Many times every month we get calls from designers or IT managers who need to reset a lost administrative password on Mac workstations. Apple has provided an easy method to reset a lost password — although you’ll need to have a Mac OS X Install CD/DVD to take advantage of it. We’re posting this short […]

Here is a fun one. You can send any open document as an email attachment by simply dragging the icon in its title bar onto the icon of your email application in the Dock. Make sure to save first. Try it!

An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) is the only way to make sure your studio’s servers receive clean, sufficient, and consistent power. In the past, configuring an UPS for Macintosh required tedious fiddling with dubious third-party software. Now the functionality is built directly into the operating system, and the most challenging part of the process is finding exactly where Apple hid those controls.

Your creative team is working feverishly, when suddenly people can’t save their Office documents to the server. A cryptic error message appears when they try:

“There has been a network or file permission error.
The network connection may be lost.”

No matter what you do, you can’t seem to get Word or Excel to save to your network shares. You’ve gone over the machines repeatedly, and everything is set up properly. Worse still, the problem’s intermittent. The errors often surface when your people are busiest, but sometimes days go by without any problems.

There is an explanation. What your team may be suffering from is an unfortunate side-effect of how Microsoft Office for Mac handles its temporary files. If your team is suffering from this problem, we have a somewhat technical description of the cause, with some options on how to address it.

Make Mac Work: Office Won’t Save To Server.

For this month’s technical cheatsheet, we have a simple form to help capture those crucial details for each user’s computer in your office. The form includes the most commonly needed network and email settings for each user. Basic stuff, but important when you need to do some quick troubleshooting. Workstation Settings Cheatsheet.pdf These simple cheatsheets […]

Is your Mac OS X server crashing frequently? If so, we have two questions for you:

Question 1: Do the crashes, restarts, or slow downs occur primarily when several people are searching server volumes over the network?

Question 2: Are you running Mac OS X Server 10.4.7 or later?

If you answered yes to both these questions, you may be suffering from a problem that exists in Mac OS X Server 10.4.7 and above where multiple Spotlight searches can render a server unresponsive.

Few experiences are more frustrating than digging through old notebooks trying to track down the correct settings for your DSL router. Especially when the rest of your studio is up in arms about Internet and email being down. Which brings us to this month’s technical cheatsheet: Router Settings Cheatsheet.pdf We often find ourselves fixing problem […]

Back on March 28th I led a free talk at Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts titled Getting Ready for CS3, Leopard & New Macs. We cautiously recommended most studios hold back a couple months before upgrading to Creative Suite 3 — and I promised we’d run a tip in the beginning of June 2007 with […]

iStumbler is a powerful free tool for finding and troubleshooting wireless networks. It will display all the wireless hotspots within range of your Mac. You can quickly determine whether they’re open or secure, their SSIDs, signal strength, the wireless channel used, and more: iStumbler Website This type of information is becoming increasingly important in some […]

For everyone busily installing their new copies of Adobe CS3, we have a quick recommendation about Version Cue: Don’t install it.