On your Mac’s Desktop, double-click the icon of the external hard drive that stores your Time Machine backup data.

You’ll see a folder with the curious name of Backups.backupdb. Open this folder.

Inside you’ll see  a separate folder for each Macintosh computer that is backed up to this drive. If you only backup one Mac, then you’ll only see one folder. The folder is typically named something like Susan’s iMac. Open the folder containing the backups you want to delete.

Wait for the contents to be displayed. It could take a minute. Eventually, you’ll see a list of folders whose names are comprised of date and time stamps. Each of these folders contains backup data created by Time Machine.

Select one of more of these folders, typically the oldest ones, and drag them to the Trash icon on your Dock.

Empty the Trash by going to the Finder menu and selecting Empty Trash.

Sit back and wait while the Trash is emptied. You’ll be surprised how long this process takes. An even bigger surprise is that the status messages will indicate that the number of items to be deleted is a negative number. Of course this is illogical, but it will be displayed. Don’t worry about it. The deletion will eventually finish.

Let’s briefly review how Time Machine works. Let’s imagine you setup Time Machine on July 17, 2010. The first time it performs a backup it copies all files onto the external backup hard drive. This means that it copies the Mac operating system, as well as all applications and all of your photos, music, Word files, etc. Time Machine continues to automatically perform backups every hour when the Mac is on, awake and the backup hard drive is connected. These subsequent backups are much, much smaller than the initial backup. These subsequent backups only include new and edited files and are called incremental backups. Time Machine regularly prunes, or deletes, some of these small incremental backups. In other words, it doesn’t hold onto each and every hourly backup. Instead, it holds onto hourly backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and then weekly backups until the hard drive is full.

Once the hard drive is full, it displays a message indicating that it’s going to delete your oldest backup, from July 17, 2010 in my example. However, Time Machine is smart enough to always hold onto at least one copy of every file on your Mac. In other words, if you created a Word file named My Resume on Jan 1, 2007 and haven’t edited or opened that file since then, Time Machine backed up this file when it was initially setup. So, even though Time Machine is now deleting some backups from July 2010, it still has one copy of that Word file you created on Jan 1, 2007. Thus all of the files on your Mac are still protected (backed up). All that is being deleted are backups of files that you deleted as well as previous versions of documents that you still have. Since you only have one version of My Resume, that sole copy is retained.

If you no longer want to be notified when Time Machine deletes your oldest backups, you can turn off this feature. Go to the Apple menu, select System Preferences and then click on Time Machine. Click the Options button and uncheck the box labeled “Notify when old backups are deleted.”

If the external hard drive on which you store your Time Machine backups can only hold a few weeks worth of incremental backups before you’re notified that your oldest backups are being deleted, then I recommend that you buy an external hard drive with a larger storage capacity. If you choose to do this and want to move your existing backups to your new backup hard drive, you can copy the backups.backupdb folder as described on Apple’s web site.

Next week’s Tech Tip will cover how to manually delete your Time Machine backups from an external hard drive if Time Machine fails to do so on its own.

As a Mac consultant, I regularly find Download folders with hundreds and sometimes thousands of files in them. When an email attachment arrives in Mail it is connected to a specific email message. Each time you double-click that file to open it, a new copy is added to your Downloads folder. Thus, I often see 3, 4, 5 or more copies of the same file in a person’s Downloads folder. Many people also get confused when trying to install applications such as Adobe Flash. They manage to download the installer, but they don’t know that they need to go to the Downloads folder, open the installer and follow its prompts to actually install the application. Then, a few days later they are again notified that Flash still needs to be updated and they dutifully download yet another copy of the installer. Consequently, it’s easy to understand how and why the Downloads folder accumulates large numbers of files. (Note: Once an application or application update has been installed then the installer located in the Downloads folder can be deleted.)

I try to keep my Downloads folder or close to empty. I just checked and there are 29 items in it currently, most of those from the past few weeks. So the next time you are procrastinating on an important work project, go clean out your Downloads folder. At least you can feel good about doing that task!

How to find your Downloads folder

I intend to update this list as I learn about new resources. If you can recommend any places, please contact me.

Phinney Ridge

The Phinney Neighborhood Association operates four buildings that contain a wide-variety of rooms that could accommodate a mere handful or many dozen. All rooms have wireless Internet access.

Wallingford

Present Sense has two small meeting rooms which offer a small kitchen but no Internet access.

The Mosaic Coffeehouse rents their den. It includes a large conference table and wireless Internet access.

iLeap rents their Library which is equipped with white boards, projector, screen, wireless Internet and a kitchen (for an additional fee).

All Over Seattle and Bellevue

The Seattle Public Library offers free meeting rooms in many of their branches. The rooms can be reserved up to 3 months in advance. The meetings need to be open to the public. No attendance fee can be collected and no merchandise sold there.

Regus offers conference rooms, virtual offices and executive suites in the greater Seattle area and in many other states. Rooms can be rented by the hour, half day or full day.

In a previous tech tip, I talked about reasons why you might want to sign-up for a personal VPN service such as securing all of the data that goes to or from your laptop while you’re using a public wireless network.

In this article we’ll briefly compare two personal VPN services including Cloak and TunnelBear. I’ve used both of these services over the past few months. Both are affordable, easy to setup and capable, but I prefer Cloak for its unobtrusiveness and helpfulness.

You can try both services for free. Tunnelbear offers a service plan which lets you send up to 500 MB of data over your Tunnelbear VPN connection for free. If 500 MB isn’t adequate then they offer two paid plans that permit you to send unlimited data. You can either pay $5/month or $50/year. Cloak offers a 30-day free trial. After that, you have to choose from one of 3 monthly data plans: 5 GB for $2/month, 25 GB for $8/month or 60 GB for $15/month. In my experience, a 5 GB monthly cap is sufficient, so I would pay $24/year for a year’s worth of service from Cloak.

Both applications have very simple interfaces. Tunnelbear is an application. When you open it you see two buttons. One is the on/off button used to start or stop your VPN connection. The other button lets you indicate if you’re in the US or the UK. Additionally, the application displays the amount of data remaining if you’re using the free account. Cloak installs a menu bar icon whose menu provides a Connect/Disconnect command, a status indicator, preferences and a way to quit Cloak. I prefer Cloak’s interface since its menu bar icon is out of the way while Tunnelbear’s application seems much larger than it needs to be. Additionally, Cloak displays information notifications when it has connected or disconnected as well as when the public wireless network requires you to sign-in using your web browser.

Both applications reportedly work in many countries, but Cloak’s coverage might be more wide-spread. Cloak claims to work in most countries since they piggyback on data centers around the globe. While I don’t travel internationally much, I know many of my clients do, so this is an important feature. It’s unclear how wide-spread Tunnelbear’s coverage is. I assume they only have servers in the US and the UK and thus, I presume it’ll work in North American and European countries and maybe others. Both applications indicate that they don’t work in China.

Both services support Mac OS X and Windows-based computers as well as iOS devices like iPhones and iPads and Android-based phones and tablets.

It’s important to be aware that using a VPN connection will slow down the speed of your Internet connection. VPN connections encrypt all network traffic that is transmitted across them. This encrypting and decrypting of data takes time and thus slows down your connection. Cloak estimates that you’ll see a loss of about 20% of your network throughput.

I hope you find this comparison helpful. Security is increasingly important. Both Tunnelbear and Cloak offer affordable, user-friendly ways to secure your network traffic when you’re on public networks, so try these services and start to use one.

• Open the PDF file using Apple’s Preview application. (If Preview isn’t the default application, then you’ll first have to go to your Applications folder and open Preview, then drag your PDF file onto Preview’s icon on your Dock.)
• Go to the File menu and select Export, if your Mac is using OS X 10.7 or 10.8. (If your Mac is using OS X 10.6 or earlier then go to the File menu and select Save As)
• From the pop-up list next to Quartz Filter, select Reduce File Size. Use the image below as a guide.
• Click the Save button.

The file size reduction is primarily achieved by reducing the quality of images in the PDF file. Please review the resulting file to make sure the image quality is satisfactory.

It turns out that one can make their own custom “Reduce File Size” filters to control the amount of image quality reduction. This helpful tutorial explains how and also indicates subtle changes that apply to older and newer versions of Mac OS X.

If your PDF file is still not small enough to send as an email attachment or if you have a handful of PDFs, which collectively are too large to send as attachments, then you should consider using DropBox. I have a tech tip about using DropBox this way.

By default Word 2011′s Form Control features are hidden. To make them visible you have to enable the Developer tab on the Ribbon. Here’s how to do this:

• Open a new document in Word 2011.
• Click on the Word menu and select Preferences.
• Click the Ribbon button on the bottom row on the right-hand side.
• In the Customize section, scroll through the list and insert a check mark next to Developer.
• Click the OK button.
• Click on the Developer tab on the Ribbon and you’ll see the Form Controls as depicted below.

You can now use these controls in a document. Let’s look at how to use the Text Box, Combo Box and Check Box.

The Text Box lets the form-filler type in their own answer. Click the Text Box option to insert a Text Box into your Word document. Double-click on this Text Box to control its options. For example, you could set a Maximum Length for the recipient’s answer.

The Check Box lets you create a box that can be checked by the form-filler.

