Notice of telephone phishing scam directed at Apple users.

Notice of a telephone phishing scam directed at Apple users, a client of mine was just called by someone with an accent claiming to be from Apple, that her emails were being compromised, and directing her to go to her computer, open Safari and start typing. She asked to speak to his manager and the line went dead.

More than likely they're trying to sell some kind of bogus security software with the aim of obtaining your credit card number or other personal information.

Be aware, Apple would and will never phone you for any reason, especially to discuss sensitive security issues regarding your computer. Either collect the number off your call display and forward it to the RCMP, or simply invite the caller to go pound sand and carry on with your day. DO NOT buy any software from these scammers.

Changing Your Computer's Name and User Names

Now and again I meet clients who have bought a used computer, pre-installed with an operating system and user accounts that become disconcerting for them because it's somebody else's name.

It's simple to personalize your computer by changing the computer's name as well as the user name.

To change the computer name, simply navigate to the System Preferences > Sharing > Computer Name.

Changing the user name and password is just as simple, navigate to the System Preferences > Accounts, click the lock and login to make changes and change your name and password there.

That won't change the home folder name, however. To do that, you must hold the Control key and click on the account name who's home folder you'd like to change, that will take you to advanced options where you can change the account name and home folder.

Up Your Media's Quick Tips Newsletter Volume II

Hi, and welcome to another edition of our Quick Mac Tips newsletter. These are some issues that have come up with my Apple cpmputer clients around Parksville, Qualicum, Nanaimo and central Vancouver Island in the past weeks.

In iPhoto 9 you can now choose to send mail via iphoto or your mac mail application I suggest choosing the Mac Mail program. Choose this option in the iPhoto General Preferences pane.

Hot Corners, is one of my favourite navigation features. If you're like me, you tend to have a lot of windows and applications open at once. In your System Preferences pane, go to Expose and Spaces, and pick Active Screen Corners, I like my top right corner to tile all open windows and my lower right corner to clear all windows and expose the Desktop.

You can add a photo or logo to your email signature by opening up the signature dialogue in your mail program and simply dragging the image directly onto that particular signature from either the finder or the iPhoto application.

Change your Safari homepage from the default Apple store to a page more suitable to you. In the Safari preferences pane, simply type in the url to your favourite page where it says 'home page'.

Need to translate text or full webpages, use the Google translator at http://translate.google.com/ . This free tool will allow you to translate over 50 languages

iTunes Radio contains access to hundreds of radio stations worldwide in every genre.

To save a PDF for the best emailing and sharing compatibility, choose print in your Pages, MS Word, Safari or Mail program, at the bottom left of that window you'll see the PDF tab, from there you can save the PDF or mail it directly

To type fractions go into the keyboard language drop down menu near the top right of your screen (the flag beside the clock) and choose to "show character viewer". From there you choose symbols, then number and number symbols, pick the fraction you want and click insert.

So You Bought a New Mac, Now What?

Congratulations, you’re one of the approximately three million lucky so and so’s who got a new Apple computer so far this year. It’s agreed, that sleek aluminum unibody looks gorgeous on your desk, but now that it’s out of the box, are you getting the most out of your new computer?

For those of you ready to dive in but just need a gentle nudge in the right direction, here are the first five things you should know about your Apple computer.

Menu Bar

Across the top of every screen lies the menu bar. It has consistencies across every application and is the key to the functionality of your system and commands. Ever-present in the top left corner is the Apple Menu, a drop down menu which holds root level commands over your basic system preferences. The Apple Menu contains some handy day to day operations, including force quit, software update, and a shortcut to your 10 most recent documents and applications.

To the right of the Apple is the active application preferences menu and next to that is a file menu (open, save, print etc.) edit menu (cut, copy, paste) a number of app-specific menus, (bookmarks, view, share,) and finally the help menu. It’s comforting to know that whatever program you happen to be using, the basic navigation is essentially the same. From the right side you can expect to see your Spotlight icon, active user name, keyboard language, clock, speaker volume, Bluetooth, Time Machine and various other icons.


Dock and Dashboard

The Dock is the graphical panel that shows your currently open and chosen favourite applications. You can customize the dock to sit on the left, bottom or right of your screen, or disappear altogether and reappear with the scroll of the mouse.

The Dashboard also lives in the dock and contains various handy tools and widgets such as calculators, weather reports, dictionaries and stock-tickers at the click of a button. There are hundreds of fun and/or useful little apps available for download at the Apple site.

Spotlight

This is the blazing fast and ultra-thorough search tool that appears at the uppermost right corner of your screen. It indexes every character in your entire home folder and can find not only files, folders and applications that match your search term, but also documents, web pages and emails that contain that term. It’ll also display exactly where in your home folder said document resides.

Time Machine

It’s true, sometimes bad things happen to good computers, and if something in your computer is going to fail, chances are it’ll be your hard drive. Time Machine is the built in, automatic back-up tool that can prevent that sinking feeling you get when you realize your computer has died, taking with it your family photos, music collection, masters thesis or client database. Simply attach external hard drive and never think of it again.

Viruses

The actual science on this matter is misunderstood. Apple quite rightly claims that its computers are immune to all viruses that infect PC’s. However that doesn’t mean there aren’t malicious files out there that can affect the Apple OS. True, the Unix platform on which the operating system is based is more robust and secure, but immunity to malware simply does not exist. The short answer is that yes, Mac computers can be susceptible to various non-PC based viruses. Anecdotally speaking, neither I, nor anyone I’ve ever met, has ever (knowingly) suffered from a computer virus.

