In this quick tutorial you will need two Macs and a FireWire cable.

First, connect your two Macs together with the FireWire cable. All Macs, excluding the new MacBook Air and Macs older than the iBook, have at least one FireWire port. If you are unsure, check your ports on the back or side of your computer looking for the FireWire symbol (See the icon above).

Once you have the FireWire cable connected to both computers, restart or startup the computer you would like to gather data from and hold the “T” button on its keyboard. After no longer than 15 seconds you should see a FireWire symbol bouncing around the screen and an external hard drive icon (like the one icon above) on the other Macs desktop should pop up. You can now navigate through the files as if it were an external hard drive.

Pretty cool, eh? And much faster then trying to network them together.

Your dock currently looks something like this

You would like it to look something like this

1. Launch Terminal and enter the following defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
2. Relaunch the Dock by entering in killall Dock

Behold it’s 2D beauty! Should you decide to switch back, enter the above commands but replace YES with NO.

Warning: Be very, very careful with what you do in this tutorial. Unwanted things could happen to your User account if you don’t know exactly what your doing. Have a backup before trying anything!

1. Open up the Accounts area in System Preferences and authenticate as an Administrator.
2. Once authenticated, right click (Control click) on the user you want to edit. Select “Advanced Options…” from the drop menu.
3. As you can now see there are several options you can edit. You have your standard User ID, Group ID and Short Name. Now you can even edit your Home Directory (make sure you have a backup!) and even apply Aliases to your user.

There you are, quick and easy to get to and edit, but it can be a very powerful tool if used correctly. Be careful with what you do here and ALWAYS make sure you have a backup of all important data before you try anything!

1. While in Safari, left click on the History menu from the Menu Bar. Make your way down to “Reopen All Windows From Last Session” and left click this.
2. You’ll notice all your windows from the last session are restored.

Quick and simple. If you need to open the last closed window, select “Reopen Last Closed Window” directly above

1. Open up Terminal and type in defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES and hit enter. Then type in killall Finder and hit enter.
2. Open up a new Finder window and you should see the full path of your directory displayed at the top of the window.

There you go, quick and easy. To turn this feature off, follow the same steps but type in NO instead.

1. Right click (or Control click) on your screen where you would like your burn folder to be placed (on the desktop or somewhere in Finder) and left click on “New Burn Folder” from the drop down menu.
2. Now that you have your burn folder and it is named appropriately, drag the files you would like to burn into the folder. A burn folder is essentially like a normal folder however it doesn’t actually keep any data in it. A burn folder keeps aliases (shortcuts) to files which it plans on burning to an optical disc. You can tell these files are aliases because they have a small arrow on the bottom left corner of the files icon.
3. Once your ready to burn your disc, left click the “Burn” button on the top right corner of the burn folders window.
4. If you do not already have a CD or DVD in your drive, you will be prompted to insert one that can be written to. Once you do so your CD or DVD will be burn
5. Once your disc has successfully burnt it will eject from the optical drive. You can either keep the burn folder you created to burn another disc or you can delete the folder. Deleting the burn folder will not delete your original files.

There it is, you can now easily burn data to CD or DVD. Almost too simple isn’t it?

1. Open System Preferences by left clicking on the Apple icon on the menu bar in the top left corner of your screen. Left click on “System Preferences…” from the menu that drops down.
2. Left click on the CDs & DVDs icon in the System Preferences window that appears.
3. You will now see several drop down boxes. When a CD or DVD is inserted you can specify what action you would like to take place.
4. Select your preferred action from the drop down box. You can even specify a custom Application to be run if you have a 3rd party program that you would like to use. Once you have things setup the way you want you can quit System Preferences.

1. First we’re going to download and install a great little tool called Perian. Click here to download Perian.
2. Once you have it downloaded, double click on the the disk image and double click on the Perian.prefPane icon.
3. After you’ve successfully installed Perian you’ll see it’s perference pane. Here you can change some of Perian’s settings.
4. Next you’ll want to download Flip4Mac. Click here to download Flip4Mac.
5. Double click on the disk image and then on the installer package to start installing Flip4Mac. Go through the wizard to install it. Once you’ve finished the install your set to go.
6. Flip4Mac also has a preference pane that you can access through System Preferences. You can use the preference pane to tweak Flip4Mac’s settings to suit your needs, but everything should be setup by default for you to start enjoying your video files.

There you have it, quick and easy. You may have to log out and in again from your User account, but things should work from the get go. Now go enjoy your videos!