At some point I thought to myself, “There’s gotta be a better way to do this.” Having to restart my computer when a disc doesn’t want to eject is not exactly user-friendly. After pondering the possibilities for quite some time, I remembered that you could enable some menu extras (including an eject button) from the CoreServices folder.

Go to the root of your hard drive, either by choosing “Computer” from the Go menu or by clicking it in the sidebar of a Finder window, and follow this path:

System > Library > CoreServices > Menu Extras

Once in that folder, you’ll see a lot of different extras that you can put into your menu bar. Just double-click the ones that look appealing to you and they will appear in your menu bar. Go ahead and give them a try. If you decide that you don’t want something in the menu bar, just hold down the command key and drag it off the bar.

The eject button doesn’t always fix a stuck CD, but it’s one more option to try before restarting my computer.

Create a file (using a pure text editor) named defaultzoom.css, or any name you like -- just make sure it has a .css extension.

Copy and paste the following code into the file:

body {
zoom: 130%;
}

Change 130 to whatever number suits you. Anything greater than 100 means zoom in; less than 100 means zoom out. Don’t forget the % percent sign!

If you’re using TextEdit on a Mac, be sure to have it create .txt documents by default (not .rft) before copying and pasting the above text. You can set this by going to Preferences » New Document » Format. When you save the file, a warning will come up stating that .txt is the standard extension, but you will be given the option of .txt or .css.

Save your file and close the editor.

In Safari, go to Preferences » Advanced. Under Style Sheet, select Other, and point it to the file you created. You may need to restart Safari for the change to take effect.

Voila. Hope that helps someone. (Note that this should work on both OS X and Windows versions of Safari.

In Mail 4.1, you no longer need to type the http:// part of a URL to make it clickable for the recipient. In previous versions of Mail, the text would not become a link without http://. Unfortunately, Mail still does not show your URL as a link while composing the email.

Here’s how to create a link in TextEdit, your Mac’s word processing program: First, select the text you’d like to use as your link. Next, go to the “Format” menu and select “Text,” then “Link.” In the pop-up that appears, type the URL you’d like to link to. (Your linking text needn’t be a URL itself. For example, you could link to the same location either by typing: “Get more info at www.apple.com,” or “Get more Apple info here.” Press OK, and you’ve got your link.

You can generate an email just as easily. In the “Link” destination field, type “mailto:” followed by the email address, with no spaces, like so: mailto:info@apple.com.

TextEdit boasts a new feature in Leopard: “Smart Links,” which automatically creates links from email addresses and URLs as soon as you type them. To activate it, select “Preferences” from the TextEdit menu, make sure the “New Document” tab is selected, and check the “Smart Links” box in the lower right corner. Now Leopard will automatically generate a link in TextEdit each time you type a URL or email address. (You may need to restart TextEdit to enable this change.)

Leopard also lets you create live links in Mail. First, highlight your linking text. From the “Edit” menu, select “Link,” then “Add…” and enter the desired web address in the pop-up.

It can be very useful to determine a file’s pathname if you can see the file in the Finder (or in a search result) but don’t know exactly where in the Mac’s file structure it is located.

In such a case, the Finder provides several ways in which to determine the path to the file.

Hold down the Command key while you click on the title of a folder window in the Finder. A drop-down menu will show the folder’s path, and you can use that menu to move to any folder that’s part of the path. (This works with document titles in some applications, as well.) You can use the Path button to achieve the same result. Hold down the Control key while clicking in the toolbar of a Finder window, and choose “Customize Toolbar” from the pop-up menu. Drag the Path button to the toolbar and click “Done.” Click the button to see the folder’s path.

My favorite: from the Finder’s View menu choose “Show Path Bar.” The path to any item you click on will be shown in a bar at the bottom of the Finder window. If the path is so long that the names in it overrun each other, just run your cursor along the bar without clicking, and all will be revealed. If you use Spotlight to locate a file or folder, you’ll sometimes be able to see the item you want in the search result, but won’t know where it’s located. Clicking the item will open it, but that may not be what you want. You can do one of the following:

Hold down the Command key while clicking the item, which will open its enclosing folder in the Finder, or
Let your cursor hover over the item but don’t click. After a second or two the item’s path will be displayed in a yellow “note.”