The Combo Box lets you enter a list of choices that will appear in a drop-down list. The form-filler can select only one choice. After adding a Combo Box to your Word document, double-click it to be able to enter the choices that you want to offer.

The Protect Form button is very important. After you’ve finished your document click the Protect Form button. This button locks the document so it can’t be edited. In other words, it turns the document into a fillable form. Once you’ve protected the form you’re ready to distribute it to others.

Below is a picture of a sample document which demonstrates the Text Box, Combo Box and Check Box.

• Open Mail and compose a new email message.

• Address the message and start to type the message.

• Select one or more words in your message.

• Go to the Edit menu and select Add Link.

• In the box that appears paste the web page address (aka hyperlink) and click OK. Use the picture below as a guide.

Pasting a web page address directly into your email is possible, but long addresses can really break up the flow of an email. If the web page address gets divided onto two lines then it can even break and not work when the recipient clicks on it. For example, imagine that you want to send a friend a link to a book available on Amazon’s web site. You could list the address, but it can be long and ugly. For example:

<http://www.amazon.com/The-Mac-Not-Typewriter-Edition/dp/0201782634/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1361854496&sr=8-1&keywords=the+mac+is+not+a+typewriter+by+robin+williams>

Using the technique I list above, you’ll be able to hide that entire address by making it a link, like this.

For about the past decade, most internal hard drives have been equipped with a system that lets them monitor their own health and tries to predict failures. This technology is called S.M.A.R.T., which stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology. Onyx and SMARTUtility rely on this monitoring system to help you to check on your hard drive’s health. It’s important to note that external hard drives do not include SMART technology.

Using Onyx is easy. Download the appropriate version of Onyx for your Mac. There is a different version for each version of Mac OS X from version 10.2 to the current version, 10.8. After downloading Onyx, open it and enter an administrative user name and password. This is typically your user name and password.

Onyx will then automatically present a window indicating that it will check your Mac’s internal hard drive if you click Continue. See the picture below.

Phase 1 – Planning for the Migration

1. Select a new hosting company.

It’s not easy to provide reliable and capable email and web hosting with solid customer support to Macintosh users. If you’re not satisfied with your current hosting company you might like to read the article I wrote about selecting a good hosting company.

2. Sign-up for hosting services with the new company.

Setup email accounts and distribution lists. Don’t forget about setting up email aliases for addresses listed on your web site like info@company.com. Setup web hosting and send the FTP login information to your web site manager. Have your web site manager install your web site and test it.

3. Identify the registrar for your company’s domain name.

One way to determine your registrar is to look it up on Who.is.  Make sure you can login to your account at your domain name registrar since you might need to change the name servers listed here. If you’re not sure how to change name servers, contact your registrar for support. Also, ask them how long it’ll take for this change to go live on their servers. Most companies have this change go live immediately, but it’s not uncommon for this to take up to an hour. I’ve even encountered a few registrars who only update this information every 2 or 4 hours.

4. Identify where your company’s DNS records reside and verify that you can login to this account.

One way to do this is click the DNS records button on Who.is. Make a copy of all of your company’s current DNS records so you can undo mistakes if you make them. If you’re only changing mail hosting companies then you won’t need to change the name servers at your registrar as described in the last step. Instead, you can simply edit the MX (Mail Exchange) records with your DNS hosting company. If you don’t know how to edit your DNS records, ask your DNS hosting company for guidance. Also, lower the TTL (Time To Live) values for your company’s MX records to the lowest value permitted by your DNS host. Five minutes (300 seconds) is ideal, but many companies won’t lower it below 60 minutes (3600 seconds). Briefly, the TTL value tells other companies’ mail servers how long to trust the information listed for how they can deliver messages to you. Since you’re going to change this information, you want other companies’ mail server to check back often to learn the new information quickly. Again, ask your DNS host how quickly changes you make will go live on their servers. Make sure that you ask them how long it takes them (the DNS hosting company) to make this change effective in their systems. DNS hosting companies’ knee-jerk reaction is to tell you that it can take 24 hours or more for the DNS changes that you will be making to propagate around the globe. While it’s important for you to be aware of this fact, you need to know how quickly they’ll make the changes on their servers so you can estimate how long your email and web site will be down (unavailable).

5. Identify all users at your company who will be affected by this migration and collect an inventory of all of their devices that will need to be reconfigured.

You’ll need to build a complete inventory of all user’s desktop computers, laptops, smartphones and tablets, including the version of the operating system on the device and the email application used. Make sure you have instructions for configuring all of these devices. You can configure these devices in advance if there are a lot of them. If there are only a handful of devices then you may just want to configure them the day of the migration. Determine what email data and/or address book contacts will need to be migrated when you make the change of hosting companies. For example, if your users store their mail in IMAP folders on the mail server or contacts in an address book server then you’ll need to set aside time to move this data. Before you move this data, you should verify that all users have a current full backup of their computer.

6.  Inform all users of what to expect on the day of the migration.

Tell the users what time of day the migration will start and how much downtime, if any, to expect. If there will be downtime of an hour or more, encourage your users to use a secondary email account for correspondence during the migration. Some users even need to notify important clients or contacts about the migration and the need to use the alternative email address.

Phase 2 – Migration Day

The big day has arrived. Change your DNS or nameserver records and wait for them to go live with your host. This commonly takes about an hour. Then expect these changes to take 24 hours to fully propogate around the globe. If you haven’t pre-configured all computers, smartphones and tablets then configure them now to access the new email accounts. Migrate the data that needs to be migrated. At the end of the hour, use Who.is to verify that the record changes have taken place. Then start to send test email messages on each device. Test your web site to make sure it’s working properly.

Inform users how to use new system. Users will want to know how to setup an Out of Office message and/or setup email forwarding. It’s useful if they know how to access their email account using webmail. You should also notify them how to contact the new hosting company for technical support.

Phase 3 – After The Migration

About 24 hours after the migration, each user should login to their email account with the previous hosting company, using webmail, to see if any messages were delivered to the old mail hosting company during the propagation period. If so, these messages can be forwarded to themselves and they will now be delivered to the new hosting company’s mail server.

A few days after the migration, contact the old hosting company to completely close your account.

1. Click on the icon of the file or folder to select it.

2. Simultaneously press the Command key and the Delete key.

That’s it. The file is moved to the Trash Can.

I use this keyboard shortcut daily to throw away files on my Mac. Clients that see me using this keyboard shortcut ask me what I just did, and I’m happy to share. Give it a try. I’m sure you’ll find it increases your productivity by saving you a bit of time.

Here are instructions on how to set up and register a new cable modem. These instructions are also helpful if you’re replacing a cable modem which has stopped working.

1. Disconnect your current cable modem. Specifically, unplug the ethernet cable that connects it to your router or Macintosh computer. Also, unplug the coax cable that connects it to the wall jack and finally, disconnect its power cord.

2. Plug in your new cable modem. Specifically, plug in the coax cable coming from the wall, then run the ethernet cable from the cable modem directly to your Mac (even if you have a router). Lastly, plug in its power cord. The cable modem will start up and try to connect to Comcast, but it won’t be able to do so since it’s not yet registered with Comcast.

3. Call Comcast Tech Support. Their phone number should be on a recent invoice. Have a copy of your invoice handy because you’ll likely be prompted for either your Comcast account number or the phone number associated with your account. Once you get a person on the line, tell him or her that you’re setting up a new cable modem and you’d like him or her to guide you through it. The tech will ask you to read the MAC address which is printed on a sticker on the cable modem. The tech might also want the make and model of cable modem. Note: A MAC address has nothing to do with Macintosh computers. MAC stands for Media Access Control and is a unique identifying number.

The tech will then register the cable modem on their end and soon more and more lights on the cable modem will come on. This is a good thing, it’s progress. Soon your laptop will be connected to the Internet. Yay, things are working!

Note: I’ve had you bypass the your router temporarily because Comcast won’t support the configuring of routers. They only support cable modems and 1 computer.  Now that you have your new cable modem working, you can hang up with Comcast and do the following.

A. Unplug the power cord from the Comcast cable modem. This is very important: make sure that all lights on the cable modem are off. If they aren’t off then your cable modem also provides your home with phone service. If this is the case then your cable modem has a battery in it and you’ll have to find the door and open it to pop out the battery. Once you have all of the lights off, then you’re good. Now proceed to the next step.

B. Move the ethernet cable from your laptop back to your router.

C. Re-insert the battery and power cord into the cable modem. The cable modem will start up, then it will see the router and pair with it. This is very important to understand. The cable modem can only pair with one device at a time. When it pairs it then permits that device to connect to the Internet. When the cable modem is off (i.e. has no lights lit up), it forgets the device that it last paired with and it’s ready to pair with a new device on start up.

D. Wait about two minutes for the cable modem to startup and all of its lights to turn on.

E. Make sure your laptop is connected to your router either wirelessly or using an ethernet cable. Open Safari and you should be able to view web sites. Yay, you’re done!

If you have problems getting all of this to work then you can go back to having your laptop plugged directly into the cable modem. However, to get this to work you’ll need to turn off the cable modem so it forgets its pairing with the router and will thus be ready to pair with your laptop when you connect your laptop using the ethernet cable to the cable modem.

