MacMost: Making the most of your Mac, iPod, Apple TV and iPhone.

   DNS is what finds Web sites when you are surfing. You type in a domain name, like MacMost.com and your ISP’s DNS server will figure out where that Web site is really located. But if that site has just moved, or if it was down recently, you may get an error instead. This error may persist even if the site if back up. This is because DNS information is cached on your Mac for quick access. So your Mac may have outdated DNS information.
    To clear your DNS cache, open the Terminal application. In Leopard, type:
    dscacheutil -flushcache
    In earlier versions of Mac OS, use this instead:
    lookupd -flushcache

   To set which applications you would like to startup automatically at login, go to System Preferences and then click Accounts under the System header. Click the Login Items button. Next, click on the plus or minus buttons in the bottom left corner of the window to add or remove applications from your list. The next time you login to your Mac, the selected applications will launch automatically.

   You can make frequently used fonts easier to find by adding them to the Favorites font collection. If you often use a particular style or color with a given font, you can save the styled font as a favorite, too.

   To add a font to Favorites, open the Font panel. The way you open the Font panel depends on the application you’re using. For example, to open it in TextEdit, choose Format, then Font and finally, Show Fonts. Select a font family and a typeface, then select a font size. To select a font color, click the Text Color button and select a color. If you want to see a font preview, choose Show Preview from the Action pop-up menu in the lower-left corner of the Font panel. Finally, choose Add to Favorites from the Action pop-up menu, or drag the font from the Typeface column to the Favorites collection in the Collections column. When you select the font in your Favorites collection, it automatically appears in the correct color and style.

   Do you sometimes lose you cursor when mousing around the desktop? You can make you cursor larger and easier to find. Choose System Preferences from the Apple menu. Select Universal Access. Click Mouse, or if you have a MacBook, click Mouse & Trackpad. Finally, just drag the Cursor Size slider to the right to make it larger.

   To set an e-mail reminder in iCal, click on your event and the go to the View Menu and select Show Info or press Command I to do the same thing. Next, select the email option under Alarm in the Info drawer. Finally, select which e-mail address you want the reminder to go to, and how many minutes in advance that you want your reminder.

   iPhoto automatically launches when you hook up a digital camera to your Mac. If you would rather load your pictures into another App or just want to drag them to your drive, go to Applications and open Image Capture. Select Preferences and click on the general tab. Use the pull down menu to select an alternate Application or none at all if you want to drag the images to your drive.

   One very frustrating thing about slot loading optical drives like the Mac Mini and the iMac have is figuring out how to eject a Bootable CD Like the Mac OSX install disc. One Way to eject the CD before it mounts, is to hold down the mouse button as you boot the computer.

   To view a slideshow of pictures in an email message instead of scrolling through them individually, click the Slideshow button to have Mail display the photos full screen, one at a time. You can also use the Slideshow controls to display all the pictures at once and click another button to send your favorites directly to iPhoto.

   Spotlight is the powerful search engine that’s included with Mac OSX Tiger which searches for files on your Mac. One easy way to access Spotlight is to click on the magnifying glass icon in the upper right hand corner of the Finder. Another “click less” way to access it is to press Command + Space, and if you want to bring up the full Spotlight window press Command + Shift + Space.

   To set Text Edit as the default application to open Word docs, Option or Right click on the Word document and select Get Info from the contextual menu. In the Get Info window, click on the ‘Open With’ disclosure triangle. Select Text Edit as the application from the pull-down menu, and finally click on Change All to always open Word docs in Text Edit.