I just heard that the new Apple Store on West 14th St. in Manhattan (Opening tomorrow, 12/7) will offer free classes on Apple’s professional line of software like Final Cut Pro, Logic, and Aperture.

They’re calling it Pro Labs where 6 people sign up for 2 hours lessons, once a week for four weeks.

The classes start on Jan. 7 next year. Did I mention the classes are free?

TinkerTool is another great shareware application that gives you access to preference settings that are hidden in OS X. It’s very useful for tweaking your systems, especially for older models where you want to reduce as much resources as possible when running OS X Server.

One example would be to disable Widgets from being activated, which can often happen by accident. Widgets may be useful, but they are enormous memory hogs that you’ll want to avoid in a server setting.

Other tweaks of interest is the ability to turn off extraneous eyecandy within the Finder that can slow down your system.

Download TinkerTool.

In case you haven’t heard, Mike Bommbich’s Carbon Copy Cloner is up to version 3.

This is a really great piece of software for creating backups and images of your drive. It’s very useful for scheduling backups automatically so you’ll be ready in the unfortunate event of catastrophic drive failure. Things fall apart you know.

It will also come in very handy in case you mess something up while tinkering within the guts of OS X Server.

Download Carbon Copy Cloner.