In recent years, when I’ve been asked to setup adult content filtering, I’ve recommended applications like Intego’s ContentBarrier which now appears to be part of Intego’s Family Protector product. This application gets installed on each computer on which protection is needed. This solution is no longer affective if you have iPhones, iPads or iPod Touches on your home network since ContentBarrier or comparable applications do not exist for the iPhones and other iOS devices. This is where FamilyShield comes in handy.

FamilyShield works by modifying the configuration of your wireless router. All network traffic in and out of your home network travels through your wireless router. Thus, by reconfiguring your wireless router, you affect all devices on your network, including computers, mobile devices and gaming consoles like XBoxes.

I should mention the protection offered by FamilyShield can be pretty easily defeated by somebody who understands how networks work. So it’s not a perfect solution if you have a savvy teenager who wants to get around it. However, FamilyShield could be an appropriate solution for younger children. OpenDNS also offers a paid service named OpenDNS Home VIP which might be more difficult to defeat, but because OpenDNS’ site doesn’t do a good job of highlighting the additional features included with this paid service, the degree of increased protection is unclear. It’s also possible that over time FamilyShield might become more robust.

I’m also watching a couple of other products that provide content filtering for your entire network. They included two wireless routers, the iBoss Home Parental Control Router/Firewall and Pandora’s Hope. iBoss has a range of other network products for home and business users so they appear to be a well-established company, but reviews of the iBoss are mixed, like this one and this other one. I couldn’t learn much about the Pandora’s Hope router or the company that makes it. This PR article indicates that the company started selling products in 2009 and that the current model was released in 2011. I couldn’t find any reviews by computer industry reviewers. The iBoss and Pandora’s Hope cost $40 and $160 respectively and then have recurring annual costs of $60 and $20 respectively. I’m not convinced that this money is well spent in comparison to the free FamilyShield service.

None of the solutions that I could find are perfect, but, for the time being, if you want to prevent children using computers, mobile devices and gaming consoles in your home from accidentally or intentionally finding adult content, I would check out OpenDNS’ free FamilyShield service. If I find a more robust solution, I’ll update this article.

• Rapidly press the Home button twice in a row. The Home button is the round button on the lower part of the face of the iPhone.
• The multitasking bar appears at the bottom of the screen and shows you the most recently used apps. Tap and hold one of these app icons. (Note when the multtasking bar appears you can swipe from right to left to see more apps.)
• When the app icons start to jiggle tap the red and white icon that appears in the upper left corner of the app icon to force that app to close.
• Press the Home button again. Tap on the misbehaving app’s icon to open it and see if it now works properly.
• If your app continues to misbehave then I recommend restarting your device.

Apple has an article which describes this same process and will be updated more often than this web page if the process changes over time.

On a related note, a widely-held misconception is that the applications listed in the multitasking bar are using some of your device’s memory and processor, thus slowing it down. This isn’t exactly correct. Read this excellent article to learn more about iOS multitasking features and how non-active apps are handled.

It’s important to know how to turn off your iPhone since it’s a fundamental troubleshooting technique. If your iPhone is acting oddly, one of the first suggestions I have is to turn it off then back on and see if now behaves correctly. Here’s how to use the On/Off/Sleep button:

1. Press and release the button to turn off the iPhone’s screen and put the iPhone to sleep. (To wake up the iPhone press the Home button which is the round button on the lower part of the face of the iPhone.)

2. To fully turn off the iPhone, press and hold the button until the screen displays the “Slide to Power Off” message, then slide your finder across the area displaying those words. If you’ve swiped properly then the message will disappear and you’ll see a small white spinning icon in the middle of the screen. Wait about 20 seconds for the screen to go fully black and the iPhone or iPad to turn off.

To turn on the device again, press and hold the button for a second or two and then release. If you’ve turned on the device, a white Apple logo will appear in the middle of the screen.

]]> http://www.soundsupport.biz/2013/01/27/how-to-turn-off-your-iphone-ipad-or-ipod-touch/feed/ 0 http://www.soundsupport.biz/2013/01/20/how-to-clean-screens-on-your-mac-laptop-iphone-or-ipad/ http://www.soundsupport.biz/2013/01/20/how-to-clean-screens-on-your-mac-laptop-iphone-or-ipad/#comments Sun, 20 Jan 2013 09:00:49 +0000 Tim Hannon http://www.soundsupport.biz/?p=2247 Have you noticed how dirty the screen of your iPhone or iPad gets? Finger smudges and other stuff accumulates quickly. Even though we don’t touch our Macintosh laptop screens as much as an iPhone, the screen still gets dirty. I recommend using a microfiber cleaning cloth for quick cleanings. Additionally, use a cleaning spray like OmniCleanz or iKlear for more thorough cleanings.

iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch screens have an oleophobic (oil-resistant) coating on them. This is supposed to make it easy to wipe off smudges. Thus a quick rub with a microfiber cloth can make the screen look pretty good. I clean my iPhone and iPad screens this way a couple of times each week. For a more thorough cleaning I use cleaning spray on a microfiber cloth. Apple Stores currently sell a Bausch + Lomb Cleaning Kit. iKlear is one of the most widely sold cleaning sprays. I tend to use OmniCleanz.

Product descriptions for these cleaners tend to tell you more about what the product doesn’t contain rather than what it does. None of the products list their ingredients, so I can’t compare them. Product descriptions tend to indicate that they are alcohol-free, ammonia-free and detergent-free. Based on this dearth of information, I tend to buy OmniCleanz because it’s the least expensive and works well for me. If you’d like to clean the screen on your Mac laptop, iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, try one of these products. Also, please follow the cleaning guidelines Apple provides. Their most important guidelines are to turn off your device and unplug all peripherals. Then avoid getting any moisture into any openings and don’t use detergents, alcohol or harsh cleaners.

According to this article from ZDNet, Apple has already sent out an automatic update which effectively disables the Java web browser plug-in for Macs running OS X Lion (10.7) and OS X Mountain Lion (10.8). That said, it can’t hurt to follow the instructions below to double-check your Mac’s configuration.

Important Note – Please don’t confuse Java and Javascript. These are two entirely different technologies despite the very similar names. This current security vulnerability only affects Java, not Javascript. More specifically, this vulnerability targets Java web browser plug-ins. In other words, you don’t need to fully remove or disable Java or Java-based applications, like OpenOffice or CrashPlan. Reportedly, Java applications have a very low chance be being exploited by this bug.

This OS X Daily article from August 2012 provides instructions on how to disable the Java plug-in in Safari, Chrome and Firefox. Please follow these instructions to ensure that Java is disabled in your web browser.

You often hear the recommendation that you should use a long, complex and unique password for each system and change each of these passwords every month. From a security viewpoint, I agree with this recommendation completely, but I don’t think it is at all practical or realistic for most people. Instead, I think it’s more reasonable to make this recommendation: Use very long passwords and maintain a written list.

Some day in the future we might login to our accounts using a thumb print or an iris scan. When this day comes then security will be easy. We simply press our thumb on a device or look into a camera and wait for a few seconds. Gone will be the days of remembering a myriad of passwords, typing in passwords and resetting forgotten passwords! However, our current reality is that we all have many, many password-protected accounts. So what’s the best way to handle this?

In this current paradigm, security and convenience are inversely related. The more secure things are, the less convenient they are. Or, stating the converse, the more convenient things are the less secure they are. Let me illustrate this. It’s very convenient for you to use one password on many or all of your accounts, but this is very insecure. If one account is compromised then they are all effectively compromised. If one account is compromised you obviously have to select a new password for that account and really, you should change the password for all of the accounts for which you use that same password. What a headache. How inconvenient!

Thus, I recommend a more balanced approach. Use at least a handful of passwords, select long passwords and maintain a password list. One of the easiest ways to make a password secure is to make it long. If your password is currently cactus. Simply change your password to cactuscactuscactus. (It would be better if you made it complex like this: c@ctuSc@ctuSc@ctuS, but I won’t push my luck.) However, even if you do your best to pledge to use a really long or complex password, your efforts could be thwarted by systems that put a cap on the maximum length of a password or don’t allow the use of punctuation marks in a password. Thus, you’ll end up with a greater variety of versions of your passwords than you’d like. Thus, it’s important to maintain a password list.

Let’s focus on this list. It could be handwritten on paper, but clearly this isn’t very secure. If you do put it on paper then securely store it in a locked drawer or a safe. However, locking up your list makes it less convenient to grab and to update. So if you’re going to maintain your list on paper I recommend that don’t write the password itself. Instead, write a hint. For example, if your password is your childhood street address then you could simply write old address as the hint. This way you could keep the password list close to your computer and even if a burglar found it he wouldn’t immediately have all of your passwords.

An even more secure way to store your password list on a computer is in an encrypted disk image. I think this solution offers a great combination of security and convenience. A previous tech tip describes how to setup an encrypted disk image. Since the disk image is on your computer, you’ll always have this information conveniently at your fingertips, but it’ll be stored in a secure, encrypted manner. Of course, you’ll have to remember your password for your disk image. If you forget it then you’ve lost access to your entire list!

Another option that some of my colleagues use and recommend is a password manager like 1Password or mSecure. This blog article covers 8 password managers for the Mac and iOS devices. 1Password and mSecure are the two that I’ve personally worked with.

