If you have setup a sweet home audio system you can play the audio through a set of speakers. Todays post is going to tell you how to set up VLC to play the audio through a HDMI or thunderbolt port, alternatively allow you to quickly switch the audio between your external speakers and the internal speakers. This allows you to play a music or video file on your Mac without it being played on your larger external speakers.

Customising your Mac is very easy to customise, however some of the customisation can be quite difficult to find. One of these is the size Finder sidebar icons. The default size may not be to your taste. Editing the size is a simple case of altering the preference setting, the required size change is within System Preferences and not in Finder. This change will also allow you to change the size of Mail’s sidebar icons.

When you Mac doesn’t boot it can be the end of the world. Hard drives are fragile and when they fail it can stop your from starting your Mac and booting. Although your Mac has a built in recovery partition it is always worth having a USB version to boot into in case your hard disk drive is toast. Creating a bootable USB drive allows you to repair your hard drive, reinstall the OS and restore from a Time Machine backup.

New Mac laptops come with two graphics cards. One is a built in graphic card which runs the majority of the time, it is low power and allows you to save power. The second is usually a more powerful dedicated graphics card that allows you to use its horsepower to play games and graphic intensive applications. You Mac will automatically switch between the two, allowing both good battery life and good graphics. It can be interesting to see which graphics you are using.

The current iMac and Macbook range feature a cool brushed aluminium that is both simple and elegant. The problem with this is that it isn’t very unique. Today’s post is going to list some amazing and interesting accessories such as decals, cases, and little gadgets that make your Mac stand out. This allows you to make your mac that little bit more unique and interesting. This post follows on from one at the beginning of the month where I listed some must have accessories.

I love watching movies and videos on my iPad. Its easy to sit on the Sofa an watch all of the home movies and other videos. The problem is iTunes, thus iPhones and iPads, only accepts mp4 videos with a specific codec. This means common formats such as .avi, .mkv, and many other video formats can’t be played on on your iOS device. There is a solution to this problem, we are going to convert the videos into a format that iTunes accepts, allowing us to play the videos on our favourite iOS device.

Stress testing your Mac is a useful way to work out if it is performing to its best and to determine if there are any faults within the various components. Stress testing your Mac is also a useful way to determine if you Mac has a fault if it is using 100% of a CPU, or if there is bad memory. Today’s post is going to describe three ways to stress test the core components of your Mac, CPU, RAM and disk. By testing each one to the ‘max’ you can determine if there is a problem and if you Mac can handle the heat.