Tag Archives: OS X

Secure Your Passwords

How do you choose your passwords? Is it based on something people could guess about you? Is it a common word in the dictionary? Do you have a password you use over and over?

Consider the number of security breaches that have already occurred this year. Sony’s Playstation Network was breached and down for weeks before coming back up. Credit card information was stolen from Sony’s databases. Epsilon, a wholesale email provider, was compromised. They handle mass emails for many large companies. You may have seen notices from many different companies regarding this breach. RSA was attacked and SecureID tokens were stolen. As things stand now, 2011 is looking to be the worst year for security breaches yet.

So what can you do to minimize your risk in the Internet age? Taking yourself off of the Internet is becoming less of an option everyday. It’s time to take a look at a password manager.

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Backup Your Mac

Backing up your computer is one of those things that everyone knows they should do but far too often do not do very well. Don’t let your backup strategy improve only when you lose data or come oh so close to losing those memories. In this post, I provide you with my backup recommendations so you can get your data back when disaster strikes. Don’t think it won’t strike because the odds will likely prove you wrong.

Get an External Hard Drive

My first two backup steps use an external hard drive. My recommendation is to get an external drive that is twice the size of your Mac’s internal drive. This will allow you to do both of these backups on the same drive. Today’s standard Mac configurations come with up to 1 TB drives. 2 TB external drives are easy to come by for this recommendation. If you custom order a larger capacity drive with your Mac then you may need two external drives.

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Connect your Mac to a HDTV

Connecting your Mac to a HDTV should be a relatively easy thing to do but it may require more planning ahead than you might expect. My recent experience will help explain why this post seemed important to help others out in this area. I recently did a slideshow in Aperture for a close friend for her mother’s funeral. I only had time to generate the export to a file on an external hard drive prior to them leaving town for the funeral. Ideally, I would have created a DVD for the movie. A DVD becomes readily playable in many more situations than just a digital file. The DVD could have easily been played at the church on a regular DVD player or BluRay player. Unfortunately, time constraints prevented that option until after the funeral. continue reading…

Is It Here Yet?

Have you ever ordered something and wanted to know when you will get it. You can check the tracking number on the web sites of UPS, FedEx or the US Postal Service but, I’ve got a better way. June Cloud software let’s you use your web browser, your Mac or your iOS device (iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad) to combine all of your tracking numbers into one place with Delivery Status.

Track Almost Any Package

Irregardless of which way you use Delivery Status, you will find most common delivery services available. This includes UPS, FedEx, DHL and the US Postal Service. Currently, there are over 30 services you can use to track your package.

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Mac Keyboard Shortcuts to Know

Anybody who watches me use computers will notice that I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts rather than reaching for a mouse. Whether I am on Mac or Windows, it doesn’t matter. In this post I bring you some of my favorite Mac keyboard shortcuts. Hopefully you will find them as useful as I do.

Coming from Windows?

If you came to the Mac from Windows, you will find many things are similar. How you work with applications and their windows is slightly different and I recommend that you don’t do the exact same thing.

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Lyrics in iTunes

I have always enjoyed having lyrics for my music. Unfortunately, lyrics don’t automatically come with song downloads or from ripped CD’s. Having lyrics on an iPod has worked from my original iPod Video all the way up to today’s iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad. Lyrics on these current iOS devices is very useful since you can just tap on the screen when in portrait view and then scroll down while the song is playing. But how do you get the lyrics on to the device?

iTunes Info

iTunes stores all kinds of additional information about the songs and other media in your library. You can easily edit the information yourself by right-clicking on the track and choosing Get Info. You can get to the same information by going to the File menu and choosing Get Info or use the keyboard shortcut Cmd-I on a Mac or Ctrl-I on Windows.

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Organization with GTD

Second in a series

In the first post in this series on Organization on Your Mac, I discussed using the out of the box solution – iCal. So what should you consider if this doesn’t seem to totally meet your needs for organization. One popular organizational method is Getting Things Done or GTD as it is commonly referred. If you are new to GTD then let’s take a look at the concepts before we talk about using them with a program on your Mac.

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Organization with iCal

First in a series

Finding a way to keep yourself organized by using your Mac is a goal many of us are looking for. Your needs and style will determine the level of detail and the type of program that will work best. This first post in a series on organization with your Mac takes a look at iCal. Further posts will take a look at alternatives that provide many more features. Don’t let extra features pull you to another program unless you can see the benefit they will offer you. In many cases the benefits are worth it but that is where you will need to decide. I also expect you will continue to use iCal with other programs.

Apple provides a number of great applications when you pull your Mac out of the box. Address Book, Mail and iCal provide the basis for everyday communication and organization. I prefer the three application approach because it allows each application to be simpler since it focuses on the specific area it was designed for. This is very much unlike Microsoft Outlook which combines everything into one program. The programs still interact with each other nicely when you need it. If you write an email in Mail it can pull the email address from Address Book. If you get an email with a meeting date you can quickly add it to iCal.

For organization, iCal is the place to start. It provides calendars, subscriptions and to do lists.

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Get a Deal with InvisibleHand

While this post is a little late for Christmas, shopping never goes out of style and neither does getting a good deal. InvisibleHand is one of those tools that can save you money while you are browsing the internet.

InvisibleHand is a browser plug-in for Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox. It also works on Windows, OS X and Linux. If you are on a site that has pricing for a product, InvisibleHand will start working in the background and if it finds pricing from other web sites it will notify you how your current site compares.

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