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.

Loud Fan and Low Battery - What to Do?

Mikul asks:

Hey, our MacBook’s fan has been running really loud lately. It used to not at all, and now it does 100% of the time, even when we’re not running anything. Also, the battery has been lasting for a lot less time than it used to. Any ideas of what it is or what we could do?

One thing you can check is the activity monitor (if you use spotlight and search for Activity Monitor). Change the little box up top to say “All Processes” and then sort the list by the CPU option. Chances are something like Safari or Firefox is running really high and when you’re shutting the lid to put it to sleep, that process is still running even though you think it’s not, which is why the battery isn’t lasting as long as it used to. If it’s a program that you recognize (i.e. Safari, Firefox, iTunes) you can select it and choose the stop sign looking button that says “Quit Process” and it will fully kill that program/application.

Click here to continue reading about how to fix a loud fan/low battery combo

PDF Viewing for Firefox 3

I really like Firefox 3 and have always used it as my default web browser on both the Mac and PC platform. However, the way that Firefox handles PDF files is some what of an annoyance. If you are like me you too will find it rather odd then that when in Firefox and you click on a web link to a PDF file it will automatically download the file and then open the PDF up in Apple’s default Preview.app. Now the easiest way to solve this problem is the go ahead and start using Safari. However, one of the reason I use Firefox is for the amount of add-ons, extensions and customization you can do in it. So as usual their is a Firefox extension which adds this feature. (I believe their is an extension for pretty much everything) This simple extension adds the ability to view PDFs directly into Firefox. You can download the Firefox extension here.

Google Adds Video Chat to Gmail

Google has (finally?) added video and voice chat capabilities to their gmail service. To enable the service, just visit this site and download and install the plugin. You’ll have to quit your browser once it’s downloaded before you can install it - but don’t worry, it will prompt you if you accidently leave Firefox open.

Then, it’s just a matter of waiting for one of your contacts to have installed it themselves so you can try it out!

You can tell one of your contacts has the video plugin installed because they’ll have a little video camera icon by their name in your contact list like this:

Tech Talk poster gets noticed

Hey everyone, I’m Famous! Er, maybe by everyone I should say, “attention all geeks,” either way I am famous. Thanks to Greg Benson, my counterpart here for forwarding me to this article on the popular site of Macworld, which tokens me for my “Firefox 3 and iweb fix” which I posted awhile ago. Seems the techie world took notice and I got my name and a link to Terribly Poetic on MACWORLD! I can’t believe, and if you don’t either, just click through and read the article. Albeit, the article probably won’t mean anything to 99% of you, but either way you can see for yourself that I am on Macworld site. Is this my 15 minutes or just the beginning? Next stop Macworld magazine cover!

Now if only I had posted that tip on this blog… next time I guess.