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.

Automator – How-to & Training

Automator is, hands-down, the most awesome piece of Apple software that’s already on your computer that you’ve probably never touched. It’s exactly what its name (and logo) implies: a little engine to perform repetitive tasks and actions for you. You can save your workflows as services or plugins to be accessed from the specific applications to which they apply, or just drag and drop the files you want to process onto the workflow itself.  Its interface reads like an a la carte menu of potential actions and processes, and (like lots of Mac apps) constructing a workflow is as simple as dragging and dropping. The link above will take you to a site with a wonderfully comprehensive intro video, and even some step-by-step instructions to create workflows and scripts for some commonly automated tasks.

Apple Hardware Test – How-to

We’re sure you were so overcome with joy when you first got your Mac that you couldn’t be bothered to look through all the other stuff that came in the box (a cleaning cloth? SCORE!), but you might want to fish out those gray and white “system disks” and put them in a very, very safe place. Not only do they hold the operating system your computer shipped with and all the bundled software (like iLife), they have the particular version of AHT, or Apple Hardware Test, that goes with your computer’s model. AHT is a diagnostic tool that can tell you if all the major hardware components of your machine are doing their jobs, and the test results appear with a simple pass/fail. If your machine is acting funny, it’s always a good idea to run the test before spending a day waiting around at the Genius Bar or otherwise bringing out the big guns.

AppleJack - download

One thing about Macs: when they do fail, they tend to fail pretty catastrophically. Often the crashes or weird behavior that play harbinger to full-on system failure can be fixed through terminal actions, and therefore avoid the explosion every user dreads. But if you’re like a lot of computer users, you haven’t had to run a command line script since, you know, ever. AppleJack can help you with that. It’s a simple utility you can install that will create “shortcuts” in Terminal to some of those magical restorative processes that will fix your corrupt OS woes. All you have to do is boot into single user mode (not scary, just holding down buttons), and type the word “applejack” before hitting the return key. The app will walk you through the rest. With luck, you may never need it. But the day you do, you’ll be really, really glad it’s there.

Onyx - download

Onyx is like one of those crazy Swiss Army knives with the butane lighters that they don’t sell in the US… that’s how many random tools are packed into it. It will do almost anything, from repairing your directory to cleaning up registry or plist errors, to showing you some of the hidden preferences for your system or applications you might not have known you wanted changed. Rather like AppleJack, it’s sort of hard to pin down exactly why you’d want to download Onyx, just because its uses are so varied. But in any case, it’s free. So do yourself a favor and install it, and figure out how awesome it can be for yourself.

GrandPerspective – download

Remember last week, when we talked about the PC Program Sequoia View that displayed the various items taking up space on your hard drive in a graphical, color-coded, and scaled representation? Yeah, GrandPerspective does the same thing for your Mac. It’s a great tool to have when you’re pruning your files, since you can see what’s taking up the most space without having to navigate through every folder one at a time. It’s also just interesting to look at.

Secrets – download

This app is meant to lift that veil of mystery we mentioned in the intro. It’s a Preference Pane plugin (so after installing, it shows up in the System Preference application), and it short cuts you to some of the most sought-after but well-hidden Mac user preferences and shortcuts. It not only has shortcuts for your OS, but also for a handful of popular third-party apps you might be using. If you don’t have the patience to sort through every single preference menu to customize everything your liking, Secrets is the app for you.

Thanks to Appstorm for the image

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?

The first line of backups should always be local, an external hard drive or other device that your computer backups up to on a regularly scheduled basis.  If your system goes down it’s always faster to restore a large data set from a backup on site than it is to restore from the internet.

Local Backups

If you’re using Windows 7 (you have upgraded already, right?) you already have a great back up solution built into your system! Just get an external hard drive that’s at least as large as your internal drive (2 TB external hard drives are under $150 these days), connect it to your computer, go to your control panel and then click “backup and restore”

Then just follow the wizard to select your data, select the external hard drive and set the schedule and you can rest a little easier now.  With Windows Backup and Restore you can go back through all existing backups and recover individual files or whole directories.  This is especially useful if you make changes to a file or accidentally delete something and later realize you need the old version.  With a large enough backup drive you can go back months.

