory folder on the Mac, two of which are done through the familiar graphical interface of the Finder file system, and … Read More

Do you have two Word doc files that you need to see the differences between, and compare the two easily side-by-side to review changes? You can easily compare Word documents against each other with the Microsoft Word app in Mac OS X and Windows, Word of course is part of the Microsoft Office Suite, and … Read More

If you want to beef up the security on your Mac with a simple settings adjustment, you can enable the built-in software firewall. This offers a layer of protection by blocking many ports for common protocols, incoming connections, and other potential attack vectors. Generally, the Mac OS X Firewall is not necessary to use for … Read More