Serious Stuff • Important to Read • Important to Do

A recent hacking event highlights the need for all computer users to take a more active role in securing their computers and online accounts.

If you do not know what "Two-Step Authorization" is, or simply don't use it, now is the time to educate yourself and change your ways.

Please read the following one sentence summary of an article that I urge you to read, and click on that sentence to open the story in a new page.

A very tech savvy guy came home the other day to find his iCloud, Amazon, Google and Twitter accounts hacked, and his iPhone, iPad and Macbook erased, (including all his music and two years worth of his son's baby photos) all by some stranger by remote control!

Please set up Two-Step Authorization at Google.

Please start using a different, non-trivial password at every online site.

Please start using an application like 1Password to help you manage these passwords.

Please start regularly backing up your files.

If you need help, you know where I am!

Ready for Mountain Lion?

Word on the street is that Apple releases Mountain Lion, OS 10.8, tomorrow. No doubt, if you have a Mac, you're excited and may want to upgrade, ASAP. Here's a few things to consider:

1. If you really really depend on your Mac, maybe wait a couple of days? What folks in the biz call ".0 releases" are famous for delighting many AND completely screwing up others. As they say, "pioneers get arrows in their backs." Why not wait and let the bold go where no one's gone before, and read a few reports about how it went for them before you offer up your fine running machine to the gods of software upgrades?

If you decide to ignore that, my wisest advice, then how about this? Backup, backup, backup and utilize Utilities!

2. Back up your whole hard drive. That shouldn't be a big deal because you do that all the time, right? If not, get in the habit. Between low prices on hard drives, and great software including the built in Time Machine and the free Carbon Copy Cloner ("CCC"), you have no excuse not to, and a few million reasons (counted in megabytes!) that you must. Even if you run TimeMachine regularly, there's nothing like the bootable, complete hard drive clone that CCC will create for you when it comes to disaster recovery. Recovering your system from TimeMachine is certainly doable. Just don't count on doing anything else for hours - maybe days - if that's what you end up having to do!

3. Run Disk Utility. Make sure your hard drive reports no errors and that your disk permissions are OK. If Disk Utility finds any errors, have it fix them and run it again until it reports a clean system.

4. If you've moved any Apple installed software, move it back or reinstall it. Many times, Apple likes to see its stuff where it put it when it's making upgrades.

5. Run Cocktail, Onyx and DiskWarrior if you have them. Now is the time to run any utility you have that can help insure that your hard drive and your system software are in order.

6. Back up again now that everything is perfect. I'm not kidding.

7. Think again about my first piece of advice. I'm serious.

8. Good luck.

9. Let me know how it went!

MobileMe to iCloud: You Have 5 Days!

If you have been putting off the move from MobileMe to iCloud, now is the time to make the move.

The most common reason for delay is procrastination, followed in quick succession by "having a Mac that does not yet, or can't, run OS X 10.7 (Lion).

If you've simply been procrastinating, now's the time to make the move. I can't do much more for you than point you to the Apple page to get you started.

Now is also the time to download your Gallery photos and any iWeb pages that may still be lingering on MobileMe.

And, don't forget your iDisk files! They all disappear when June becomes July. (See my previous post on DropBox and other free services for alternatives to iDisk that are actually better than iDisk ever was!)

If, on the other hand, you have a non-Lion compatible Mac, there's still hope. It's easy to keep your email@mac.com or email@me.com email. Here's what Apple has to say:

If you want to keep email working on your devices, go to me.com/move from your computer, choose the option to keep using your email after MobileMe ends, and follow the steps. If your devices meet system requirements, you'll also be able to access all of the iCloud features after June 30, 2012, but only on your compatible devices.

• Mail

Mail continues to work on devices that don’t meet iCloud requirements.

• Calendars

Calendars continue to sync with your devices until June 30, 2012. After MobileMe ends, if your devices are not running iOS 5 or OS X Lion, Calendars no longer sync (Calendar data still resides locally on your devices). Once your devices are updated to iOS 5 or OS X Lion, your Calendar data will be able to sync with iCloud.com, and you can access all of the iCloud features.

• Contacts

Contacts continue to sync with your devices until June 30, 2012. After MobileMe ends, if your devices are not running iOS 5 or OS X Lion, Contacts no longer sync with iCloud.com (Contacts data still resides locally on your devices). Once your devices are updated to iOS 5 or OS X Lion, your Contacts data will be able to sync with iCloud.com, and you can access all of the iCloud features.

