Mac Lab: An Apple Macintosh OS X, Mac & PC Blog

Tips & Tricks: open applications

Number One tip:  stop quitting your most-used applications! I see scores of people use their PCs. Almost everyone will do the following: Open their browser. Quit (close) their browser. Open their email program. Quit their email program. Open Word. Quit Word. Then they repeat this process. Over and over. STOP. Here’s the tip: keep your [...]

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Mac running slow? Check your Memory

I find myself sharing this tip every week. When your Mac has been used for several days/weeks, the consistent opening and closing of applications chip away at your available memory (RAM). Soon you will be out of what is referred to as “contiguous memory”, and the machine will start using the much slower virtual memory [...]

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Photoshop history options

We’re not sure why this isn’t on by default. In Photoshop, go to the History palette, select the indicated area, and choose “History Options”. Then in the next screen, check “Allow Non-Linear History”. Deleting a “state” deletes that state and those that came after it. If you choose the Allow Non-Linear History option, deleting a [...]

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Apple releases Mac OS X 10.5.5

Apple has released the latest Leopard update, Mac OS X 10.5.5 which is available through Software Update. The 10.5.5 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Leopard and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac. Apple details the updates at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2405 as well as [...]

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iTunes 8 hidden import settings

Apple has changed the preferences in iTunes 8. Several readers have complained that they cannot find the import settings anymore. To make sure you import higher-quality MP3s (or AAC, Lossless, etc.), go to iTunes: Preferences: General Tab: Import Settings. The default is the old-fashioned and lower-quality 128 kbps MP3. We recommend changing it to the [...]

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Our top pick for FTP program: Transmit

Our number one pick for FTP application is Transmit. It is solid, and quite full-featured: Column view. iDisk. sidebar. ftp/ssl. search. zooming. it even has tabs. What is FTP? FTP, or File Transfer Protocol, is the universal way to send, receive, and manage your files and folders using the internet. If you manage a web [...]

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Automountd trying to connect to Backups.backupdb

Little Snitch’s outbound firewall tells me that automountd wants to connect to Backups.backupdb on port 111. We found out that this is caused by our switch to the free OpenDNS service. It is Time Machine trying to mount a remote NFS (network file system), but cannot. We told Little Snitch to Deny, but you can [...]

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