Whichever method you choose, I hope you compile a list of your current accounts and passwords and hopefully take some time to select longer, more secure passwords for these accounts.

VPN stands for Virtual Private Network, but this isn’t particularly helpful in understanding what it is or what it does. A VPN is an additional, virtual network that can be setup to exist over an existing physical network. In even simpler teams, a VPN is way to secure (encrypt) the data that leaves your computer as it travels across the Internet.

VPNs can be useful in a few situations, but my clients tend to use them in the following two situations. First, some clients want to provide part of their staff with secure remote access to the office network. This way, a staff person could work at home or travel to another city yet still have access to the business’ systems, like a file server or a database of client information. The staff person manually initiates a VPN connection to a VPN server in the business’ office. Once the connection is established, the person would be able to connect to the database or file server as though his or her computer was in the office. It’s important to note that the performance or speed of such VPN connections will be much slower than if the computer was actually in the office. This loss of performance is seen as a worthwhile trade-off since security is maintained and slow access is considered better than no access.

The second situation would be a person, like me, who travels regularly for business and often uses shared public networks like those found in coffee shops, airports or hotels. Many of these networks require no password to join and are thus far from secure. So, to prevent others on the network from determining what web pages I’m visiting or what emails I’m sending, I could use a VPN to encrypt all data as it moves from my laptop across the wireless network. Additionally, I find that some hotel networks or other public networks are configured to not allow users to send emails. While I understand that these networks are doing to for security purposes, it can be an inconvenience. Establishing a VPN connection would permit me to bypass this network limitation and send emails. There are other possible reasons why one might want a VPN service as described by Witopia, a provider of VPN services. To secure the data that I send and receive on my laptop, I could initiate a VPN connection to a VPN server. In this situation there is also a performance hit but the trade-off is increased security so it’s considered worthwhile.

Hopefully, these two examples illustrate how a VPN could be useful and what a VPN is.  A future article will compare a few personal VPN services.

Why would you need an anti-virus application on your Mac? I can think of a couple of reasons.

1. While there aren’t many Mac viruses, there are some Mac OS X Trojan Horse viruses. I still occasionally come across some Word Macro viruses also, which were common on Macs in the late 1990s.

2. You might receive an email attachment which contains a PC virus. While this virus can’t do any harm to your Mac, would you want to pass this virus on to a friend or family member who has a PC? Sure, that person should have their own anti-virus protection, but it still doesn’t look good that you’re passing on viruses.

If you have business computers you can also use Sophos, but you’d have to buy an initial license. Sophos requires the purchase of a minimum of 3 licenses for about $34 per license. Volume discounts kick in at 10 licenses.

Check out Sophos Anti-Virus. It’s free for home users. It can detect if your Mac already has any infected files and can prevent you from getting infected in the future.

Because email is so central to my business, I like to hold onto just about every message I send or receive. This means I have mail messages that I sent between the late 1990s and the present. Rather than storing years of these email messages in Mail, I archive them and store them in EagleFiler. In EagleFiler I can view the individual email messages including all of the header (to, from, date and subject) information and the message itself. I can also search for words contained in the messages. EagleFiler stores both the email message and the attachment. You can open the attachments by simply double-clicking them in EagleFiler. This triggers Mail to display the email message and the attachment.

You can download a trial version of EagleFiler if you’d like to test it. If you continue to use the program after the trial period has expired you’ll need to buy it for $40. Archiving messages into EagleFiler couldn’t be easier. Select one or more email messages in Mail and then press EagleFiler’s Capture Key, which is F1 by default. That’s it. Just sit back and wait for the messages to be copied into EagleFiler which happens pretty quickly. Once you’ve confirmed that the messages are in EagleFiler then you can delete them from Mail.

EagleFiler can actually do a lot more than store your email messages. You could think of it as a digital filing cabinet. EagleFiler can import too many file types to list here, but it includes web pages, PDF files, Word files and jpeg images. You can read the entire list. EagleFiler has a very user-friendly interface and many more features listed here. There are other mail archiving products on the market. Adam Engst of Tidbits wrote brief descriptions of  some of the better known mail archiving products, Mail Steward, Mail Archiver and DevonThink Pro Office. Since I already was using EagleFiler to store, tag and organize other documents, it made sense for me to start to use it to archive my infrequently used mail messages also. I hope you check out EagleFiler.

This is the fourth and final article in a series about setting up email and web hosting for a new small business. The first article explains basic terminology, the second discusses how to register a domain name, and the third offers guidance on selecting an email and web hosting company.

This article will give you an overview of three affordable options to build a good looking web site. The first option includes template-based systems like SquareSpace, Virb and Zenfolio. Second, I present an overview of how to build your own WordPress-based web site. Third, I describe hiring a professional to build a WordPress-based site.

 Option 1 – Rather than trying to design your own professional-looking web site, you might consider using a template-based web site. Template-based web sites have been around since the mid-1990s, but they’ve come a long-way. The template systems of old often looked cheesy. Today’s systems look more professional and often include features like blog pages, photo gallery pages, a calendar and integration with social networking sites. Both SquareSpace and Virb let you use your own registered domain name, offer free trials and then have prices that start at $10/month and $8/month, respectively. If you’re a photographer then you might want to consider Zenfolio which also offers a free trial and accounts for as little as $30/year.

Option 2 – If you’re fairly tech-savvy and interested in building your own web site, you could build a great-looking site using WordPress. This is the option that I chose a few years ago to build the site you’re reading now. WordPress is a free, open-source tool that is very capable and widely used. I bought a professionally-built WordPress Theme for $30 from ThemeForest. (There are also many good-looking free Themes.) I then hired two friends to make customizations to the Theme and help me with a couple of WordPress Plugins. This out-sourcing cost me less than $500. I use and often recommend WordPress since it’s a tool that can be used by novices to update their own web site. Since so many people use WordPress, there are thousands of plug-ins that let you add a wide range of features to your website, like a calendar, statistics tracking, search engine optimization information, good print layouts and countless others.

Option 3 – If WordPress sounds good to you, but you want some hand-holding getting things setup, you could hire a professional web site developer like Christine The Designer. Christine focuses on WordPress and offers her WordPress Assistance Package for $500. She’ll help you register your domain name (in case you were still intimidated even after reading previous articles in this series), install WordPress at your hosting company, help you select a Theme and modify it slightly. Finally, her package includes two training sessions to show you how to make changes to your site in the future. Wow, that’s a great deal, if you ask me!

Hopefully, one of these options will fit your needs. You can build a great-looking site in a few days if you use a template-based system, already have a logo, know what colors you want to use and have an idea about content you want to include. Alternatively, you could learn to build your own site using WordPress and then have access to thousands of plugins. Finally, you could hire a professional to get you up and running in just a few weeks using WordPress.

Time Out is easy to configure and every situation seems to have been taken into consideration. Time Out’s default settings will prompt you to take 15 second Micro Breaks every 15 minutes and a 10 minute Normal Break every hour. You can adjust the duration and frequency of both types of breaks or time outs. You also have the choice to postpone or skip a break. When a break occurs, your screen will begin to fade and become darker. If you take a break on your own, by not using your computer, then Time Out‘s built-in timer will reset itself. You can also configure Time Out to never initiate time outs when you’re using a specified application. For example, by default, Time Out will not perform time outs if you’re using DVD Player or Face Time. This makes sense since you wouldn’t want to interrupt your movie or a video conference. Lastly, you can manually start a Micro Break or a Normal Break using keyboard shortcuts.

If you decide to check out Time Out be aware that there are two versions. The older version requires Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or 10.6 (Snow Leopard). The current version requires Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) or later. Dejal Systems, the developer, indicates that they are working on a new version, Time Out 2, which will add more features and will require OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion). There will be both free and paid versions. Currently Time Out is distributed as freeware, and donations are welcomed and appreciated.

This article is the third in a series about setting up email and web hosting for a new small business. The first article explains terminology. The second discusses how to register a domain name.

I’ve put together a table which lists some email and web hosting criteria which I’ve found are important to many small-office/home-office companies. My PDF table lists a handful of hosting companies and how they compare. Hopefully this table will help you develop a set of important criteria to find a hosting company that is well matched for your needs.

Let’s talk about each of these criteria in turn.

Cost – It seems that too many people select a hosting company by looking only at the cost. Maybe this is because they don’t know what other factors they should be considering. Costs can vary considerably so it should be a factor, but far from the most important factor. If you are sensitive to startup costs, check out MacHighway. MacHighway’s entry-level hosting plan for $30 per year is the least expensive plan I’ve seen. It provides 3 email accounts as well as web hosting by a very Mac-friendly company with well written help articles on their web site. This is a great value. If you want integrated calendars and contacts within your email account then Big Mountain’s Kerio Connect server is an affordable option for a start-up business that only wants 1 or 2 email accounts. The larger hosting companies often require that you sign up for a minimum number of accounts. Rackspace, for example, requires a minimum of 5 accounts and Intermedia requires at least 3 accounts.

