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Speed Up Your Mac

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        A free system maintenance and cleaning utility for Intel Mac OS X 10.6 or later is brought to our attention by John Carter.  He asks, "Does it take a long time to launch an application? Tired of waiting for 20 seconds or more for iPhoto to come up? Would 4 seconds be better? Is Mail launching almost instantly?
        "You can vastly improve the performance of your Mac by running a third party application called Maintenance.  If it doesn't automatically install in Applications > Utilities, I suggest moving it there."

John suggests, "When you run Maintenance, I recommend selecting all the options at least the first time. Otherwise, the defaults are probably good enough unless you don’t see a major improvement in the time to launch your favorite application.
        "Be aware that after running Maintenance, the first time you launch any application it will take much longer. Also, if you use Spotlight to find and launch an application it won’t be found the first time you attempt to find an application after running Maintenance, so you have to launch the application from Finder the first time. In addition, it will take longer the first time you are able to launch an application from Spotlight after running Maintenance, but subsequent launches are much quicker.
        "To confirm that running Maintenance actually improves the launch time, I opened Gimp before running Maintenance. The time was 22 seconds. Then I ran Maintenance. The first time I opened Gimp it took 28 seconds. I closed Gimp and X11 (which is required for Gimp) and reopened Gimp. It took 8 seconds. A similar performance improvement was noticed with iPhoto and NeoOffice. Mail now launches almost instantly (after the first time)."
        John concludes,  "Actually, Maintenance is provided by the same developer that provides Onyx, a similar, free application.  And the download page for Titanium shows different versions of the apps for different versions of Mac. (I've got to look deeper into Deeper.  Pun Intended)  I have used Onyx, but never got the performance improvement from it like I did by using Maintenance. Each application has its own benefits and has different features."

Do Taxes Online? Consider This . . .

It's Tax Time and here's a sobering message from Jim Hamm first thing this morning.  He writes, "According to this article, Intuit was not affected by the recent hack into Epsilon's e-mail data file, but warns its customers to be careful anyway. We use Intuit's Turbo Tax online system to do our tax return each year. The possibility of a breach of a company's security system is one downside, and risk, of storing personal data online. But, with the popularity of online shopping, banking, etc., it's almost impossible not to do so."

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Things About Trojans You Need to Know

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Ever watchful, here's from Jim Hamm.  With the title, "I Smell a RAT" we know that there's something here to read!  What are trojans and how do you get them?  How do you protect your Mac?  Jim comments, "It's oft been said the best protection from the malware lies between the chair and the computer!"  While you're at it, you might want to sign up to get Small Dog Electronics' Tech Tails.

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Warning About Email Swindles

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        Alert for security breaches, the latest breaking news about Epsilon grabs our attention.  We heard from Jim Hamm who has been notified by Chase Bank.
        Jim sends us this article from ComputerWorld which lists 32 companies who are involved.  The writer advises, “Keep your security software updated. If you feel like you really must open an email from one of these companies, then mouse over the link to see if the domain name matches the company. Check for HTTPS. Don't give out sensitive personal information unless you are 100% sure you are dealing directly with the company as these emails can open the way to identity theft."
      

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Function Keys Can Help

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        Making good use of those function keys or a combination of several keys?  Both John Carter and Jim Hamm passed along some tips today. Want to know a lot more?  Maybe ask them to do a PMUG presentation?
        Jim started off with this: "Here's a Mac tip I just discovered. To turn the display screen off (and not put the Mac to sleep): Shift + control + keyboard eject button. Moving the cursor brings the screen back on.
        "When might a person use this, you ask? Say, for example, your Mac is in your bedroom and you want to stream and copy something into your Mac in the middle of the night and don't want the bright screen on. Or, say you're using a laptop, not plugged in to electricity, and want to conserve the battery. Turn the screen off.
        "Here's another tip I occasionally find useful: to minimize all open windows quickly, press the shift button. For example, I may be typing an email and want to look at something on the desktop. Tap shift, take a look, tap shift again to return to the email. There are other ways to do this, as well."
        Trying to replicate this didn't work for me.  A query to Jim brought a quick reply, "At this point, I don't know or recall how I did this. I checked all my settings and don't see anything about this setting. It works just on the right shift key, but not the left. The left 'shift' key does the normal shift function. If I come across the setting I'll let you know.
        "Here's something to look at. One might be able to click the desktop, then +, then add shift key to see if that would work. Or look at this one."
        John shed some light on the function keys with his input. "The action of the function keys, whether you have to press the fn key plus the function key or just the function key to get the desired action is determined by a preference setting. With a standard Mac keyboard, in System Preferences > Keyboard, you should see a box like this:

        "So, if you press the F12 key and this increases the sound volume, that box is not checked. With the box checked, pressing the F12 key brings up the Dashboard.
        "The is different for different keyboards used. I use the Logitech diNovo Keyboard Mac Edition on my iMac. That box is not even available for that keyboard.
        "So what’s the ideal setting? If you look at the function keys on your keyboard, the symbols for the special features are large and the letters for the standard features are small. To some, this would indicate that the default action when pressing a function key would be for the special feature, not the standard feature, so the box would not be checked. The choice is really yours."
        And John concludes with this additional information about assigning keyboard shortcuts, "Assigning any of the modifier keys (Shift, Control, Option, Command) to perform a special function with a single press is contrary to the 'normal' and 'customary' method of using those modifier keys (aka meta key). The developer’s intended usage is that one or more modifier key is always pressed with one or more other key which is not a modifier key (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, space, symbol, function key). To see all the keyboard shortcut assignments, open System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts. Unlike the modifier keys, the function keys can be reassigned to suit your own needs, but such reassignment is best done for use with a particular application."