[robg adds: I was hoping this might also work to change the text size in List and Column view modes, but no luck. It only works in Icon view mode.]

In Pages and in TextEdit, the Edit menu will now have the “Special Characters” item for you to use instead of the flag icon in the menu bar.

If you don’t use them every day, you can forget what’s where.

Mac OSX10.5 Leopard comes to the rescue with its Help menu, available in every application at the far right end of the application’s menus. Click on Help, then type part of the name of your menu item into its search field.

The menu item containing your term will appear at the top of the list, and if you mouse over it, that menu will open and a gyrating arrow will point to the item you need. Clever!

I often email entire web pages to myself to reference later — for example, recipe pages, confirmation forms, and directions. It can also be useful to email an entire webpage to a friend or client.

There are two ways to do this in Safari:

Navigate to File > Mail Contents of This Page. A new email will open with the page embedded in it. Simply enter the recipient’s email address and click “Send”.

-or-

Just press Command/I and a dialog will appear, asking for the email address of the person you want to send the page to.

The recipient will now be able to see that page right within his/her email application!

If an application hasn’t responded for a while to mouse clicks, trackpad scrolling, or other persuasive actions, click on the Apple menu and select “Force Quit.”

A pop-up window lists all the applications you currently have open. Stalled applications are listed in red and say “(not responding)” after the application name.

Scroll up and down through the list with the arrow keys, or just click on an application name to select — then click “Force Quit” to exit only that program. You can restart the application from your Dock or Applications menu, but any unsaved changes may be lost.

But there’s an even easier Force Quit trick: simultaneously press Command/Option/Esc and the “Force Quit” pop-up appears — an especially useful trick if your Finder has frozen and you can’t select the pull-down Apple menu.

Once the info dialog appears, click on the right-facing arrow beside “More Info” to expand that panel and it will display a “Where” from header, and to the right of that it will show the exact web address from which the file was originally downloaded.

For example, if you’re reading a story and want to do a Google search on something you’ve read, just highlight the text and drag-and-drop it on the Safari icon in the Dock. It will launch Safari and display the Google Search Results.

By default, the drag-resizing occurs from the center of the box outwards. To me, this feels quite strange an unnatural, and I was having trouble quickly drawing boxes of the right size and shape.

Thankfully, there’s an easy workaround. If you hold down the Option key before dragging, the box will be anchored to the corner opposite the one you’re dragging — drag the top-left corner, for instance, and the bottom-right corner will remain fixed in place as you drag. Move to another corner, and its partner will then remain anchored as you resize.

I find this corner-based resizing more natural and much faster to use. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet found a way to make it the default behavior, so for now, you’ll have to rely on the Option key if you prefer this method.

Next time this happens, pause a moment and note down exactly what the message says. (If it’s a long one, look for what seems to be a key phrase.)

Now open Safari and into the Google search box at the top right of the Safari window, type the exact text from the error message enclosed in quote marks (” “) so that Google will search for the complete phrase. Yes, I know the Google box isn’t big enough to contain all the text — just keep typing and it will scroll across.

When you’ve entered the text, press the Return key and wait for Google to return some results.

You’ll very likely find references to discussions in Apple and other Mac-related forums, which can be very helpful though they may require a bit of digging through. If you’re lucky you’ll find a reference to an Apple knowledge base document, or to an article from MacFixIt or a similar problem-solving site.

This method of solution-seeking has been around in one form or another for years, but the increasing sophistication of both Google and the information sources has recently made it a really useful tool.

By picking up your laptop with two hands, and avoiding at all costs putting pressure on the optical drive area, you can prevent problems down the line. These range from failure of the optical drive, scratching disks on every insert or eject and failure of the drive to suck a disc in or spit one out.