Company Size – If you prefer to work with smaller companies where you might be able to develop a personal relationship with the hosting company, you should check out MacHighway or Big Mountain Internet. Big Mountain Internet is owned by a husband and wife and run by a small team. I don’t know exactly how large MacHighway is, but I suspect they have a few dozen employees in the entire company. When I contact them for email support, I regularly get replies from the same handful of people. HostGator, RackSpace and Intermedia are all large companies with hundreds or thousands of employees. Your experience with them is less personal, but companies of this size can build networks that have greater redundancy and thus offer higher guaranteed uptime, which is an important factor to keep in mind.

Mac Knowledge – If talking to Mac-knowledgeable and Mac-friendly people in technical support is important to you then MacHighway can’t be beat and Big Mountain also has this covered in spades. MacHighway is a Mac-centric company that appeals directly to Mac users. For a large hosting company, I’ve been impressed by Intermedia’s Mac knowledge even though I know that only a small percentage of their customers use Macs.

POP and IMAP access – If you want to check your email account from more than one computer then you’ll want to use IMAP to access your email. IMAP can synchronize your Inbox and other folders across all devices. I’ve talked about the appeal of IMAP in a previous Tech Tip article. I only list hosting companies that offer IMAP accounts. Note: I’ve previously expressed my dislike for GoDaddy and I’ll point out that most of GoDaddy’s hosting plans do not include IMAP access.

Storage Space – If you’re going to use IMAP to access your email account, you’ll care how much storage space is provided by the hosting company since your Inbox and other folders will live on the mail server using up that storage space. These days it’s pretty easy to use up 1 or 2 GB of storage space after a few years. All of the hosting companies in my table provide a minimum of 5 GB of storage space. If you’re willing to spend a bit more money and work with one of the larger hosting companies then you can easily get 25 GB or even unlimited storage space.

Integrated Calendars and Contacts – If you want your calendar and contacts to wirelessly sync between your Macs, iPhones and iPads, you might want to look at a hosting company that offers Kerio Connect or Exchange accounts. Another appeal of these Kerio and Exchange accounts is the ability to have a company-wide calendar or contact list and the ability to share your calendar or contacts with other people in your company. Kerio and Exchange accounts cost more than a regular POP/IMAP email account, but BigMountain offers affordable hosting with adequate storage space. They offer accounts with 2 GB of storage space for $5 per account per month or 10 GB or storage space for $10 per account month. If you need even more storage space or some features which are only available from Exchange servers, you should consider Rackspace, Intermedia or Microsoft. Intermedia specializes in Exchange hosting and Microsoft has recently started offering Exchange hosting accounts. Their prices undercut the competition at $4 account per month for 25 GB of storage space.

Spam Filtering – All of the hosting companies offer some decent spam and virus filtering, but many charge extra to get premiere filtering.  Rackspace and Big Mountain both include their top-tier spam filtering as part of their base package. MacHighway includes SpamAssassin which is a decent spam filtering system. MacHighway’s top-tier spam filtering costs $50 per year.

Guaranteed Uptime – Many hosting companies advertise a guaranteed uptime. While this detail is important, it can also be confusing or misleading. This Wikipedia article gives greater context than I can provide here. Briefly, the higher the uptime percentage the better. However uptime does not mean the same thing as availability. In other words, a mail server may be up and running but not available to you due to a network outage somewhere. Despite Rackspace listing 100% guaranteed uptime, this doesn’t really mean that their mail servers will always be up. Every company suffers from equipment failure or earthquakes or hurricanes. Rackspace and others simply provide you a written guarantee which states that if their servers are not up and running then you’re entitled to some sort of refund of your hosting costs.

WordPress –  Web sites can be built using a variety of tools, but WordPress is a free and popular web site building tool that I recommend to many of my small business customers. If you use WordPress already or plan to use it, you’ll need to make sure your hosting company offers it. MacHighway and HostGator both include it as part of their base package. Big Mountain and Intermedia both offer it for a small additional amount of $10 or $15 per month. RackSpace offers it, but it costs a few thousand dollars per year. I was flabbergasted when I read this. It appears that their WordPress hosting is scalable and is intended for larger companies. The last article in this series will talk about other affordable ways to build a professional web site for your business.

Hosting companies are not all the same. A small business owner should think about their email and web hosting needs, then find a hosting company that is an appropriate fit. I hope this article has helped you to better understand some of the differences between hosting companies.

The Voice Memo app is available to almost all iPhone owners. Apple added the Voice Memo app to the second version of the iPhone which they introduced in 2008, the iPhone 3G. The Voice Memo app is not as capable as Siri, the intelligent personal assistant who can find you information and lets you control your iPhone with voice commands, but Siri requires an iPhone 4S or newer.

Here are a few ways I use the Voice Memo app. Hopefully, you’ll be able to adapt these uses to your own situation and needs.

1. When I leave a client appointment, I’ll record the date, duration and description of the work I did for them while the information is fresh in my mind. I can later transcribe this recording to enter the information into my billing system or send the memo as an email attachment to another person who can do the transcription instead.

2. When I meet with a client, I might record all or part of our conversation as we discuss a project and put together a game plan. This is especially useful if we’re walking around an office when writing notes is not easily done.

3. I’ll record short reminders about what I need to do, then email the recording to myself. This can be much faster than trying to type out this information. Of course, a recording could be emailed to anybody. I could record an email reply to a client and then send it to them.

Here are some quick instructions on how to use Voice Memos:

• Click on the Voice Memo icon to open it.

• Click the red dot in the lower left corner to start a recording. While recording, the iPhone displays the word “Recording,” followed by a timer, at the top of the screen.

• You can press the same button in the lower left corner to pause the recording. The status message then reads “Recording Paused” followed by the timer, as depicted in the photo to the right.

• To stop the recording press the round button in the lower right corner of the screen. The iPhone will then immediately take you to a screen which lists all of your recordings. Your newest recording will appear at the top of the list and the iPhone will start to play it back to you.

• To share the recording with others, press the Share button in the lower-left corner. Then choose Email or Message to send it as an attachment to either an email message or SMS text message.

When you sync your iPhone to your Mac, your voice recordings will be transferred to your Mac. They’ll appear in an iTunes Playlist named Voice Memos.

I hope this article has helped you to think of some ways you could benefit from using the Voice Memo app. Next week’s article will be the next installment in our series about setting email and web hosting for small businesses.

Let’s imagine that you’re starting a new business and want to register the domain name fullymac.com. To determine if this domain name is available I like to use the WhoIs web site. At the time of this writing, a search for fullymac.com at WhoIs shows that this domain name is available. You could perform this search at many other web sites, but I like WhoIs’ simple and easy-to-read listing of the results. It indicates clearly if a domain name is available or not. It also indicates if other versions of the domain name are available, in case you’d like to buy (register) one of them as well. For example, you’ll see that fullymac.org, fullymac.net, fullymac.biz and many other versions are also available.

It can be difficult to find a domain name that is available. In 2003, I wanted to register  soundsupport.com for my own business, but found that somebody else was squatting on this domain name. The name was and continues to be for sale, but I didn’t want to play that game. Instead, I picked the less well known .biz domain and never looked back. People still occasionally comment “Oh, I’ve never heard of dot biz,” but it’s never been an impediment. Everybody seems to want a .com domain name. It’s possible to do this, but you might have to be creative with your name since .com is so popular. One way to find a .com domain name that is available is to add your city name. For example, some clients have chosen to add Seattle to their domain name, such as fullymacseattle.com or seattlefullymac.com.

I typically recommend that you try to keep your domain name as short as possible and avoid hyphens. Remember you’ll need to print your domain name on a business card, so you don’t want it to be too long. More importantly, visitors to your web site will often need to type your domain name. Hyphens can lead to confusion since visitors may not always remember to type the hyphen.

Once you’ve found a domain name you want to register, you’ll need to pick a domain registrar. As I mentioned in my first article, GoDaddy and Network Solutions are two of the best known domain name registrars. They have their fans, but there are other options. I tend to avoid both of them for a number of reasons. Briefly, Network Solutions charges higher than average prices and they always try to entice you to buy additional features and services that you most likely don’t need. GoDaddy also tries to bundle extra services at every turn and I think they have the single-most confusing web site on the planet. I also don’t like their sexist advertising either. As a consequence, I recommend Hover.com. I have not done exhaustive research, but I use Hover.com and have been pleased with them. Their web site is easy to navigate, and while their prices are not the lowest, they are reasonable. I’ve found their support articles well-written. They even have specific articles about how to transfer your domain registration from GoDaddy to Hover if you ever need to do this.

I should elaborate on pricing. You’ll find wide-ranging prices for domain names. For example, WhoIs lists the price for fullymac.com as $10.99. Hover charges $15 and Network Solutions charges $35. Network Solutions, however, doesn’t show this price up-front. First, you have to add the domain name to your cart, wade through 3 offers for extra services and finally they show you the price for a 5 year registration. Their price for a 5 year registration drops to only $23 per year! What a bargain. (That’s tech sarcasm.)

If you choose to register your domain name at Hover, visit their web site and enter your desired name in their prominent search field. Then, add the domain name to your cart and check out. You’ll be required to create an account and pay using your credit card or PayPal. It’s a straight-forward process that can be finished in 10 minutes or so. If you want to use Hover to register your domain name, please consider using this link so that I’ll get a referral bonus, which I would appreciate.

I hope this article has helped you to find a domain name that is suitable for your needs and available, and that you went ahead and registered it. In our next article, we’ll look at how to select a web and email hosting company.

