After I recently wrote about how I often set up new Macs from scratch rather than taking advantage of migration, many people asked me to share my action logs. While I can't do that specifically because (1) my logs are extremely long and cryptic and (2) they contain tons of personal activation keys and serial numbers, I decided to share a few setup tips to help stem the tide of emails.
What follows is a dozen setup tasks that I picked out from my normal techniques, which I thought might be useful to others. Here are some of the things I do to my new systems, to make them shinier and happier and ready to use.
1. Copying my Solid Black desktop pattern
