Today, a friend was reassembling his MacBook Pro after performing a hard drive upgrade, and he inadvertently put a very short screw down a very long shaft. How to get it out? After much shaking and poking, I remembered I had the base from an iSight camera, which is magnetic. We put that over the ...
Do black and white laser printers still make sense?
There is an article in today's Unplggd blog about why monochrome laser printers still make sense in today's office. The article says that in most offices, what's being printed is documents--letters, agreements, emails, proposals. None of this derives any benefit from being in color instead of black ...
How to back up your iPhoto images
If you want to back up just your iPhoto images (your library) to an external source, such as a hard drive or CD/DVD, you need to know where to find them. Here's what to do. 1. In the Dock, click on the Finder (the blue face). 2. A Finder window pops up. In the window, on the left-hand side under ...
Is your Time Machine really backing up your Mac?
We've seen more than a few horror stories of people whose computer drives failed, and then they found out their Time Machine backups hadn't been backing up in months! Time Machine is not infallible, it doesn't work correctly 100% of the time. To prevent this from happening to you, check your ...
Hacking the Voting Machine to Run Pac-Man
I just started reading the Freedom to Tinker blog, which is about "your freedom to understand, discuss, repair, and modify the technological devices you own." It's hosted by Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy, and posts are written by faculty and students. A recent post ...
3 ideas for how to create strong passwords
We all know how important it is to choose a password that's easy for us to remember, but difficult for others to guess. Ideally it should have a combination of letters and numbers, uppercase and lowercase. Here are a few ideas for creating secure passwords. 1. Choose a phrase or sentence that ...