How safe are your passwords?

If you are like many people online you are probably using Mozilla’s Firefox as your web browser of choice. If you aren’t using Firefox then this post won’t directly related to you. However if you are… read on.

Do you save passwords to frequently visited websites in Firefox with this dialogue drop down menu?

If so, do you utilize the Firefox master password, which can be set here:

I would greatly advise using a master password. By doing this you are protecting yourself from someone walking up to your computer and logging into a website with those saved passwords, as Firefox will prompt you for this master password during a session of Firefox or after your computer wakes from sleep. This is the first step to amping up security on your mac. However, not having a master password allows anyone who can gain access to your computer the ability to copy and view ALL of your passwords. Let me repeat that. If you don’t have a master password set, someone else can go on your computer and look at all your passwords.

This is simple done by clicking on the Saved Passwords from the above screen and then clicking the show passwords as shown below. If you don’t have a master password set, Firefox will display all passwords, but if you do have a master password set, then Firefox will ask for the password before doing so.

I highly advise that you make sure you have a Master Password set in Firefox, otherwise if your computer or even your hard drive falls out of your possession you are at great risk.

Personally I always have maintained a master password, that is until I began using the app, 1Password, which we will cover in a future post.

Happy 40th Birthday

Happy Birthday to the Mouse.

The computer mouse turns 40 via Macworld.

Stay tuned for our favorite mice used by us here at About This Mac

Magic Eraser + Macbook = New

For those of you that have a white macbook and have had it for any length of time will notice the discoloration of the palm rests. What once was a bright clean white macbook as turned to a rather ugly looking colour. This can be an issue when you are showing off your amazing Macbook to your PC using friends. If you are like me you tried to use a variety of cleaners, windex, etc to clean it, all of which did nothing to solve the problem. One of the best solutions is to go pick up a MR.CLEAN Magic Eraser. You will want to turn off the computer when you do this. Then apply the Damp Magic Eraser to the affected areas and wipe clean with a second cloth so as to remove the chemicals and to dry it off. This should do the trick. Check out this before and after shot.

Customize About This Mac

Customization of your Mac is one of the best ways to bring your personality to your Mac. And what better place for us to start talking about customization than with the About This Mac screen. Now some of you might not even know where to find this screen. So to begin click on the Apple logo in the top left, and the first item you will see is About This Mac

This is what you will see before you do any customizing.

What we intend to do is customize the image that you see in this screen. To start goto Finder and locate /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app

If you have trouble finding this folder you might be looking in your current users home folder and not the root folder of your computer. From here you will then need to right click and click Show Package Contents, and find /Contents/Resources/MacOSX.tif

Make a backup copy of this file to somewhere you can find it, so you can change it back if you want. Then find any new image you’d like, making sure that the new image is the same size image as the current one. When you have your image ready, just rename is to MacOSX.tif and place it in the location above.

To make sure it all works, just Logout and Login again to see changes. Here what I got when I was done. If you get a chance to customize your About This Mac Screen, we’d love to see it. Just post a link to the image so we can all check it out.

uTorrent comes to Mac

 

One of the most popular BitTorrent application, uTorrent, has finally found its way to our Macs. It is officially available. This first official release is still beta, and Intel Macs only, and the developers are aware that it still may contain bugs. However, it looks great and I can’t wait to test it out.

Visit the site to uTorrent Mac to download it, and if you test it out let us know.