1. Select a domain name and register it with a domain name registrar.

2. Select a company which provides email and web hosting and sign-up for service.

3. Configure your computers and smartphone, if you have one, to access your email account.

4. Build a web site and place it on your hosting company’s web server.

Sounds pretty easy doesn’t it? It can be easy, but it can also be confusing. There are a lot of choices to be made and you’ll encounter a lot of jargon along the way. Let’s explore some of these terms.

Domain Name – Even if you’re not familiar with the term “domain name” you know what they are. Examples are apple.com and mail.comcast.net.

To over-simplify slightly, a domain name is a human-memorable name assigned to an individual computer or a network of computers. Thus, it makes it easier for a person to remember your email address or web site name.

Domain Registrar – A domain registrar is a company that will help you register a domain name. One pays an annual fee to register (own) a domain name. It’s common to register a domain name for several years at a time or have your registration set to automatically renew every year. Make sure you don’t accidentally let your domain name registration expire or else your email could suddenly stop working and your web site would no longer be visible. GoDaddy is a very well-known and now infamous domain registrar. Network Solutions is one of the oldest registrars.

There’s actually very little money to be made in being a domain registrar, so most companies that register domain name also offer email and web hosting services since they can make a bit more profit in that business.

While I understand the convenience of having your registration, email and web hosting all with one company, I prefer to keep them separate. I like to use one company as my registrar and a second company for my email and web hosting.

Hosting companies – A company that houses or stores your company’s web site and processes incoming and outgoing email messages is a hosting company. More specifically, they could be called a web and email hosting company. Obviously, one pays a monthly or annual fee for email and web hosting services. In order to get your email and web hosting setup and working, a hosting company will configure their name servers with DNS records for your company.

Name Server – A name server is a server which maintains authoritative records for your company’s domain name. Put more simply, a name server stores information about your company’s domain name. A name server then responds to requests from anybody trying to find your company’s web site or trying to send emails to your company. The information stored are called DNS records. DNS stands for Domain Name System. The Domain Name System is a hierarchical system for naming computers and for keeping track of and locating the millions of computers that are connected to the Internet.

DNS records - DNS records include information about the names and locations of your company’s servers, like a mail server or a web server. DNS records are stored on DNS servers. DNS servers are often described as the phone books of the Internet since they translate human-memorable server names like www.apple.com into IP addresses like 23.49.45.15. Another example is mail.apple.com might be translated to 17.171.2.21. Humans find it difficult to remember strings of digits like this and easier to remember names like www.apple.com. However, computers are just the opposite, so DNS servers play a critical role in making the Internet easier to work with.

If you use just one company as your domain registrar and as your hosting company, they’ll setup all of the DNS records on their name servers and you won’t have to deal with any of this. On the other hand, if you choose to use two or more companies for your domain registration and hosting, you’ll need to deal with some of these details. For example, if you register your domain name with one company then pick a separate company for your email and web hosting, you’ll need to list the hosting company’s name servers in your account at the domain registrar.

This concludes our introductory overview about what you need to know about setting up email and web hosting for a new company. The next article in this series will cover picking and registering a domain name.

MacWorld has an excellent article that explains the entire recall situation, After reading MacWorld’s article, enter your iMac’s serial number on Apple’s page to see if your iMac is affected.

You can locate the serial number of your iMac by clicking on the Apple menu and selecting About This Mac. In the window that appears, click on the numbers that appear below “Mac OS X”. When you click on the numbers, they’ll toggle through displaying the version of Mac OS X, its build number and the Mac’s serial number. Write down the serial number, then go to Apple’s iMac recall page and enter it in the search field to see if your iMac is affected.

Would you prefer to type on your iPad using a real keyboard instead of the on-screen, virtual keyboard? This week’s tech tip gives you an overview of some iPad cases that include keyboards.

The iPad is a great device for reading information such as email messages, web pages and ebooks; listening to music or podcasts; and watching movies. However, it’s not the best device if you’re trying to type an email, take notes during a meeting or work on your novel. While some people may think it’s anathema to add weight and bulkiness to the lithe iPad, I think there’s a time and place for connecting a wireless, bluetooth keyboard to an iPad. Thus, I’ve been keeping an eye on iPad cases that let you easily connect an iPad to a keyboard when you want it, but also easily detach the iPad when you don’t need the keyboard or the added bulk. Here are a list of iPad cases with keyboards that caught my eye. This is by no means a complete list of all iPad cases with keyboards.

• Logitech makes a couple of appealing keyboard cases including the solar keyboard folio and the ultrathin keyboard cover. The solar keyboard folio has a solar-charged keyboard, feels solid and let’s you pick from a couple of viewing angles. The ultrathin keyboard cover is diminutive and is not a protective case, but it’s stylish.

• Zagg makes an appealing iPad holder with keyboard. It doesn’t protect the back of the iPad, but its aluminum design feels sturdy. It holds the iPad but lets one easily detach it.

• Another choice is Adonit’s Writer Plus. It looks sturdy, stylish, well designed and is available in a few colors. It can be adjusted to any viewing angle.

• Another case on the market is the Clamcase. It appears to have a versatile design, including a hinge that can be adjusted to any viewing angle, easy release of the iPad and other cool features.

Be aware that some keyboard cases will work with any version of the iPad while others only work with one or two of the three iPad models that Apple has released to date.

You may also like to read an April 2012 CNet review of stand-alone keyboards and assorted iPad cases.

Solar-powered – Logitech makes the Wireless Solar K750 keyboard. Indoor or outdoor lighting will keep this keyboard charged, so you won’t have to replace batteries. This keyboard is very thin, just like Apple’s current models. A couple of my clients bought it and like it.

Wired, backlit keyboard – Logitech makes the Illuminated Keyboard. It’s also a very thin keyboard but is not wireless. Its distinctive feature is backlit keys. A sensor measures the ambient light and illuminates the keys in low light situations. If you like to type in the dark or have a keyboard shoved in a dark closet, this is for you. I use this one in my office. It’s great for early morning work when I only turn on the desk lamp that is pointed at my monitor.

Wired keyboard with big keys – Matias’ Tactile Pro 3 Keyboard appeals to people who prefer a wired keyboard with more key motion than Apple’s current flat keyboards. The Tactile Pro is based on Apple’s design of their Apple Extended Keyboard. The Extended keyboard was beloved by many Mac users during its reign in the late 80s and early 90s. The Tactile Pro keyboard is a solidly built keyboard with large keys, large key motion, space between the keys and curved tops of some keys to help keep your fingers on the home row. Another keyboard which has some similarities in its design is the Das Keyboard Professional.

Wired ergonomic keyboards – If you’re looking for a more ergonomic keyboard then check out Kinesis’ 3 ergonomic keyboards, the Contoured, Maxim and Freestyle 2. I have one client who uses the Maxim and likes it. The change in arm and wrist angle or motion reduced the pain he used to feel in his arm.

Wireless mini keyboard with touchpad – SMK Link’s Wireless Ultra-Mini Touchpad Keyboard is a very compact keyboard that could be used to remotely control a Mac from across the room. It has an integrated trackpad (aka touchpad) which can be used to move the cursor on your Mac. If you give PowerPoint or Keynote presentations you might find it useful to manipulate your Mac from afar. Maybe you’re at the front of the room and your Mac is not within arm’s reach. Similarly, if you have a Mac mini setup in a your living room as a media center, this keyboard would let you control your Mac from a comfortable seat across the room.

If you’d like to add a keypad consider these options:

Cropmark’s LMP Bluetooth keypad is a keypad that is designed to connect to Apple’s wireless keyboard to give you one integrated keyboard.

SMK-Link’s VP6273 Bluetooth keypad lets you switch between using it as a standalone calculator or a keypad for your Mac.

Apple sells their own keyboard which includes a keypad. It has an elegant and clever name, Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad.

Adding a keypad can really increase your productivity if you enter numbers regularly. Check out the options above. I think you’ll find one that you like.

Spring-loaded folders lets you drag a file from one folder through another folder and into a sub-folder. Here are some step-by-step instructions.

1. Click on the icon for a file and drag it on top of a folder, but don’t release the file’s icon. Instead, simply continue to hold this icon as though you were hovering it over the folder.

2. After a second or two the folder will automatically open and display all the files and folders inside. Now, continue dragging your file’s icon on top of one of these sub-folders. Again, hover the file’s icon on top of this sub-folder. This sub-folder will automatically open.

3. Finally, release the file.

You have just dragged a file through one folder and into a sub-folder. If the words aren’t clear or meaningful to you, please watch the video mentioned above.

It’s convenient that the folder or folders one traverses, as you move a file into a sub-folder or sub-sub-folder, automatically close themselves. This is very nice and reduces screen clutter.

If you try to use spring-loaded folders and they don’t work for you, the feature could be turned off on your Mac. Here’s how to check:

• Click on the Finder icon on your Dock.

• Go to the Finder menu and select Preferences.

• Click on General then make sure there is a checkmark in the box labeled Spring-loaded folders and windows. Note that you can also adjust the amount of time or delay, that you need to wait before a folder automatically opens. Refer to the image to the right which depicts these preferences.