In the future we will explore some more indepth features of your Apple computer. For now, the most important lesson to learn is that, short of physically breaking it, there’s not much you can do to ruin your new computer, As long as you keep your data safe, you can feel free to explore your Mac system, change the settings and layout to your specific needs and comforts without fear. Enjoy.

iPhoto '09, A Glorious App for Disorganized Photographers

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying my new iPhoto program, part of the iLife ’09 bundle I purchased for $99 CAD at my local Apple vendor.

Like most folks, I’ve got thousand of unorganized photos culled from various computers, cameras and file systems over the years. They move from one drive to another, renamed, shrunk for web and dotted throughout my pictures folder.

The initial import was a breeze, a one-click ‘import to library’ function typical of most Apple programs. The photos are arranged in a beautiful graphical format. You can modify the size of the thumbnails in the gallery and easily expand to view full-size and back again.

The Faces feature is one of my favourites. It uses a newly developed facial recognition software. You begin by inputting the name of the subject in the photo and the program will scan the rest of your photos and suggest other instances where that face appears. The more examples you have of that face, the more precise the selections will be. It’s not foolproof but it is pretty darn accurate, and managed to accurately scan and group photos of my children over the years, right back to infancy.

Sharing is super-easy, with one-click interfaces for email, flickr and facebook. Simply select the photos you wish to email and choose what size you’d like to send the photos, iPhoto does the rest of the work. Create an album for facebook and flickr and it will batch upload the entire album to the account you’ve assigned.

You can flag or hide photos, sort, title and rate them. You can add location data, keywords and descriptions. You can send to iWeb, iDVD or simply burn to CD. You can even fix red-eye and build cards, calendars and other mementos, then order direct from the program.

My only complaint is its lack of duplicate finder capability. While it was easy enough for me to sort the photos by date and click and delete duplicate files by hand, it seems like it could be even easier, given the strengths of the rest of the program. All in all though, I’m loving my iPhoto ’09 by Apple, and if you’re a photographer or collector of snapshots, you’ll love it too.

Back Up Your Data!! It's Easy With Time Machine

I received an all-too-common phone call from a frightened-sounding University student yesterday. He had accidentally knocked his MacBook off his desk and onto the floor, "It wasn't very high," he insisted, "But pretty soon the hard drive started making funny noises. I turned it off and when I turned it back on all I got was the grey screen." At that point I could almost hear the churning in his gut as he said, "How much to fix it and what are the chances of data recovery?"

Now I can't fault the guy for dropping his computer. Never mind it's a dumb-ass thing to do, but accidents happen to the best of us, and with a computer so versatile and robust it's easy to take it for granted and drag it into situations it should never be in.

I told the client that it was probably the hard drive and potentially the logic board that was at fault and that, since it had been dropped, it had voided any warranty. A replacement hard drive was likely to run close to $200.00 with the installation and software restore, and a logic board could be upwards of $1000.00 all told. Data recovery, if I couldn't do it here in the shop, was likely to start at $800.00 or more at a dedicated data recovery operation.

Money matters aside, this student likely had his whole year's work on his hard drive, complete with essays and notes, pictures, contacts, software and more, an entire year's investment in time and energy. But did he have a back up?

According to Apple’s own research, only 4% of users conduct a regular back-up of their important data. One feature common to Mac users, (and you can colour me guilty) is the sense of being bullet-proof. Which brings us to Time Machine, OS X Leopard's seamless and painless back up feature.

The Time Machine application is an integral part of the Leopard OS and its interface is as easy to use as anything else Apple. At every start-up you’re prompted to configure your Time Machine back-ups and asked where you’d like the back-ups to be stored. You’re also allowed to choose any files or folders you’d like to have excluded by the backup. After that Time Machine does all the work, automatically storing the contents of your home folder on your (preferably external) hard drive. Each subsequent hour the Time Machine will back-up only those files that have changed, storing them in an easily searchable interface on your new drive.

Restoring your system from the Time Machine backup is as seamless and easy as building the Backup in the first place. Simply find the date or the file you’d like restored in the quick look interface, click restore, and it’s done.

Let’s face it, even Macs die and not only through drops, spills and burlaries. With 1 Tb external drives selling for under $150.00, there is no excuse for losing a year or more's worth of effort and resorting to professional data recovery services charging a 'desperation premium'. Prepare for the worst, back up your data

When It Comes To Security, Apple's Got You Covered.

If data and internet security is an issue for you and your computer, the new Leopard OS X operating system from Apple is sure to help you sleep nights

Parental Controls

As the parent of an 11 year old, I dread the internet and any unfettered access my children may enjoy. Porn, violence, creeps and predators all pose hazards to our children. The new parental controls in the Leopard operating system are robust and comprehensive, allowing you to place time limits on your child's usage, to block broadly filtered and/or specific Adult or other sites, to limit the programs your child can use and even to log email and chat messages for parents to monitor. They're available in System Preferences under Parental Control.

User Accounts and Filevault passwords

For any government worker, medical practitioner, business person or researcher, it's imperative that one protect one's data from prying eyes. Apple's user account setup can effectively give varying levels of security depending on your specific needs. The user accounts and keychain passwords can keep your data relatively safe when sharing a computer with others in a home or office environment. Users with particularly sensitive data can store their entire home folder in an encrypted disk image using Filevault, or you can just as easily encrypt specific files.

The EfI Firmware password is a feature that can protect your entire computer from being booted with an external disk if that computer should fall into the wrong hands.

Just another reason, you should'a bought a Mac.