Mac Email Tip

        Want to make your emails look neater, more professional for your recipient?  John Carter explains a quick, nifty procedure which works for Snow Leopard, not Tiger or Leopard:
       "If you find a website that you want to share with someone, the best way to send the URL is to embed the URL as a link in some part of the body of the message. For instance, let’s say you just looked at the YouTube video Two Dogs Dining. Great for a laugh! What follows are instructions for embedding a link in an e-mail message using Apple Mail to create a really clean looking message.
        1. Copy the link of the website from the address bar in the browser.
        2. Open a new message in Apple Mail (the postage stamp in the Dock).
        3. In your own words in the body of the new message, tell your friend what it is you want them to look at. Something like this: “Hi. I just saw a great YouTube video called Two Dogs Dining. What a great laugh I had. Click here to see it for yourself.”
        4. Now, double click the word “here” to highlight it.
        5. Press Command-K on your keyboard. A window will pop up.

        6. Paste (Command-V) the link you copied from the browser address bar:

      
        7. In this case, the link wasn’t all that long, but it could have wrapped around that window three times.
        8. Now click OK. The word “here” will now have the link embedded in it and it will look like this:
Click here to see it for yourself.
        And if you click on the word “here” in the line above, it will take you to the YouTube video Two Dogs Dining.
        If you attempt to embed a link in a plain text message, you will get a prompt asking if you want to convert the message to RTF or leave it as plain text. You cannot embed a link in a plain text message."

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A Reminder to Be Careful

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        A warning of a trojan comes from Jim Hamm.  The Mac blog he subscribes to sent this, ""Today the Black Hat Trojan infected a Mac OS X server at a company that I work with in Washington, D.C. The company has about 65 Macs at this location.  The Trojan came in via an unknown attachment to an email message and then infected 15 Macs that had been asleep during the night.  When employees arrived for were five were tricked by the Trojan into keying in their Admin password at which point the entire HD was wiped clean including OS and the Trojan itself."
          Jim adds, "Along the same vein are comments on a backdoor trojan from this website." And Jim concludes, "No great cause for alarm, just something to be aware of. From further reading on the blog, one should be careful if all of a sudden you're asked to enter your admin password -- especially when, at that point in time, it isn't normal for you to do so."

Solved: Damaged SD Card Problem

"You might some day discover that the SD card in your digital camera appears to be damaged," John Carter gets our attention!   "You put it your computer and the computer says that the card has to be initialized. But you know there are hundreds of photos on it that haven’t yet been transferred off the SD card. Not to worry. There’s a free solution to recovering photos from what appears to be a damaged SD card.  A recent article in Digital Photography School describes the application and how to use it."
All of our PMUG photography buffs thank you, John.

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Gmail Solution is Posted

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Having a problem with Gmail?  Never fear, John Carter to the rescue.  John has been accepted as a writer for the popular WikiHow, and he introduces his topic, "I posted an article here that goes into some detail about working with a Gmail IMAP account in Mail. It discusses a major issue regarding the ALL MAIL mailbox wherein you might be thinking that, try as hard as you can, you can’t delete a message from that mailbox, or that after deleting a message from another mailbox it still shows up in All Mail. Don’t worry about it. There is a solution."

Mac Cheat Sheet

        Helping us get better organized, John Carter writes, "Have you ever wanted all the right information about your Mac in one place? Apple put a very useful page online in its support section. It’s a form that appears to be the Mac owner’s dream come true to keep the kind of information at your fingertips that you need -- especially when calling Apple support."
        John goes on to suggest, "If you print directly from the web page, the information on the printed page comes out jammed to the left edge of the paper and some text is lost. In order to get a decent print, I had to copy the text and the form off the web page and paste it into TextEdit, then print from TextEdit."   (Elaine adds, "I pasted to Pages and found it came out printed in larger size type, 2 pages, two-sided.")

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Solid State Drive in Your Future?

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        "I think it's the technology of the future," comments Jim Hamm about SSD, as he sends us this article from Small Dog Tech Tails.  Scroll down to "Just a TRIM."  It explains why a Solid State Drive (SSD) needs a TRIM (or a similar function) to prevent the degradation, over time, of the write function. (TRIM, while capitalized, is not an acronym for anything; its purpose is to trim old data from the SSD.)
        I asked Jim about replacing an existing drive in a Mac with a SSD.  He says it's not commonplace, but several new Macs, including the new MacBook Pros with SSD come with Thunderbolt and do support TRIM.  He thinks SSDs are available to be used as an exterior drive of Time Machine, and suggests this info from NewEgg.