Back on the trail of helpful Mac tips. Just two quickies this time round:

First, I had a CD that wouldn’t eject from my MacBook drive.

It was really stuck; the drive was spinning up and down but nothing in Finder, not even an icon. I was getting an occasional colourful spinning CD mousepointer, but nothing else. Pressing the eject button showed the eject icon on the screen but didn’t actually have any effect.

Not only that, it pretty much ate up the resources preventing starting of other apps etc. or even get to display the dock.

I searched around, and while there were a number of suggestions, none of them worked for this particular disk, but the following did…

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Hot on the heels of the similarly titled post, I have a few other gems I’ve come across or been pointed towards to make life on the good ship MacBook that little bit more simple. Not that it’s difficult in the first place, just different if you’re used to Windows.

Note: Feedback from the family, who are a mix of casual and regular PC users, would suggest the Mac is easy to use. So fear-ye not Mac virgins, this is not a platform (only) for the uber-geeks.

That said, if you *are* an uber-geek, there’s lots (and I mean lots) to float your boat here.

So, what do we have in the bag this time?

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As you may heve read from previous posts, and at the risk of boring any regular (aye right!) readers, I got a MacBook a short while back. It’s a bit of a migration for me, having uset a PC for most of my career. I published a list of keyboard shortcuts previously and heres a list of other things I’ve hunted down as ‘essentials’ for day to day work/play.

I know there are alternatives to all of the below, but these are the ones I plumped for. One prevailing factor influenced the choices below; they’re all open source/freeware. My budget for toys is dry following the arrival of the MacBook, so it’s cheapies or freebies for me for a while.

So here goes:

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