If you’re using an older version of Windows you can still backup your data, you just need to use some extra software to accomplish it. I’ve used Cobian Backup for years.  It’s a great free backup software that gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of choosing how many full backups, incremental backups, scheduling and other options.  You can even configure multiple backups to different locations (multiple external hard drives, thumb drives, etc) so you can better organize your data.

If you’re using a Mac with OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or newer you should definitely give Time Machine a try, like Windows 7′s Backup and Restore it comes built into your operating system.

Just like in Windows 7 you connect an external hard drive, and configure Time Machine and then just let it automatically back up your files. You can also use an Apple Time Capsule as your wireless router and backup hard drive.  That way as long as your computer is powered on and connected to your wireless network your backups will run on schedule!

Online backups

The advantage of online backups is that even if your computer and workspace are totally destroyed by natural disaster or massive theft all your data is safe somewhere on the internet.  Also with a backup solution like dropbox not only are your files backed up but you can also use it to keep files in sync between different computer and devices like Android devices and iPhones.  The down side is that unless you only have a little data to backup you’re going to have to start paying for a subscription.

Last year I wrote about a couple online backup options. An interesting addition to this list is crashplan.  They offer similar features to other online backup providers such as real-time backups, incremental backups to save time and bandwidth and the ability to go back in time and recover previous versions of files. One option that I really like is Backup to a Friend’s Computer.

It works like this.  You and a friend (or family member, or just another computer you own at a different location) sign up for a free crashplan account and link your computers together.  You then backup the files from one computer across the internet to the other computer.  So instead of using crashplan’s bandwidth and storage space you’re trading space with the other computer.  All your files are encrypted and the person on the other computer cannot open them in any way however if the unthinkable happens you can recover all your data safely using your credentials.

What other backup software or hardware do you use?  Let us know in the comments.

Security is always a huge concern in the IT community.  We make huge efforts to maintain firewalls, encryption via SSL, VPNs, encrypted wifi signals, program and operating system updates but the biggest security vulnerability time and time again are the passwords that people choose.

There is an article that I recently came across written from the perspective someone trying to break into a secure system.  The top 10 most used passwords list reads like a list of lazy choices from people that just don’t want to think about security:

1. Your partner, child, or pet’s name, possibly followed by a 0 or 1 (because they’re always making you use a number, aren’t they?)
2. The last 4 digits of your social security number.
3. 123 or 1234 or 123456.
4. “password”
5. Your city, or college, football team name.
6. Date of birth – yours, your partner’s or your child’s.
7. “god”
8. “letmein”
9. “money”
10. “love”

Even if this list didn’t cover the password that you use on every site out there, does it come close to some of your passwords?   Someone that’s motivated to gain access to your system won’t just try a handful of passwords on one system and then give up, they will try your email accounts, your facebook login, web forums and anything else they can find.  From the article:

So, how would one use this process to actually breach your personal security? Simple. Follow my logic:

• You probably use the same password for lots of stuff right?
• Some sites you access such as your Bank or work VPN probably have pretty decent security, so I’m not going to attack them.
• However, other sites like the Hallmark e-mail greeting cards site, an online forum you frequent, or an e-commerce site you’ve shopped at might not be as well prepared. So those are the ones I’d work on.
• So, all we have to do now is unleash Brutus, wwwhack, or THC Hydra on their server with instructions to try say 10,000 (or 100,000 – whatever makes you happy) different usernames and passwords as fast as possible.
• Once we’ve got several login+password pairings we can then go back and test them on targeted sites.
• But wait… How do I know which bank you use and what your login ID is for the sites you frequent? All those cookies are simply stored, unencrypted and nicely named, in your Web browser’s cache. (Read this post to remedy that problem.)

So how do you protect yourself and your accounts?

Well, the obvious first answer is use good passwords.  This means your password should not be a word that’s found in any dictionary in any language all in lowercase.  Cyber crooks use software that can try tens of thousands of words per minute to crack your password and their first tool is generally a dictionary attack.  Putting a number, capital letters and special characters (i.e. !@#$%^) in your password make it exponentially more difficult to guess.  If you use an either character password all in lower case and change one letter to a capital and change another to a special character  the time that it would take to crack the password goes from 2.4 days to 2.1 centuries!!  Check out this chart to see the difficulty of cracking your password:

This is all great unless you make a password so complex you can’t remember it. So how do you make a secure yet usable password?