When we see this problem, we’re often able to use a non-marring nylon probe tool to pry open the optical drive slot. These tools are thin and rectangular, and by inserting the tapered end a few millimeters into the slot and twisting, the slot can be coaxed open. However, if your optical drive is having issues and your slot is compressed, there cannot be warranty coverage for the problem.

The non-unibody 17-inch laptops are especially prone to this problem, as the optical drive is right under the wrist rest area, and the slot seems less reinforced than on other models. Plastic MacBooks are also very vulnerable. Apple, recognizing this oversight in design and engineering, made the optical drive slot in unibody laptops much more rigid. This said, you should still make an effort to avoid pressing or squeezing this opening.

Just press Command/Option and then hold the Eject button for about 2 seconds and Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Under Preview’s Tools menu, you’ll find the options “Mark Up” and “Annotate.” Mark Up lets you highlight, strike through, or underline selected text within a PDF. Annotate allows you to draw circles and rectangles around parts of a PDF, append Stickies-style notes, and add hyperlinks.

To use Mark Up, choose the “Text” tool from Preview’s Toolbar. Select your target text with the cursor, and then choose a “Mark Up” option from the Tools menu (the choices are Highlight Text, Strike Through Text, and Underline Text).

To add shapes, links or comments, select a command from the Tools menu’s “Annotate” list (the options are Add Oval, Add Rectangle, Add Note, and Add Link).

If you’ve selected “Add Note,” simply click anywhere on the PDF. A colored tag appears in the left margin alongside the spot where you clicked. Its default text consists of your user name and the date, though you can alter or add to this by double-clicking on the note. To move notes, double-click their icons (those little cartoon-style balloons) and then drag them. When you double-click a note icon, you can also specify the note’s color and other attributes. To remove a note, double-click its icon and press “Delete.”

All Mark Up and Annotate tools can be summoned via key command. Also, if you use these tools frequently, you may want to add them to Preview’s Toolbar. (By default, they are not shown.) To add them, select the View menu’s “Customize Toolbar” command, then drag the tools you want from the pop-up onto the Toolbar.

For example, say you’ve edited a series of images in Photoshop, and now you want to take a quick look at them. You might prefer to view them in Preview, a Mac OS X program that opens in an instant, rather than the larger, slower-to-load Photoshop application.

To quickly specify your app, Control/click the item you want to open, then choose “Open With” from the pop-up menu that appears. This takes you to a list of every application your Mac considers capable of reading the file. Choose the name of the application you want, and the file opens in that program.

If you think you’ll be opening the file repeatedly in that program, you may want to specify an ongoing “Open With” preference. To do so, select the file and press Command/I to see the file’s “Info” window. Click the “Open With” tab and choose your program. Now the file will always open with your preferred application. And if you click the “Change All” button, every file of the same type will open with this application.

Fortunately, Mac OS X has a built-in solution for this problem: screen zoom.

To enable screen zooming, open System Preferences, click on “Universal Access,” and click “On” in the “Zoom” area. You are immediately ready to zoom: Press Command/Option/Equal sign (=) to zoom in and Command/Option/Hyphen to zoom out.

If you click the “Options” button in “Universal Access,” you can fine-tune how Mac OS X displays the zooming effect — for example, you can set how far the screen should zoom in.

Zooming in and out is a great way to draw your audience’s attention to just what you want them to see.

While Zoom was originally designed for visually impaired users, it is also very useful for people who need to demonstrate Mac OS X applications.

Better yet, even if you drag multiple attachments, they all attach to just one email message (rather than creating one message for each attachment, as in previous versions of Mac OS X).

But what I also figured out is that I can use the USB port on the AirPort Express to charge my phone, so I can leave the iPhone’s charger at home.

You can purchase AppleCare at any point during the first year of owning your new Mac or other Apple product, to extend warranty coverage to three years in total.

