Tuesday, 18 August, 2009
A reader who wishes to remain anonymous is concerned about a very scary looking website. I attempt to calm the waters.
I used Yahoo to search for something and was sent immediately to the following [redacted] site. I believe my Mac was invaded and don’t know what to do!
First, relax. Your Mac wasn’t invaded, infected, compromised, co-opted, or conquered. If you’d clicked through a few of those dire pop-up warnings you might have been as amused as I was to see a phony Windows Security Alert appear on a Macintosh. What you’ve encountered is termed “scareware”—a scam that attempts to frighten those confronted with these pages into downloading a hunk of software that will allegedly deal with the problem.
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Tuesday, 12 May, 2009
Are you annoyed by bouncing icons in the Dock—and I’m not talking about the bounce when you open an application, but when a program wants to get your attention. Like when iChat has a video chat request, or System Preferences wants your OK to install a new panel, or Software Update found an update to install. The main problem I have with the bouncing icons is that they’re never-ending; once they start, they won’t stop until you switch to the application to end the bounce.
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Monday, 11 May, 2009
The concept of a single-site browser or site-specific browser (SSB, either way) is simple: give me a window with one website in it, preferably a desktop application replacement like Gmail, RTM, Basecamp or Zoho, and let that window behave like a regular application with its own Dock icon, notifications, etc. If you’re spending a lot of your time on a particular site, this can simplify your life quite a bit; if you’re mixing up GTD with ADD (as so many of us seem to be), an SSB can help limit your distraction horizon while you’re trying to maintain focus and flow.
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Sunday, 10 May, 2009
OS X has a number of options for handling disk images—settings for such things as automatically opening them, moving Internet-enabled images to the trash after opening, verifying checksums, and more. You control all of these options (and a few more) in Disk Utility’s preferences panel.
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Wednesday, 25 February, 2009
We’ve all been effected one way or the other with the struggling economy. It’s the expenses you don’t prepare for, or expect that hurt the worst. A car breaking down, an illness or injury; add a myriad of household repairs to the list and your budget is blown in the blink of an eye.
The average computer owner/user has never suffered a hard drive failure and often doesn’t realize it’s even possible. Sadly, disaster strikes when you least often expect it and often offers little to no warning for preparation.
So what should you do when you lose your data and recovery services just aren’t in the budget? First of all, DON’T MAKE REPEATED EFFORTS of booting or access attempts on your own or under the direction of a non-specialized recovery company. Each and every time the attempt is made the situation can be made worse or irreversible.
The best advice is to remove the hard drive from the system (if you’re unsure of how to do this have a professional do it). Place the hard drive in an antistatic bag. Label it with a date of the crash and a description of the contents you had stored on the drive that may be most important. If you have a safe or safety deposit box you may store it there. Otherwise, a shelf in your home office or similar out-of-the-way type place is fine. Bottom line is that a hard drive can survive years without further deterioration as long as it is in an even-temperature environment. No high-level humidity or extreme cool temperature conditions. Your hard drive can outlast this economic recession, whether it’s 5 years or 50 years. (shutter)
