Vanessa asks: I really need to get some back up Hard Drive. I’ve heard I need at least 3 HDDs. is that what I use? Also what brand or memory space do you think is required?

On a mac the best back up is a external firewire HD and then setting up time machine. Time machine is Leopard’s built in backup solution and you will need to have Mac OS 10.5 installed to use it. When they say you need 3, they are talking about having 3 duplicates of the data you want to backup. 1 on local machine + 2 Backup HD’s = 3 HDs.

If you want that much storage I would recommend something like the WD mybook mirror edition. Like this one above, which is available at Costco for $329. While it may seem like way too much HD space, if you have alot of movie, pictures or music you will find a way to fill it up fast. Plus if you use the “Mirrored” mode you will actually only have 1TB of storage as the device had 2 HD’s inside and when you set it up it will mirror the drives. This is how people get the 3 HD’s backup. If one of the drives dies inside the backup the other one still has everything on it and you are fine.

However you could go the cheaper route and just buy an external HD with one HD and you would still be okay. Anything better than no backup is better.

The last option, which I am currently using at both work and home, is to buy an Apple Time Capsule.

While you are only getting 1 HD for backup purposes, the unit also functions as your wireless router at the new standard “N” speed. It also has a USB port to add a wireless printer or expand the HDD space with another external unit. The benefit you get from backing up to this unit is that you never have to connect a devise to your macbook or iMac as it is done wirelessly. In the past I had been backing up with a regular USB external HDD, however, sometimes I would go 10–20 days before I would remember to backup. While this never really got me into major trouble, I did learn my lesson when a HDD recently died and I almost lost data that would have been backed up, had I connected my external drive. Luckily I was able to rescue the needed files. The Apple Time Capsule comes in a 500GB, and 1TB size and cost $329 and $529 respectively. However, you can find them cheaper from the Apple Refurbished Store.

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.

The computer mouse turns 40 via Macworld.

Stay tuned for our favorite mice used by us here at 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.

 

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.

I have been using Pages for a lot of my desktop publishing needs while on my Mac, however, I still need people in the PC world to view my documents. I have been using the Export function quite a lot and noticed that it does not have a shortcut key next to it. What is its shortcut key?

This is a great question and actually a problem that I have encountered when using other programs. As I love to use shortcuts I find it rather annoying when the one command I use the most doesn’t have a shortcut. The solution: Create one yourself.

Step 1: Go to your System Preference and click on Keyboard and Mouse Pane.

Step 2: Select the Keyboard Shortcuts Tab as shown above. Then click the + to add a new shortcut.

Step 3: In the dialog box that pops up above just select the application you want to create the shortcut for, in this case, Pages. Don’t worry if it isn’t listed, just click other and select the application via the Finder popup window.

Step 4: Enter a menu title. This is the only really important part that you can screw up on. You must enter the command exactly as it shows up in the application so in this situation the command in Pages is “Export…” Note: if you are creating the ellipsis for this command you can type it by pressing Option+;

Step 5: Enter your keyboard shortcut. For this example I went with Cmd+E

Step 6: Restart the application you created the shortcut for and just like that you have a new shortcut. It will even show up in the menu for those times when you forget the newly created shortcut.

Now you can all go ahead and create new shortcuts for any application you want.

The following is a list of things that stick out from when I made the move to my first Mac. So if you’re delving into Macs for the first time, the following should come in handy.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Luckily, when it comes to the actual keyboard shortcuts, a lot of the shortcuts on your Mac are the same as they are on your Windows PC; generally you can just swap Command for Control for a lot of the standards. For example, the Ctrl-C/X/V for Copy/Cut/Paste become Cmd-C/X/V. Simple, right?

Instead of boring you with a long list of keyboard shortcuts like those, I’m just going to highlight some of the less obvious shortcuts.

• Force Quit: When a program freezes up on your Windows PC and you want to force it
  closed, you hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete. On your Mac, you’ll hit Cmd-Alt-Escape. This brings up the Force Quit dialog — a similar tool
  to the task manager for the purpose of closing unresponsive apps.

• Minimize/Hide: You can minimize a window to the dock from your keyboard by pressing Cmd-M. Or you can Hide an application by pressing Cmd-H. The difference is that hiding an application does not put anything on the dock, but hids every window of that app. Instead all application windows disappear from view until you switch back. In my opinion hiding is a better option because you can Cmd-Tab back to a hidden application and it will restore to your screen; however pressing Cmd-Tab to a minimized app will leave the app on the dock.

• Opening selected file: If you’ve ever opened a file or program on your PC by selecting the file and then hitting Enter to launch it you will need to know this tip. If you try to do the same on your Mac, your Mac will think you want to rename the file instead of open it. To open the file, you have to hit Cmd-O (for open).

• Backspace vs Delete: On Macs, the backspace key is called Delete. This key deletes from right to left, just like the backspace key. If you want to delete test from left to right, like the windows delete key, you will have to press Function-Delete (especially if you’re on a laptop). As well if you want to delete a file or folder from with a key press, select the file and press Cmd-Delete and it will go straight to the Trash.

• Closing windows and apps: In the Windows environment, whenever you close the last open window from a program, that program quits. Things do not opporate like that in the Mac world. Cmd-W will close the active window, however — unlike in Windows — once you’ve closed the last window of an application, the app will continue to run. If you want to quit a Mac app, you hit Cmd-Q (for quit). This one is especially important when you first switch to a Mac so you don’t end of wasting your system memory running several apps you’re not using.

Installing apps

This may seem like somewhat of a no brainer for Mac veterans, but when you switch to a Mac from a PC, you may find the installation process of new applications a bit confusing at first. That’s because, in general, there’s absolutely nothing to it. When you download an application (generally in the form of a compressed .dmg file, which will mount as a drive when you open it), you’re pretty much done with
the installation process. You can run an application (marked by the .app extension) from anywhere on your computer, and there’s really no installation to it. Broadly speaking, the installation of a new Mac app generally consists of moving the new application to your Applications folder. Many apps make this very simple, like the mounted Firefox .dmg above.

Unless you have your own system for arranging apps on your Mac, copying new apps to the Applications folder is a good practice. What you don’t want to do is forget to move the app from the .dmg folder to your hard disk.

While this article is just scratching the surface I hope it helps those readers who have just switched to a Mac or plan to soon. I’m sure their will be more written on this topic hear in the future, so if you’ve got questions on the subject; say there is something you did on your Windows that you just can’t seem to figure out how to do on your Mac — then let’s hear it. Send us your questions and we will do our best to get answers up. Also if you’re a Mac Addict like us hear at About this Mac and you have your own tips, we’d love to hear those as well.

In general a CD or DVD can be ejected on a Mac (MacBook or MacBook Pro) using the physical eject button or from the finder without any problems, but occasionally this don’t work and the disc icon might disappear from your Desktop and you can’t get the disc out of your computer. However, there is a trick you can try to extract the stuck disc.

• Restart your Mac
• After you hear the startup chime, press and hold your trackpad button
• After a minute or so and you think nothing is gonna happen the disc ejects
• Release the button once the disc ejects

99% of the time this will work. The other 1% has a more advance solution that I won’t publish. So if it doesn’t work for you. Just contact us and we’ll walk you through it.