1. Catch a burglar
It’s a great way of protecting your kit if you’re somewhere public and you’ve had to leave your Mac alone for a moment (of course, you’ll have locked it down with a Kensington lock too, won’t you?).
2. Create stopmotion classics
Sure, if you wanted to create a stop-motion movie, you could buy software such as iStopMotion, but in fact you don’t have to spend a penny.
Set up your stills camera on a tripod pointing at your scene, take a picture, move your characters, take another, repeat.
3. Turn it into a retro games machine
Most Mac gamers know the joys of digital download services, such as Steam, but few are aware of the Mac-emulation scene. Thanks to emulator programmers such as Richard Bannister, you can play classic games of yore from just about any platform you care to remember.
4. Plug in and use any scanner
First of all, plug in your scanner. To scan using Preview, from the File pull-down menu, select ‘Import from Scanner’ and choose your model of scanner. A scanning window opens, from where you can do a preview scan, select an image format, scan in colour, black and white or text, set the resolution and more. You can even correct the brightness, tint, temperature and saturation.
5. Use it without a mouse
The mouse (or trackpad) has been integral to Apple and its OS pretty much since the year dot, but with a few smart keyboard shortcuts, you can do a huge amount on your Mac without going near it.
Aside from the obvious keyboard shortcuts that you’ll see listed next to menu items, meet the application switcher. Press Command+Tab to bring it up. Hold down Command and press Tab repeatedly to cycle through your open apps; add Shift to move in the opposite direction.
6. Take over somebody else’s screen
How many times have you had a call from somebody who owns a Mac and needs your help? If you’re anything like me it happens quite often. It would be so much easier if you could actually see their screen, so you could know exactly what they were talking about.
7. Automate actions
Everyone forgets about Automator, the application that lets you automate repetitive tasks. It works by clicking together actions into a chain of events.
8. Use it as a dumb hard drive
If you connect a MacBook to another Mac by a FireWire cable then hold down T while you start it up, then it boots up into a special FireWire Target Disk Mode. You can now effectively use it as a removable hard drive, which is ideal if you need to transfer files from one Mac to another, or if you’ve got a problem that prevents the original Mac from booting properly.
9. Save the world!
Do you want to join the fight against cancer? Or perhaps you’d like to help look for aliens? Believe it or not, you can do both with your Mac. Distributed computing projects let you put your computer’s spare processing power to good use.
10. Doing your maths homework
Use the View menu to choose how it appears. If you just want to do a quick calculation, you can type it into the Spotlight search bar instead of launching Calculator – how cool is that?
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