Start with something you can remember (though not someone’s name or a dictionary word).  For this article I’ll start with “ilikecheese”.  Right off the bat this is a long password so it’ll take a while to crack but it’s fairly easy to guess if someone knew my penchant for cheese.  First thing you can do is swap out a letter or two for numbers that look similar.

ilikecheese could become il1kech3es3

Then you can put in a capital letter and a special character:

il1keCh3es3! will take over 18,000,000 computing years to crack!  For all intents that’s uncrackable.

The second thing to remember is don’t use the same password for everything!  The reason for this is that different websites have different security measures in place and if someone can steal your password from an online forum and use it to log into your online banking you’re in trouble. The best practice is to use a different password for every site and use a password manager (not your browser) to store them all. Roboform for PC users and 1password for Mac are both excellent choices.

I admit that I don’t use totally unique passwords for every site I use, there’s just too many of them.  The trick that I use is I have a handful of different passwords with different complexity that I use depending on the site I’m logging into.  If someone steals my digg.com password they’ll be able to get into my slashdot.org account, but not into the online retailers I use.  If someone managed to steal the password for a shopping site I use, they wouldn’t be able to get into my banking or credit card accounts.  For the financial sites I do use different passwords for each, that way if my bank is hacked my credit cards are safe and I can still eat while the damage is fixed.

Don’t trade your password for chocolate

It’s a funny thought that people would give strangers on the street their passwords for a chocolate bar, but over 70% of the people tested by a security firm in 2004 did just that.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3639679.stm

Don’t give your password to anyone.  Not a stranger offering you candy, not your family, not your coworkers, not even your IT person (if we need your password you can type it for us), no one.

At the end of the day computer security is always a balancing act between restricting access and ease of usability, I’ve just seen too many people use the same password everywhere and get into trouble because of it.

[onemansblog.com via lifehacker]

image from kk+ on flickr

I love having multiple monitors. It makes working in multiple application so much easier. Most of the time I’ll have several browser windows, email, a couple servers, some windows explorer windows and other various things open and dual monitors makes switching between the programs much more fluid. What do you do if you don’t have the room (or budget) for a second monitor? Adding virtual desktops gives you almost the same functionality, for free!

What is the benefit of multiple virtual desktops?  For me, when I’m working on several projects at once virtual desktops allow me to segment the windows into groups and makes it so that I only see the windows that I don’t get lost in the shuffle of open apps.

I’m a big fan of a program called Dexpot.  It’s compatible with all modern verisons of Windows (XP, Vista, and 7) and allows you to have up to 20 virtual monitors (the default is 4) with alpha transparency, fast screen switching options and the ability to move windows back and forth between different virtual desktops.

Dexpot is totally free, lightweight and fast.  Give it a try.

http://www.dexpot.de/index.php?lang=en

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

One of the worst things about starting fresh with a new reinstall of Windows (or a new computer) is that you have to hunt down updated installers for the software that you use.  I just stumbled across this great site which streamlines looking for software and installing it into one super quick process.

There’s really not too much to say about it honestly.  You go to their website, put a check mark next to the applications you want to install, hit the “get installer” button and then a small app runs (doesn’t even install itself on your computer)

It grabs all the software and silently install them for you.  I installed over a dozen apps in under 10 minutes!

Here a list of all the software they currently support or just go and check them out for yourself:

Web Browsers

Google Chrome Browser 3.0.195.27
Safari 4.0.3
Opera 10.00
Firefox 3.5.3

Messaging

Skype 4.1
Windows Live Messenger 2009
Pidgin 2.6.3
Digsby
Google Talk 1.0.0.104
Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.0.23

Media

iTunes 9.0.1
Songbird 1.2.0
Hulu Desktop 0.9.8.1
VLC 1.0.2
The KMPlayer 2.9.4
AIMP 2.51
Audacity 1.2.6
Spotify 0.3.20

Imaging

Paint.NET 3.36 (requires .NET 3.5)
Google Picasa 3.5
GIMP 2.6.7
IrfanView 4.25
XnView 1.96.5

Documents

Microsoft Office 2007 Standard (Trial Version)
OpenOffice 3.1.1 (JRE recommended)
Adobe Reader 9.2
Foxit Reader 3.1.2.1013
CutePDF Writer 2.8