The advantage of doing so before the 90-day point is that you continue to get (up to the 1-year point) the free phone support that normally finishes after 90 days. This support resumes as soon as you purchase AppleCare.

AppleCare covers other Apple items bought at the same time as your Mac.

You don’t need to do anything with the CD that comes with AppleCare — it’s there in case an Apple phone support person needs you to use it to help define a problem. What you must do immediately is to fill in and return the AppleCare registration card.

From the Apple menu, choose “System Preferences” and click on the “Accounts” button. Click on your account name (if it’s not already highlighted), then click the “Login Items” tab. A list of all Login items appears.

You can remove programs by selecting them and clicking the minus sign, or add new ones by clicking the Add (+) button and navigating to the desired application. If you check the “Hide” box next to the program name, the application will open automatically, but won’t be displayed onscreen until you select it in the Dock or via the Command/Tab key command (which cycles you between all open applications).

Login Items don’t have to be applications. You can also choose to automatically open individual documents, folders, or disks.

As you might expect, adding Login Items increases your startup time. Also, note that only a user designated as the computer’s Admin can modify Login Items.

Here’s how it’s done: Select all the files for which you want the combined size, then press Command/Option/I, which brings up the “Multiple Item Info” dialog, complete with a list of how many files are selected and their combined size.

Well, you can bypass the “adding-the-word-alias” uglies altogether by holding the Option and Command keys and clicking-and-dragging the original file outside the Finder window it’s currently in (I usually just drag mine to the desktop).

This creates an alias without the word “alias” attached.

(Note: Don’t worry, you’ll still know it’s an alias, because its icon will have a tiny arrow at the bottom left-hand corner.)

Time to take another look at your Apple menu. There, right below the Software Update item, is Mac OS X Software, which is quite a different animal. Click this item and you’ll actually be taken to www.apple.com/downloads where you’ll immediately see a number of interesting applications, but perhaps not the kind you need.

Now click the “All Downloads” bar at top left, and you can begin to explore the complete library of listed software. Note that there’s a “Search” box as well, in case you want to search by keyword(s).

Try this resource next time you need an application of a particular kind. You may be surprised at the volume of information available there. Commercial software, shareware and freeware are all covered.

To search a web page for text, type Command/F, which opens the “Find” banner near the top of the browser window. Type your search term. (No need to press Return.)

Safari instantly tells you how many times the term appears on the page. The first occurrence is indicated in your highlight color, and all subsequent ones are framed in white. The remainder of the page dims to gray.

You can advance from one occurrence to the next by pressing the Return key (or typing Command/G). Holding “Shift” while pressing Return (or typing Command/Shift/G) steps you backwards between occurrences. When you’re finished, press the “Done” button next to the search field, closing the Find Banner.

For Google searches, just type Command/Option/F. This jumps your cursor to the main Search field, ready for you to type a search phrase.

It’s easy to revisit your Google search results. Each time you enter a new search, Safari remembers the search results page. Click through to as many pages as you like — if you want to snap back to the Search results, simply click the orange arrow to the right of the Search field.

If you have to force quit an application, do one of these things: Press Command/Option/Escape. A small dialog box appears; make sure the application name is chosen, then click the blue button to “Force Quit.” Or, hold down the Option key and press (don’t click) on the Dock icon. The command “Quit,” turns into “Force Quit.”

I have also noted that the ‘error’ appears most often when I have been doing something such as scrolling through a long Web page, which involves holding down the mouse button for an extended period, probably while Time Machine was trying to conclude the backup process.

That being said, the function still exists, and people do still change their screen saver from time to time. My personal preference is to build a folder of images like comic book cover art, or rock art concert posters, and set the appropriate System Preferences panel to cycle through them.

As I was perusing through Apple’s Downloads section (www.apple.com/downloads), I stumbled upon a new screen saver that’s pretty cool called “Holding Pattern - Coach Class 2.2.” It says, “Turn your idle computer screen into an airplane window, complete with moving aerial view. Realistic, gentle animation and superb photography make it a truly distinctive screen saver!”

