Merry Christ­mas new Mac own­ers! And a spe­cial extra treat for any of you that are switch­ing from Win­dows to your first Mac. Don McAl­lis­ter at Screen­cast­sOn­line has made a free episode of his pop­u­lar video pod­cast avail­able specif­i­cally for switch­ers. Click here to check it out.

And if you find it inter­est­ing and help­ful, I’d highly rec­om­mend you look into becom­ing a full fledged mem­ber of Don’s com­mu­nity. Lots of great tuto­ri­als and infor­ma­tion to help you on your way to becom­ing a Mac genius!

MacZot.com is a site that fea­tures daily deals related to Mac soft­ware. Today they’ve got a deal going on what looks to be a great lit­tle tutorial/manual for switch­ing from Win­dows to a Mac: mac­ZOT » “It’s About Time to Learn the Switch to Mac.”

It’s About Time to Learn the Switch to Mac®” is the most inno­v­a­tive learn­ing tool ever cre­ated for “switch­ers.” It’s all about teach­ing you the Mac by con­nect­ing the dots to Win­dows equiv­a­lents. When the instruc­tor, Saied, teaches you one of the more than 30 lessons on the Mac, you can then instantly try it on the vir­tual Mac that’s built into the learn­ing tool–an inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence unique to “It’s About Time.”

It’s com­pat­i­ble with Mac and Win­dows so you can check it out even if you’re just think­ing about switch­ing to a Mac.

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.

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.