Yesterday, Microsoft released several different editions of their Office for Mac 2011 software suite. If the whirlwind of differing editions and licenses left you scratching your head, fear not! We’ve compiled the following quick reference guide to aid in picking the edition of Office 2011 that is right for you. To learn more about Office […]
Data Robotics is running a great promotion on their newly released DroboPro FS model through the end of the month. Buyers are eligible for 2 free 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green SATA hard drives via mail-in form, when they purchase any DroboPro FS storage solution. The DroboPro FS is the successor to the popular Drobo […]
Seabass unboxes South Burlington’s demo of the new Apple TV.
Mikhael installs a Hammerhead antiglare screen protector on an iPad, and lets us know how he does it. This awesome screen protector allows you to use your iPad in a variety of lighting conditions, and actually protects against grease and fingerprints. It’s available here for only $14.99
Until 08/31 we’re offering all Apple software titles on sale, from 10% – 25% off! Some stand-out offers include the latest version Final Cut Studio on sale for $749.99 – the lowest price you’ll find anywhere. Final Cut Studio includes Motion, Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack, and DVD Studio Pro. MobileMe is on sale for 25% […]
We’ve seen several generations of Macs in the last decade, and at some, a new adapter was introduced to connect video devices to our Macs. At first I thought it’d be shorter making this list by adapters rather than machines, although I may have been mistaken. I’ve listed them in order of age, and hence, […]
Though I was excited when Apple freshened up their slightly stagnant Mac Pro model a few weeks back, glancing at the initial processor configurations left me dazed and confused. Not as much: “12 cores? Heavy man!” but more in terms of just which processor(s) went with which machine. Visiting Apple’s product page did little to […]
A long-time Small Dog customer asked me about an item that fleetingly appeared in his dock. It was a generic-looking green icon with a zipper on it called Archive Utility, and when he used Spotlight to search for it, it was nowhere to be found.
Many of the items you download and receive in your email are compressed files. File compression is nothing new, and is exactly what you think it is: when you compress a file, you make it smaller. This reduces bandwidth loads and expenses on the server side, and can help you save disk space on your computer. However, compressed files cannot be directly accessed; they must first be decompressed.
Back in the days of twenty megabyte hard drives (my LC II had a 20 megabyte drive in the early nineties), file compression seemed more relevant for conservation of hard disk space. These days, it’s more often used to shrink email attachments and other downloads. Mac OS X always included a built-in compressor and decompressor. By right-clicking on any file or folder in the Finder and selecting “Compress” from the contextual (pop-down) menu, your Mac will create an archive in zip format.
When you open a compressed file, Mac OS X launches an application called Archive Utility. Its sole purpose is to compress and decompress files. It’s located in /System/Library/CoreServices, and Spotlight doesn’t search there. If you poke around the /System/Library and /Library areas of your hard drive, there’s plenty to learn if you Google intelligently and use extreme caution when moving or deleting anything. Actually–don’t move or delete anything. Just explore and learn!
This week we wanted to bring your attention to the new 24-inch LCD CinemaView Display. This monitor has similar good looks as the Apple LED Cinema Display, and is also the first non-Apple display to use a Mini DisplayPort connector. However, it costs half as much as the Apple LED Cinema Display, which many of […]
I’m in love with my hard drives. They really are miraculous devices, storing billions of bytes and copying that data to and from drive to drive at amazing speeds. I realize that the world of external storage is pretty vast, with lots of names and terms and numbers, and thought it would be good to do a quickly summarize the differences between external drives.
The first distinction I make between external drives is their physical size. The case around the actual drive may vary in size but there are only two sizes of hard drives–2.5-inch laptop drives and 3.5-inch desktop drives. Desktop drives require more power than can be supplied via USB or FireWire, and so they are considered “desktop” hard drives because you need to plug them into power separately.
Laptop drives often can run off USB power supplied by a USB port, so they are considered more portable. Just like comparing laptops and desktops, you will generally get more performance and space out of a desktop drive than you would from a laptop drive.
If you ever work with large amounts of video or want to play media off of an external drive, then a faster RPM (revolutions per minute) is worth buying. If you are just trying to keep your files backed up, then a lower RPM drive will work fine. The two specifications of drive speeds on the consumer market right now are 5400 and 7200 RPM.
The third thing to check is the connection type of the external drive. Most drives use only USB, but some drives offer FireWire 400, 800, and/or eSATA. For general backup, USB is perfect because it’s fast, reliable, and can be plugged into almost any computer made in the last 5-10 years.
FireWire is a connection also known as IEEE 1394. As anyone who works with video knows, FireWire is often required to download video from a camcorder or videocamera. Drives that have FireWire are generally more professionally geared because FireWire is a lower latency connection that makes transferring lots of small files faster than USB.
eSATA is a very fast data connection but does not supply power. eSata is the fastest type of connection commonly seen in external drives, but Apple does not build this port into its computers at this time.
