Apple

On June 6, Apple announced the latest incarnation of its OS X operating system: 10.7, more commonly known as Lion. Also announced were the imminent release of iOS 5 for Apple’s mobile devices and, hand-in-hand with that, the iCloud.

Folks who’ve been handy with Apple’s products for a few years now might recognize the source of this “new” service as MobileMe (née .Mac), the yearly membership with an email address, online storage, and push syncing for your mobile devices.

But iCloud is more than just a name change. Apple is revamping the service to expand its offerings and its reach. MobileMe used to cost $99 a year to subscribe. iCloud will be free to anyone using iOS 5, that is to say, anyone with an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch capable of running the new software when it comes out this fall.

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We here at NYC Tech Guys have discovered that folks have a lot of complaints when it comes to their computers. From speed issues to viruses run amok, there are myriad frustrations that can complicate the user experience.  But even more amazing, lots of people don’t realize that there are some excellent software solutions out there that can ameliorate or even totally rectify some of the most troublesome issues that plague your computer.  To that end, we present “our picks,” a basic ranking of our preferred options for the most popular types of software to help you find the right programs to make your life easier.  This week, we’re talking about some great utilities for Mac users.

Macs are well-known for their user-friendliness and relatively low-maintenance operating systems, and it’s true: as long as you’re conscientious about keeping your software up-to-date and don’t drop it off a cliff, you’ll likely never have a problem with your trusty Mac.  But that said, there are some things that remain veiled behind the curtain of mystery—like keyboard shortcuts. Or Flash. So it is in the spirit of discovery that we present this list of apps that can make your iLife (HA! See what we did there?) that much easier.

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We here at NYC Tech Guys have discovered that folks have a lot of complaints when it comes to their computers. From speed issues to viruses run amok, there are myriad frustrations that can complicate the user experience.  But even more amazing, lots of people don’t realize that there are some excellent software solutions out there that can ameliorate or even totally rectify some of the most troublesome issues that plague your computer.  To that end, we present “our picks,” a basic ranking of our preferred options for the most popular types of software to help you find the right programs to make your life easier.  This week, we’re talking about internet browsers.

The internet is everywhere. Literally. It’s in coffee shops, city parks, and likely every room in your home. If you have a smartphone, you’ve even got it in your pocket. It’s probably safe to say that you, like all the rest of us, take this constant connectivity for granted. But this ubiquitous access aside, you might not be getting the best browsing experience. Here are a few recommendations to help you remedy that!

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In spite of all the wonderful things computers have added to modern life, they’ve given us some pretty rotten things too: sentient AI along the lines of HAL and SkyNet, diminished capacity for social interaction, FarmVille. But of all these modern inconveniences, repetitive strain injuries have to be the most prevalent, persistent, and downright annoying. From headaches to hand cramps, there are myriad ailments you can blame on your PC.

Including sleeping poorly.

Ever since computers stopped using interfaces made up of neon green fixed-width type on an empty black screen, the light emitted by your PC’s display was meant to mimic daylight. Specifically, the color temperature of most displays is set to around 6000K by default.  And if you leave your display’s brightness setting at the higher end of its range, it means your eyes are getting bombarded with an awful lot of photons.  Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to stare into the sun?

And burning holes into your retinas aside, staring long and hard at your computer screen after dark can actually affect your circadian rhythms—the biological clockwork that tells you when it’s time to eat, time to wake up, and time to sleep.  Since your body interprets the cooler temperature light coming from your display as sunlight, it thinks computer time equals party time, even if it’s actually nighttime and you want to retire shortly after that last round of Spider Solitaire.

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This Thursday, March 31st is World Backup Day, a day to make sure your data is being backed up correctly, your backups are in good shape and that you can restore from backup if and when it’s needed.

It’s not a question of if your hard drive will fail, it’s a question of *when* it will fail. Hard drive life is rated in MTBF or mean time between failures which basically means that your hard drive will only run for so long before mechanical breakdown or physical damage will render your computer and your data unusable. Professional data recovery companies can charge several thousands of dollars to recover data from a failed drive and even if you make sure to use new drives and replace them frequently a fire, flood or theft can wipe all your data out in a heartbeat.  What can you do about this?

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Like many people, you may have received a new computer for the holidays.  If you’re already an avid user you know how to set it up, install your favorite apps and get to work/play.  But if you’ve just moved to a new operating system (Windows 7, OS X or even Linux) you may be a little lost as to the new functionality in your new toy.  Luckily lifehacker has put together a great list of tips and tools for whatever system you’re baffled over.  Take a look at this list and let me know if you have another cool trick you’d like to share.

image from bolti22 on flickr

Password protected , encrypted disk images

There are times when you may want to keep files away from prying eyes. A great way to do this straight in OSX is to make an encrypted image that you can mount and write to. So first open up disk utility. I am going to create an image on a usb drive so that I can take it with me.

As you can see I have made a partition called test. Highlight the partition then goto File –> New –> Blank Disc Image

Select the Save as and give it a name, You may also give the volume a name but it is not necessary.

Choose volume size and select custom, enter a size smaller than what the volume in question can hold ( as you see in the video I choose 1.8 GB). Select the encryption type, the partition should be changed to harddrive and the image format should be changed to sparse image.

Click create, it will ask you for a password. When you hit create it will start the process and automount the image for you. It will not ask you for a password because it will have saved it to your keychain.

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Click in any icon that you want to change, I will use my internal computers hard drive as an example. Highlight the icon , then press apple key I. Highlight the icon up on top as seen in the picture.

You can now drag any icon to the highlighted icon on top. If it was successful the preview icon below should change as well.

Congratulations! You have changed your icon. Easy wasn’t it.

I love Firefox, but there are always minor issues with any piece of software that should to be addressed to make them run even better.  Here’s one that has bothered me for quite some time.  If Firefox has been running for a while and I have a bunch of tabs open Flash performance, especially video, tends to suffer.  It turns out there’s a simple fix.

If you’re watching video on Firefox and it seems to skip or stutter every ten seconds or so it’s because Firefox is taking a snapshot of all your open tabs in case your browser crashes.  You can either disable the session restore feature (not really recommended) or you can just change the interval from every ten seconds to something a little more reasonable.

To do so simply type about:config in your address bar, then type browser.sessionstore.interval in the filter box.  It’s default value is 10000 (10 seconds in milliseconds) so just change this to something like  60000 for 1 minute intervals 120000 for 2 minute, etc.  You don’t even have to restart Firefox for this to take effect.

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Lets face it, Leopard is great, but you mac may be long in the tooth. What to do? You can always stick some more memory in the machine. I know, times are tough and you don’t want to spend money. Believe it or not , the 3D dock in Leopard takes up bit of resources just to make it shiny. “We don’t need that”, you yell at me. Very well, this is how to get rid of it.

Open up terminal ( it’s in your application folder under utilities, you can also just type terminal in spotlight).
Enter this in the window:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

The dock should close out and open up in 2D mode. There you have it, a short and sweet hack. If you ever want to change it back all you have to do is set the Boolean value to NO in that command.