Vancouver BC, Canada (April 12, 2010) – Mac Video Training products help you learn your Macintosh computer with their appropriately titled “Quick Start” video training courses that are designed to get you going quickly and work at your own pace to master your Mac. Their most successful title “Quick Start Your Mac” has sold more than 25,000 copies in Canada and the U.S. and to celebrate the company’s success, they have released Quick Start Your Mac plus; a brand-new and dramatically improved course, rebuilt from the ground up.

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This “Tip of theWeek” brought to you by S2M Computer Consulting

We all want to be as “green” as we can these days… It’s just the right thing to do and why not save some money while you do your part for the environment!

I find myself constantly printing things off like invoices, maps, addresses, and confirmation emails, maybe many of you also find yourself printing stuff like this too?

Do you also find that much of the time you think you’re only going to get one page but when all is said and done, out pops another couple pages of non-relevant info or even sometimes one line of print that renders that entire page useless for reuse.

Here’s what I do to get around this problem and save on paper and ink as well as overall printer usage and general waiting around.

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This “Tip of theWeek” brought to you by S2M Computer Consulting

File Management
A common computer mistake, and not just on a Mac is file disorganization, or randomly placing anything and everything wherever the mood dictates. Sure you can always use Spotlight to find a file or email but why not just organize your Mac as you go and the next time you need to find something it will be right where you filed it. That said, there is no one way to organize your Mac’s files, you could do it alphabetically or maybe start off with a Personal and Business file system that branches off from there, the idea here is to make a filing plan and follow the plan.

A few key rules are not to mess with your iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and GarageBand files or Libraries as these generally get managed by the Applications, automatically going in your Photos, Movies, and Music folders. The folder that you can mess about with is your Documents folder. Customize this as needed and create New Folders and Sub-folders for what-have-you. Think of your Documents folder like a real filing cabinet, how would you organize this if it was the real deal?

To create a new folder inside the documents folder make sure to first navigate to your Documents folder and once it is highlighted, all you need to do is simply go to the “Finder File Menu” and select “New Finder Window”. Pressing “Command-N” will do the same thing. The new Folder will be labeled “untitled folder” and will usually be highlighted meaning you can now type the name you want that folder to be. If you want to change the name of a folder later, select it by clicking on it once, wait a second and then click on the name of the folder till it highlights, now you can enter a new name for it.

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Want to run OS X Leopard on your AppleTV without altering the internal drive in any way? That’s what I did and here’s why and how:

I have this ginormous eMac that I use as an iTunes server on my home network, the eMac sits under the stairs with my other network stuff eating up electricity and creating a sauna like environment from all the heat it generates along with about 80db of fan noise.

You may ask why I even need an iTunes server in the first place? Well, I have two AppleTV’s in the house and they stream all their movies & music from the iTunes Library on the eMac server. In the past I used my main MacBook laptop for this task but every time I left the house the wife and kids would be without their beloved AppleTV media entertainment… Unhappy family – unhappy me!

Then I get this email from a friend that Apple has just reduced the price of their soon to be discontinued AppleTV 40GB down to $169 Canadian! This made we wonder if I could run OS X Leopard on an AppleTV and use it in place of my aging eMac iTunes server, thus reducing my energy bill, lessening heat and fan noise in my network room – AKA under the stairs.

Here’s where this brain child idea came from… A few years ago when Apple first introduced the AppleTV, there was a frenzy of geek activity when the geeks united to try and hack the AppleTV to actually run OS X and as always some uber-nerds figured a way to do this. So if you had a bunch of time on your hands and a bit of computer know-how, one can read through all the pages of geek jargon and actually get OS X to run on an AppleTV.

So I decide to go down this slippery road – with caution…

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