There are over a dozen different aerial locations to choose from including full daylight, or sunset scenes. Anyone care to fly without leaving the ground? Just download this special screen saver found here: <http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/icons_screensavers/holdingpatternscreensavercoachclass.html>.

Pretty obvious, really, but the Desktop & Screen Savers System Preferences panel makes it so easy to point to an iPhoto album -- and restoring an iPhoto Library usually takes time, which allows the screen saver to kick in. If the screen saver is active while restoring, however, the screen saver will either recreate a missing file in a partially-restored iPhoto Library, or cause an access conflict which will prevent the Time Machine restore from completing successfully.

To avoid the problem, open System Preferences and click Keyboard and Mouse, then Mouse. Here you’ll see a diagram of the mouse with a label linked to the scroll ball. Click the label and change its setting from “Dashboard” to “Off.” (The scroll function will still work.)

While there, you’ll note that the mouse’s side buttons are labeled “Expose,” which explains why Expose is activated when you squeeze the mouse slightly in order to lift it. Once again you can avoid this by changing the relevant label to “Off.”

Well, if you click that lozenge button, the toolbar belonging to the window you’re viewing will disappear. Click again and it will reappear.

Try this in a Finder window and you’ll see that the sidebar (left column) of that window disappears and reappears along with the toolbar.

Still viewing a Finder window, and with its toolbar visible, see what happens if you hold down the Command key while clicking the lozenge repeatedly. You’ll cycle through a number of ways of displaying the tools and/or their titles.

Often, a program you download from the Internet will be displayed in a small Finder window in icon view, with the toolbar and sidebar hidden. At first you may not even recognize it as a Finder window. An instruction will tell you to drag the program icon to the Applications folder.

Now you know that the easy way to do this is to click the “lozenge,” exposing the window’s sidebar, then drag the program icon directly to the Applications item in that sidebar.

Don’t forget this little button next time you wonder where a program’s toolbars have disappeared to, leaving you with no option but to use the main menus.

Luckily, there are a number of ways to turn off only your displays. For instance, you can go to the Energy Saver preference pane and use the “Put The Display To Sleep When The Computer Is Inactive” time slider. Personally, I find it hard to get the right setting here — it’s annoying to have my displays switch off when all I’ve done is pause to think.

Alternatively, you can use Apple’s Keychain Access (in /Applications/Utilities). Select Keychain Access > Preferences and select the “Show Status In Menu Bar” option. When you do this, a new Keychain icon appears in your menu bar. Click on it and select “Lock Screen” to make your screen turn black. (You’ll need to enter your password to turn it back on again,)

Finally, you can go to the Expose & Spaces preference pane (in Tiger and Leopard), click on one of the pop-up menus under “Activate Screen Corners,” and choose “Sleep Display.” Now when you drag your cursor to that corner and wait a second, your displays will go to sleep.
If you’re using Leopard, though, there’s a new hidden method that’s easier to use than all the others and requires no use of the mouse or menus. Just press Shift/Control/ Eject and all attached displays will instantly go to sleep. Move your mouse or press a key on the keyboard, and the displays awaken.

It doesn’t get much simpler than that. Note that if you’ve set your system to require a password whenever your computer wakes up from sleep or from your screen saver, that password prompt won’t be triggered if you put your displays to sleep this way. You can still make it happen, though, by first activating your screen saver and then pressing Shift/Control/Eject. The password dialog box will appear when you press the hot-key combination, but if you then click on “Cancel,” the displays should go to sleep.

The information that one has paid and registered is often hidden in Library > Preferences, in a preference file for the program, or in some file with a name like “com.programname.plist.” If so, then copying that file over to the new computer transfers the registration information. (But I still don’t know what was the lost registration code!)

A: Open the PDF in Preview, and while holding down the Option key, draw a box around the text you want. Copy, then Paste. I use TextEdit to clean up the text and remove unnecessary paragraph returns.