Keeping your Calendars and Contacts synched up after June 30 will take a bit of finagling, and some third party software and services. If you need help, give me a call. I'm a good finagler.

Mac OS X Lion and Signing PDFs

Now here's an awesome, but frequently overlooked feature that's built right in to the Macintosh operating system: you can sign PDFs with your actual signature! Did you know that?

How many times have you printed out the PDF, signed it, scanned it, shredded it and then emailed the scan back to the sender? No more. Here's how:

1. Sign your name as you would like it to appear in the document on a plain white piece of paper.
2. Open your PDF with Preview.
3. If you don't see the "Annotations Toolbar, use the menu View > Show Annotations Toolbar (or just type Command-Shift-A)
4. Look for the Signatures pop-up in the Annotation menu that now runs across the top of the document window.
5. Click on that, and choose "Create Signature from Built-in iSight…"
6. Line up the signature with the line in the Signature Capture preview window, and click "Accept."
7. Now, click where in the document you would like your signature to appear.

You can move the signature around, and even resize it. (Unlike resizing many other objects, you don't even need to hold Shift Key down as you resize it so your signature doesn't get all distorted.)

When you're happy, just hit the Enter key, and save the document!

You can store several versions of your signature in Preview, and in the future just choose the one you want to use from the pop-up menu.

How cool is that?

There are many other somewhat hidden features in Mac Lion that can make your life a lot easier. I'll post some here on a regular basis. If you can't wait, perhaps you would like a Lion Lesson or some basic Mac OS coaching. I'm here for you!

Frozen iPhone / iPod / iPad? Try This!

If your iDevice has locked up... like an app won't quit, and it doesn't respond to just pushing the home button, try this:

Restart: Hold down the power button and the home button, and keep holding them. The device may say "slide to power off." If so, do that, wait until it is completely off, and then turn the device back on again.

If the "slide to power off" doesn't appear, or if you continue to have problems after a restart, try this:

Reset: Hold the power and the sleep buttons. Keep holding both buttons, even if the slide to power off option appears. The screen will go black and maybe a little streaky. Keep holding the buttons. Wait until the Apple logo comes up. Now let go of the buttons. Wait for your phone device to finish starting up. It's going to take longer than usual.

All Better? Good. You're welcome

No? Sorry. Call me. Maybe I can help.

PhotoSynth - I Love This App!

One of the shortfalls of the iPhone and iPad cameras is their fixed wide angle aspect. I've frequently been frustrated by the camera's inability to capture landscapes, or really anything much beyond casual snapshots. With all those megapixels in my pocket - more than three times as many as in my dedicated camera (and less than 1/8 the size and weight) - I've often wished I could take a picture 1/3 as good.

Photosynth changes the game. Even though it is made by Microsoft, it is one of my all time favorite photography apps. (That alone should tell you how good it must be.) I find myself going to it over and over again. Photosynth allows you to take wide angle and panoramic photos with your iDevice, just by slowly moving around as it automatically shoots overlapping images which it then weaves together into a (mostly) seamless picture. You can take a big wide shot and crop it and save it to your photo roll (click on the image to the left), or you can go the whole 360° route and then view your panorama in the App or on the associated web site, which can have some pretty dramatic results! Click on the box to the right and be sure to expand the resulting image to full screen to really take in just what this offers!

I've found the app to be pretty easy to use, consistently yielding pleasing results. My experience is that it works best when nothing in your shot is moving. Ask people to hold still as you pan near and over them or you will have ghosts and blurs, but sometimes that can be part of the fun. The app, and the non-required use of the web site are both free.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

I don't know about you, but for me, Time Machine runs too often and takes up too much of my Mac's CPU (slows down my work), bandwidth (slows down my network connection) and too much disk space (too many backups too often). This is particularly annoying when I am working online, on photo or video editing, or sometimes just listening to music and surfing.

What is to be done?

Simple answer, download and install TimeMachineScheduler. It's a free Preference Pane that will allow you to set the interval between backups to

anywhere from 1 to 12 hours, and to not back up at all between certain hours. It runs on Intel Macs, OS 10

.5+. You could do this by messing with hidden Apple preference files and a text editor, which is how I used to do it, but why bother when something as simple and elegant as TimeMachineScheduler is available.

direct download