Many of you probably already know that you can adjust the volume of your Mac’s speakers by pressing the volume keys on your Apple keyboard. The volume keys appear in the picture below. On my keyboard the volume keys are the F10, F11 and F12 key, but this is not the same on all Apple keyboards.

The three keys let you mute, decrease and increase your Mac’s volume. When you press either the increase volume or decrease volume key your Mac gives you both audio and visual feedback. The audio feedback is a short quack-like noise that I find difficult to describe in words. The visual feedback is an on-screen icon like the one that appears below – a speaker icon with 16 squares beneath it.

Here are the two keyboard shortcuts:

1. If you hold down the Shift key on your keyboard as you press either the volume increase or volume decrease keys, your Mac’s volume adjusts silently; there isn’t any audio feedback.

2. If you hold down both the Shift and Option keys on your keyboard as you press either the volume increase or volume decrease keys, you’re able to adjust your Mac’s volume in smaller increments. The on-screen icon displays partially filled-in squares as shown in the image below.

It’s not possible to combine these shortcuts, sorry.

• Open Mail and select a bit of text in an email message.
• Go to the Mail menu and select Services. From the sub-menu select Make New Sticky Note. (If you’re using an application other than Mail you won’t have a Mail menu. Instead, go to the menu named after your application. For example, if you’re using Firefox, select the text and go to the Firefox menu.)
• The application named Stickies will open and you’ll see a new sticky note on your screen that contains the text you selected in your email message.
• Go to the File menu and select Print.
• Click the Print button to print that sticky note.

That’s it! (You can delete the sticky note by clicking the small square in its upper left corner.)

You can use this same technique in Safari, Firefox, Word 2011 and most other Mac OS X applications. This technique will not work in some older Mac applications such as Word 2004 and Quicken 2005.

You might want to create a folder to store apps that you rarely use. Apple doesn’t allow you to remove the core apps they install on the phone. It’s likely that you don’t use all of these apps, so you could create a folder to store these apps together.

Here are instructions on how to create folders on your iPhone or iPad:

Tap and hold the icon of any one app on your device. After a couple of seconds all of the icons on your iPhone or iPad will start to jiggle side-to-side.

Tap and drag the icon of one app on top of the icon of a second, related app, then release the first app’s icon. (You need to have just the right touch. Otherwise, your iPhone or iPad will think that you’re just re-arranging your apps and it’ll just move the second app to the left or right.)

This first app’s icon will fall onto the second app’s icon and a folder will automatically be created. In the image below you can see that I’ve dragged the KOMO News app onto the SeattleCrime app. My iPhone automatically created a folder and proposed a folder name of News. I can either accept this name or tap on the name to edit it.

That’s it! You’ve created a folder. Press the Home button on the lower section of the iPhone’s face to stop the icon jiggling and indicate that you’re done organizing apps into folders.

You’ll now see the folder icon, which is a square with teeny-tiny icons of the apps that it contains inside the square. The image to the right shows the many folders that I’ve created on my iPhone.

It’s useful to know that a folder can hold a maximum of 12 apps. A folder can not be put inside of another folder.

Chances are good that you’ll want to add many apps to a given folder or create many folders all at once. If this is the case, after you’ve dragged one app icon onto another to create the folder, you can simply tap anywhere outside the folder to return to viewing all of your apps. At this point, you can then drag additional apps into the folder you created. You could also drag another app on top of yet another app to create a second folder. You get the idea.

At some point, you’ll want to remove an app from a folder. Guess how you do it? You tap on the folder’s icon, it opens, then tap and hold on any of the app icons to get them to jiggle. Then, simply drag the app’s icon out of the folder. You’ll see an animation of the app icon jumping out of the folder and back onto the iPhone’s main screen. When you remove the last app from a folder, the folder automatically deletes itself.

There are numerous ways to remove an app, but here’s one simple method:

Tap and hold on the icon of the app that you want to remove. After a couple of seconds all the icons on your iPhone or iPad will start to jiggle side-to-side.

Tap the X that appears in the upper-left corner of the app. The X is a delete button. It will remove the app from your iPhone or iPad.

For example, let’s imagine that I want to remove the app named Navigon from my iPhone. I would press my finger on the Navigon app (see picture below) icon and hold it there. After a second or so, all icons on my iPhone start to jiggle. I can then tap the X button to remove Navigon.

Note: This technique only works for third-party apps that you’ve added to your iPhone or iPad. Apple doesn’t let you remove the core set of apps that come with the iPhone or iPad. If there are some Apple-provided apps which you don’t use often, the best you can do is to put these apps into a folder. What? You don’t know how to create a folder for your apps? I guess that’ll be next week’s Tech Tip.

Update: A reader asked how to remove an iPhone or iPad app when it’s listed in iTunes on your Mac. Here are two methods. The first method is remove the app from your iPhone or iPad as described above. Then, sync your iPhone or iPad to your Mac by connecting the USB sync cable to connect the two devices. As long as app synching is enabled the app will be removed from your Mac since you deleted it from the iPhone or iPad.

If this first method doesn’t work, here’s another option. Open iTunes, on the left-hand list click on Apps. Select the app you want to delete by clicking on it. Go to the Edit menu and select Delete. Click the “Move to Trash” button to fully remove the app from your Mac.

Does your iPhone have a cracked screen, a broken camera or need to have its battery replaced? If so, you might want to consider JCD Repair. JCD Repair offers affordable, quality repairs for iPhones, iPad and iPod Touches as well as some Verizon Droid phones.

If your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch is under warranty, you should obviously take it to an Apple Store. However, if your device is out of warranty or the damage wouldn’t be covered by warranty, then you should consider JCD Repair. In recent months, I’ve had a couple of clients get their iPhone 4s repaired by JCD Repair and they were very pleased with the service and results.

JCD Repair  has 3 stores in Seattle, WA; Chicago, IL and Madison, WI. The Seattle store is in the Wallingford neighborhood. If you don’t live in Seattle or these other two cities, JCD Repair also offers mail-in repair service. Most in-person repairs can be done in about 45 minutes. Schedule an appointment via their web site or by phone. They prefer that you schedule an appointment but apparently walk-in visits are allowed. Their web site lists all of the repair services that they offer as well as the cost including parts and labor. They are open 7 days a week. Their repairs are covered by a 90 day warranty.

Check out JCD Repair and post your comments about your experience.

FerrisMastering also offers record and tape conversion services. They are based in Pennsylvania. Converting one record costs as little as $10. Their web site isn’t as polished as Reclaim Media. I could be wrong but I get the feeling that the company is just one or two guys working out of their garage.

You could be thinking that $10 or $12 per record is a lot if you want to convert 20 or 50 or even 100 records. That’s true. These services aren’t the best choice for records which could be replaced by buying a CD or MP3 versions from the iTunes Store or other online services. These services make sense for rare recordings and in other circumstances. You might also think about buying a machine like this one or that one, which would let you do this conversion yourself.

If you want to buy a scanner you could consider something like the Canon CanoScan 9000F which has attachments that let you scan a few slides or negatives at a time at 4800 dpi. It costs about $200 or less. If you can get your hand on a discontinued Nikon Coolscan professional high-speed slide scanner, then you could use it. As I recall, these scanners could hold 20 slides at a time and would scan each one at about 4000 dpi in about 30 seconds and automatically move through the entire stack.

If you prefer to farm out this work you could drop off your slides at GT Recording in Seattle. They charge scan slides at either 3600 or 7200 dpi. They charge a flat $15 setup fee. They have different price tiers that currently look like this:

• less than 100 slides cost $1.25 each
• 100-499 slides cost $.99 each
• 500-999 slides cost $.89 each
• more than 1000 slides cost $.79 each

iMemories scans at 600 dpi and charges $0.49 per photo, slide or negative

Home DVD offers a range of resolutions at different prices. Refer to the table below for details. They’ll scan both photos and slides.

For photo transfer to DVD, your price is $0.99 per photo for any size up to 12 x 15 inches in size. All slides and photos needing to have additional adjustments to bring out the best image possible will be brought into Adobe Photoshop for repair at no extra charge.  Below is a chart that will help you determine which resolution would best suit your needs:

The per slide/photo charges described above include the price to burn your digitized JPEG images of your 35mm slides or photos onto as many DVD-R discs as necssary. There is a minimum charge of $45.00 per job.

Moo offers standard size business cards, half size cards which they call MiniCards. You can also order postcards, greeting cards, stickers and labels. You can order small batches such as 50 business cards, 100 MiniCards or 20 postcards. Think of the customized marketing that you could do. You can print QR (QuickResponse) codes on the cards if you’d like.

I used a Sony VRDMC6 DVDirect. It works great for transferring VHS tapes to DVD. Amazon currently sells this device for about $240. Here is a basic overview.

The DVDirect is a great investment for someone who has VHS tapes that are going to run more than $200 for conversions. It has multiple connection choices for camcorders (USB, FireWire 400), SD cards and Memory Sticks, as well as Composite Video. I was able to easily connect a Panasonic VCR to it and quickly have things up and running to transfer the video. The LCD display was a great addition, as you could quickly view what you’re recording without having to guess where to start and end.

The DVDirect allows each DVD to be formatted prior to buring and gives roughly 60 minutes of recording time per DVD. (So, this isn’t meant to copy VHS movies over to DVD) The DVDirect is also smart enough to know when the tape is finished with the recorded content–I transfered a few school presentations that were 5-9 minutes long.