Let’s say you want to use the “Line Border” theme for a book commemorating a family reunion, but you’d like to open with a couple of pages based on the retro-looking “Family Album” theme.

First, create a new book, and choose the theme you want to use on only a few pages. (For my example, I’d choose the “Family Album” theme.) Create the pages you need, and then choose File > Print. In the Print dialog box, choose “Save PDF to iPhoto” from the PDF pop-up menu, and then click on “Print.” iPhoto creates a PDF of each of the book’s pages, converts them to JPEG images, and adds them to your iPhoto library.

Next, create a book based on the primary theme that you want to use (in my example, the “Line Border” theme). Now drag the pages you made earlier into your new book (look under the “Last Import” item in the Library pane). To have one of the images fill the page, choose “One” from the Layout pop-up menu, and choose the top-most option from the submenu.

A: It wouldn’t be much of a calendar program if it couldn’t! In Leopard’s version of iCal, click on the event and press Command/E to edit it. Click on “Add Attendees” and type the name of a person you’d like to invite. If you’ve entered that person’s email address in Address Book, iCal will put the address in for you. If not, just type the address.

To add another address, type a comma and enter the new name (if he or she is in Address Book) or the address. Repeat as necessary. When you’ve finished entering addresses, press Return and then click on “Send.” Mail will launch and send an event invitation to the addresses in the Attendees field. Alternatively, you can add multiple attendees by dragging individual contacts or an entire group directly from Address Book onto the “Add Attendees” link. This method is very efficient when you want to quickly add all the members of your platoon, bridge club, or extended family.

Here is a place I had to give some bad news — because once you have downloaded your purchases from the iTunes music store, you need to make a backup. (You are reminded to do so every time you make a purchase.) I have been able to request a single re-download after a catastrophic hard drive failure (yes, even I have had a catastrophic hard drive failure) but it is not the norm. And they deny requests to re-download entire purchase histories.

So, what are your options for recovering your music after a catastrophic hard drive failure? iTunes is not set up as a two-way transfer. It only allows you to move music to your iPod. Several utilities have been written to allow you to move your music back off the iPod to your hard drive. The one that I have used is called Senuti and it worked very well when I needed to recover files. It is a freeware program and can be found through VersionTracker.com.

Going against conventional thought, the study determined that increased temperature and/or activity had little or no correlation to failure rate. By extension, it was found that drives spinning up and spinning down most often had the highest failure rates. This means it’s best to uncheck the “Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible” box in Energy Saver — at least in terms of hard drive health.

Some SMART (self monitoring and reporting technology) parameters are excellent indicators of impending mechanical failure. Among failed drives, a good chunk gave no warning by SMART, even though SMART- monitored parameters were to blame for failure. For this reason, SMART is most useful as a statistical predictor of failure for a population of drives rather than on individual devices.

With that in mind, if your drive reports SMART errors you should at the very least immediately perform a full backup. About 3% of drives failed in the first three months, 1.8% in the first 6 months, 1.7% in the first year. From there, failure rates jump to approximately 8% in the second year, 9% in the third year, fall to 6% in the fourth year, and jump back to 7% in the fifth year.

But creating screenshots this way often means you need to crop or clean up the edges of the image later. That’s especially true if you’re planning to use it as a graphic element in a document or presentation. Fortunately, Mac OS X Leopard offers a way to save clean screenshots of individual elements on your desktop — such as Finder windows, menus, icons, or the visible portion of an open document — without capturing anything else in the background.

Hold down the Command, Shift, and 4 keys, then press the Spacebar. Instead of a cross-hair cursor, a small camera icon appears. When you move this camera icon over the element you’d like to capture, that element is highlighted. Click your mouse or trackpad, and you’ve captured a screenshot of just that element — no further cleanup required.