Anti-Virus

Microsoft Security Essentials
Avast Antivirus Home 4.8
AVG Free Anti-Virus 9.0

Runtimes

Flash Player 10 for other browsers
Flash Player 10 for Internet Explorer
Java JRE 6 update 18
Microsoft .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1
Microsoft Silverlight 3.0

File Sharing

uTorrent 1.8.4
eMule 0.49c

Other

Dropbox 0.6.557
Evernote 3.1.0
BumpTop 1.1
Google Earth 5.0

Utilities

ImgBurn 2.5.0
CCleaner 2.24.1010
Launchy 2.1.2
Revo Uninstaller 1.83
Defraggler 1.14.159
RealVNC Free Edition 4.1.3
CDBurnerXP 4.2.6 (requires .NET)
Recuva 1.31.437

Compression

7-Zip 4.65
WinRAR 3.90

Developer Tools

Python 2.6.3
FileZilla 3.2.8.1
Notepad++ 5.5.1
Java JDK 6 update 18
WinSCP 4.1.9
PuTTY SSH client 0.60
Eclipse IDE for Java 3.5 SR1 (requires JDK)

http://ninite.com/

If you’re like me you use the built-in functionality of your web browser to save and manage your passwords to various online sites.  If you’re being careful and protecting your passwords from prying eyes you’re using a master password to protect your password list.  What happens if you forget your master password?  Before now you were kind of stuck.  Your passwords would remain safe but inaccessible, rendering them useless.  Now a recovery tool called FireMaster that can help you recover your passwords.

Before I go any further I’d like to remind everyone that these tools can be used for both good and evil.  Please use this to recover a lost password for yourself or someone that asks you, don’t use this to snoop on someone else’s online business.  These tools are a godsend for tech guys, but if people misuse them it just makes it harder for legitimate users to get their hands on them.

FireMaster let’s you ran password recovery using several different methods

You can have it try words out of a dictionary to see if there’s a match.  This is very fast but often times won’t work (because you put a number or special character in your password, right??).

It can try with a brtue force method.  Brute force password cracking is when you guess the password by going through every possible permutation (aaa, aab, aac, aad, and on) until you successfully guess the right one.

The third option is a hybrid mode.  This uses the dictionary method but then adds random characters on top of the basic words (pass123, test987, etc

This can take hours or even days depending on the complexity of your password, so if you remember some basic parameters of your password you can speed things along greatly.  A string such as

FireMaster.exe -q -b -l 8 “pass????” c:\testpath

Would do a brute force scan of the password, however you remember that the password was 8 characters long and started with “pass”  this type of focused scan can literally shave days off a complex password’s scan.

This is worth trying if you need your passwords from Firefox’s password manager.  If you’ve used FireMaster let us know in the comments.

[ securityxploded.com via ghacks.net]

Lets face it, if you have an email address, you’re going to get spam. If you are running your email on a server platform , then your IT should be on top of it. And if not, give us a call. Anti-spam solutions running on server can be expensive and taxing to the server. If you are not a huge company , or would like a personalized solution, SpamBayes might just be for you.

Spam Bayes uses bayesian analysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference ,which in a nutshell can predict outcomes based on evidence. As the information changes so does the hypotheses , reflecting one probability as likely and another as unlikely.

So lets get to the actual program, This will run on multiple operating systems ( thought in linux and OSX you will probably need to compile it from source code). It can either run as a standalone program or as a plugin for certain programs. You can find the download section here http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/ .

First you have to setup your email, creating a spam folder. Legitimate emails are called Ham. Move all the spam email to the new folder you created. The reason for this is that Bayesian analysis gets better as time goes on and the more information that it is fed. You want to have a nice repository of email for the program to sift through , both good and bad.

Thats all there is to it, and best of all it does all the filtering in the background. Maybe your inbox be free of spam!

If you’re running WordPress on your site, please, please update to the latest version.  There is a virus going around that is using a vulnerability in older versions of WordPress that allows a remote attacker to add spam links to your blog, insert a malicious user administrator account into your site and other nasty things.

Please upload from wordpress.org or use the auto update link within your WordPress administration panel.

Read a full report at Techcrunch