Once a DVD is finished with the transfer and you press the eject button, the DVDirect will ask if you would like to finish. By doing this it goes through a few steps to ensure that the DVD will play in a DVD Player. (NOTE: If you choose not to finish the DVD or cancel this request, the DVD will fail and will be wasted.)

Even though I did only a few transfers, I know that I could have consolidated the school presentations onto 1 DVD by swapping out the VHS tapes after a transfer and continue to hit record, allowing up to 6 10-minute presentations to live on 1 DVD.

I have yet to transfer the DVDs onto my hard drive, but the DVDirect definitely did what I was looking for.

For example, the following URL (web page address) should take you to a Amazon web page for a Netgear ethernet switch.

http://www.amazon.com/Netgear-ProSafe-Ethernet-Switch-GS116NA/dp/B00023DRLO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1339453773&sr=8-1&keywords=gs116

TinyURL shortened this URL from 131 characters to 26.

http://tinyurl.com/6qrc5ek

Using TinyURL is easy.

• Go to the TinyURL web site and paste a long URL in the field labeled, “Enter a long URL to make tiny”.
• Then click the button named “Make TinyURL”.
• A moment later you’ll see the shorter URL listed on the screen. Copy this shorter URL and then paste it into an email or any place else that you’d like to use it.

Tip – When you put a URL into an email message, I always recommend putting angle brackets at the beginning and end. For example, here I’ve put angled brackets around a URL for Apple’s web site: <http://www.apple.com>  Using these brackets will eliminate problems at line breaks. To elaborate, if you put a long URL in an email, there is a chance that the URL might be split onto two different lines. Many email applications get confused if this happens and won’t see the part of the URL that appears on the second line. Putting brackets around the URL helps the email application to find the entire URL. Tidbits has an article that gives a bit more detail about this topic if you’re interested.

How to enter a person’s extension number when you add a person directly on your iPhone.

When you’re adding a person’s phone number on your iPhone, you’ll be typing their phone number using the keypad. When you’re ready to add an extension click the key labeled *+# (asterisk, plus sign, pound symbol). This key is located below the number 7 as depicted in the photo below.

After pressing this key, you’ll see some new keys available to you. This includes keys labeled Pause and Wait. (See photo below.) If you click the Pause button this will insert a comma into the phone number. This comma translates into a 1 second pause. (Note: It may be necessary to enter a handful of pauses to make sure that your iPhone waits long enough for the phone call to be answered and for the callee’s phone system to be ready to receive the extension.)

Next, press the key labeled 123 to return to the main keypad. From there you can type the person’s extension. Finally, click the Done button.

When you call this person’s number, your iPhone will automatically dial their number, pause for the indicated number of seconds and then automatically enter the extension number.

Pause vs. Wait

While the above method works in many situations, it doesn’t work in all situations. Consequently, I often use the Wait key instead of the Pause key. When you press the Wait key you’ll see that a semi-colon is inserted into the phone number. Then, when you dial the person’s phone number, your iPhone will NOT automatically send the extension number. Instead, the iPhone will wait an indefinite amount of time after dialing the phone number. It then gives you a “Dial…” button that you press for the iPhone to send the extension number listed. This is illustrated in the photo below. This feature is helpful when dealing with complex voicemail menu systems or lengthy voicemail messages.

How to enter a person’s extension number when you add a person in Address Book on your Mac.

If you are adding a person’s phone number using your Mac’s keyboard and the Address Book application. You can easily enter Pauses or a Wait by simply typing commas or semi-colons in the number.

Login to your email account using webmail. Typically, the web address you would use to do this will follow this pattern, http://www.yourcompany.com/webmail.

You’ll then see cPanel’s main screen, which will look similar to the photo below. Click the Auto Responders button near the bottom of the main screen.

You’ll then see a screen that looks similar to this:

Fill in the form that appears, using the image above and the following details as a guide.

• I recommend leaving the Character Set on utf-8.

• Set the interval to 8 hours. This interval controls how often a sender will receive your auto-reply. You don’t want your colleagues to get an auto-reply every time they email you if they send you a handful of messages throughout the day.

• Enter your full name in the From field.

• Enter something like Auto Reply or Out of the Office in the Subject field.

• Leave the HTML box unchecked.

• Enter the message you’d like to auto-send as a reply to incoming emails.

• Use the Start and Stop options to set start and end dates and times.

• Finally, click “Create/Modify”.

• Click the Log Out button in the upper right corner. That’s it.

If you configured it to start immediately, you can now send a test message from another email accounts to make sure it’s working.

iCloud is a free data synchronization service that connects your Mac (or PC), iPhone and iPad. While the core iCloud services are free, there are optional features which cost money. Apple describes iCloud this way. iCloud stores your music, photos, documents, and more and wirelessly pushes them to all your devices. Automatic, effortless, and seamless — it just works. You can watch Apple’s video demonstrating iCloud.

iCloud is the successor to Apple’s MobileMe service. iCloud is really the fourth iteration of Apple’s online service. Wikipedia’s article about iCloud reviews this history. MobileMe had a shaky reputation in terms of reliability. When it first launched there were many incidents of slow performance and lost data. Personally, I’ve seen MobileMe data get corrupted that caused syncing to stop working. Apple redesigned and built iCloud from the ground up. It hopes to impress us with its rock-solid reliability. So far, I’ve been pretty pleased but I feel it’s a touch early to pronounce my final judgement.

According to Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, iCloud is more than a product. It’s a strategy for Apple for the coming decade. Cook implies that iCloud will grow over the coming decade to offer more and more services.

iCloud offers an array of services which I won’t list here. Many others have already covered these services thoroughly. Here are links to two such articles I think do a particularly good job of describing iCloud’s current services. David Pogue’s blog post about iCloud and Gotta Be Mobile’s blog post about iCloud.

Important Note: Before I delete the duplicates, I like to do some random double-checking. After I’ve used iPhoto’s search feature to locate the duplicates, I write down the date of a handful of the photos. Then I clear out the search field so I can see all of my photos. After that I locate these selected photos by date to verify the photos are, indeed, duplicated. Finally, I repeat the search to locate all duplicates and delete them.

Check out Duplicate Annihilator. It can save you a lot of time when you need to eliminate duplicates in iPhoto on your Mac.

Cloud Computing is often misused as a synonym for the Internet itself.  This is an incorrect use of the term. However, the term was inspired by the common use of a picture of a cloud to represent the complex infrastructure of the Internet in diagrams. Consequently, this incorrect use is somewhat understandable.

Broadly, cloud computing refers to computing resources that are offered as a service rather then a product. More specifically, these cloud computing services also need to meet certain characteristics including wide access, measured service, as well as pooling of storage space and computing horsepower.

Let me illustrate this with an example. In the past, if you wanted to use a word processor you would typically buy a product, like Microsoft Word, and install it on your Mac. In a cloud computing world you might, instead, sign up for a free (or paid) service, like Google Docs, and use its word processor. Google Docs is broadly available and behind the scenes Google’s system can bring more computers online to handle surges in customer use of  the service.

Cloud computing has become possible because it’s cost-effective for companies to build huge data centers where computing and software can be provided remotely at massive scale and rented out, like a utility service. Other factors include the lower prices of computers and smartphones and the growing pervasiveness of fast Internet connections.

For those interested in a more in-depth description and definition of cloud computer I direct you to this excellent Tidbits article on cloud computing. It covers the essential characteristics, service models, and deployment models for cloud computing in more detail. With this basic understanding of cloud computing, we’re ready to look at Apple’s iCloud service. We’ll address the question, What is iCloud? Look for this in a future Tech Tip.

Power line adapters let you create an network using the electrical wiring in the walls of your home or office. Yes, this may sound odd. I was skeptical at first, but this technology has been through several generations and works well now. You can read about the history and how this works in this Wikipedia article. Netgear is not the only company that makes such products. A bunch of companies make products that are, supposedly, interoperable and all comply with the HomePlug standards.

I use power line adapters most commonly in large homes where I need to extend the coverage of the wireless network. If the home has ethernet wiring in the walls then I can simply plug a wireless access point into one of the ethernet jacks in an appropriate part of the house. However, if the home does not have ethernet wiring, I’ll use a pair of power line adapters. One connected to the wireless router, the other to a wireless access point in an appropriate part of the house. Here’s a bit more detail.

To get started, you just need to buy a pair of power line adapters, like the ones found in this XAVB2501 kit. Take one of the adapters and connect it to your existing network router using the included ethernet cable. Then plug the adapter into a wall outlet — avoid plugging it into a power strip since this will greatly diminish performance. Plug the second adapter into an electrical outlet elsewhere in your home and then run an ethernet cable from it to your computer, printer or wireless access point. That’s it. The two adapters will find each other and setup communication. Various LEDs on the adapters will tell you if they are connected and at approximately what speed. These adapters can communicate at speeds up to 200 Mbps. You can setup more than two adapters if you’d like. You can read about the maximum number of adapters and other details at the Netgear FAQ page. Reviewing the Troubleshooting page could also be helpful. If you’d like to setup encryption or rename the adapters, use the Netgear Powerline Utility for Mac or PCs.