For some reason, Finder doesn’t reset the icon grid on the desktop when the Dock is moved to the side of the screen. A quick Google search on this issue revealed nothing more helpful than the suggestion to set the Dock to automatically hide. But there is an easy way to get the Finder to move the desktop icons out from under the Dock. Click on the Desktop, select Show View Options from the View menu, and slide the Grid Spacing slider around. As soon as you do this, the grid will be reset to respect the position of the Dock, and will move your desktop icons out from underneath the Dock. You can then put the slider back into the same position you had it before, and close the View Options palette.

A: An annoying behavior, with an easy fix! In Safari, under the History menu choose “Clear History.” This will erase all of the URLs that you have recently entered that Safari helpfully “remembers” for you so you don’t have to re-type them. Similarly, in Firefox select “Tools” from the top menu and then “Clear Private Data” from the drop-down list. Make sure that “Browsing History” is selected and click “Clear Private Data Now.”

I have discovered that there is a small picture of myself in the upper right corner of every email I send. I have no clue how that started and would like to know how to eliminate that picture.

The source of that picture is Apple’s Address Book application. When you
open Address Book and choose your contact card (Card -> Go to My Card), in addition to your contact information you’ll see any image you’ve assigned to your contact.

Note that your picture is not being sent across the great expanse that is the Internet as an attachment. Others who receive your mail won’t see this image. Rather, you’re seeing it because it’s part of your Address Book card and Mail is displaying it because Mail displays pictures assigned to contacts in your copy of Address Book. Those you send messages to don’t have that image in their copy of Address Book (unless you’ve given them the image and they’ve assigned it to your card) and so it doesn’t display in their copy of Mail.

If you no longer wish to see the image when you look at your own messages, just open Address Book, select your card, and choose Card -> Clear Custom Image.

A: Hold down the Command and Option keys as you connect the iPod to your computer. Hold the keys down until the iPod appears in the iTunes window.

1. You type the first three characters of their name or email address

2. You get bombarded by the history of everyone that has those characters in common — including old addresses

3. You accidentally select a bad address for someone

4. You receive an ‘undeliverable’ message in response (It’s easy to do if you select the correct name quickly)

Of course, upon closer inspection, you notice that the address you selected was, in fact, bad. So, how do you remove all those cached addresses?

Simple! With Mail open, click on the menu item Windows. In the Windows menu drop down, select Previous Recipients. Delete those stale addresses as you wish — they should no longer automatically come up when you start typing in an address.

1. Open System Preferences (located under the Apple Menu at the upper left)

2. Open International (under the Personal section)

3. Click on the Formats tab.

4. In the Dates row, click on Customize.

5. Arrange your date in the format you want to appear on your menu bar by rearranging each item within the blue box. Use the down arrows on each element to choose between formats (January, Jan, 01,1, etc.)

6. Select the entire date format within the blue box (CMD + A) and copy it to your clipboard (CMD + C). Click OK.

7. In the Times row, click the Customize button.

8. Next to Show: using the up/down arrows, choose “Medium.”

9. Paste the date format (CMD + V) next to the time format, and click OK. Your date will now appear next to the time in your menu bar.

Open up iPhoto and go to the Preferences. Choose “Appearance.” If you uncheck “Outline” and “Drop shadow,” then slide the background all the way to white, you should notice that iPhoto starts up a lot quicker.

If you still find iPhoto to be slow, try holding down the Command and Option keys while starting up. A dialog box should load up, asking if you want to rebuild your photo library. This has the greatest effect if you have a very large photo library.

One final tip is to press 0, 1, or 2 while in your library. This sets your photos to one of the 3 default sizes, which load a lot quicker than the custom sizes you get when dragging the slider. Now your iPhoto library should scroll like butter!

Of course, this seems intuitive if you use QuickLook in the Finder a lot or use the this hint for a similar effect in the Media Browser, but it’s not documented anywhere so I hadn’t tried it.

It’s a huge help to use this function to quickly look more closely at a few images while still taking advantage of the normal grid view to quickly browser through the rest of the image library. No more switching to full-screen mode or zooming in and out just to examine a few images.