Our lives are filling up with more and more devices as the post-PC era takes a firm hold, as all of our devices are connected to each other and to the internet, wirelessly.  The problem is, we are not all professional radio engineers or even amateur radio operators.  Most of us are not familiar with how various radio frequencies penetrate. The following will help anyone with a WiFi network understand where and why their devices are not connecting to the network.

Luckily it doesn’t have to be that complicated. Sometimes by simply moving an existing wireless router base station, or adding a second base station to extend your network, you will rectify the most common of dead spots in most home networks. Here are some tips to walk you through the process.

Diagnose the problem

To start, there are a few basic things to look for: signal strength and noise.  Apple has included several utilities for checking both the signal strength and the noise associated with the WiFi network your Mac is connected to.  Perhaps the quickest and easiest way to check the signal strength on a Mac is to hold down the Option key and click on the Airport Wi-Fi icon on the menu bar.  What you are looking for is the received signal strength indicator, or RSSI.  Basically, the stronger the signal, the closer the number is to zero.  Think of this measurement as the measured loss of signal strength from transmission to reception.  So an RSSI of -40 is much better then an RSSI of -70 since you are losing less of the original signal.

Provided you are on an Airport network using one of Apple’s Airport WiFi networking products, you can use Apple’s Airport Utility for Mac to collect this information for all of your devices.  After entering the Airport router’s base station password (not the wireless network password), you should see a list of all of your wireless clients.  These are represented either by the device’s host name or by the device’s Media Access Control address (MAC address).  Mouse over any of the clients to review their individual signal strengths.  Knowing the location of each of your network devices, you can begin to get a picture of whether or not the location of your router is optimal for where your network resides.  The further away you get from the router, the weaker the signal strength will likely be.

But signal strength is not everything.  You should also figure out what noise is present in your network.  To start, either take a MacBook to an oft-used location furthest away from your router, or use the Mac on your network that has the weakest WiFi signal. The idea is to start on the outer edge of your network and work your way in.  Located in the /System/Library/CoreServices/ folder of Mac OS X Lion is the Wi-Fi Diagnostics utility.  This utility will help you determine both the signal strength as well as the noise in a given location for the Mac you’re testing.  Hopefully, you will find that you have a stronger Signal value than Noise value — the value you see in the utility for Signal is closer to zero than the value for Noise.

Next, subtract the Noise value from the Signal value to get your signal-to-noise ratio (S/N).  With a RSSI value of -67, and a Noise value of -87, you would have an S/N of 20, which is good.  The higher the S/N, the better network performance you will likely experience.

Some simple remedies

Once you have collected all of the data, it’s time to see if there is a quick and easy solution to your networking problems.

Degrading signal, low noise throughout: You may find that your environment has very little noise and that the signal is simply degrading by the time it reaches all of your devices.  This could be due to long distances or obstructions like walls and ceilings.  The first thing to try is to reposition your Airport base station to a more centrally located position. This will remedy situations where your network is clearly unbalanced, meaning all of your devices on one side of your house have a very high S/N value, and all of the devices on the other end of your house have a very low S/N value.

Strong noise throughout, many networks: If you find that both your Signal strength and Noise remain strong across all your devices regardless of location, you’ll want to check and see if there are a lot of other WiFi networks in your area.  To see if this is a problem, look again at the information provided by holding down the Option key when you click on the Airport Wi-Fi icon on the menu bar.  Only this time take notice of the RSSI values and assigned channel of all the other WiFi networks on the list.  You are looking for any networks with strong RSSI values on the same assigned channel as your network.

In extreme situations, changing the assigned channel of your WiFi network, repositioning your base station or even extending your network by adding an additional base station won’t help much at all. You will have to work things out with your neighbors and perhaps come up with a more communal solution for everyone.

Strong noise in pockets, no networks: This is a situation where something other than a WiFi network is causing interference.  The best thing to do is to start unplugging and powering off each of your electronic devices, one at a time, then check to see if your network has improved.  A good way to go about this is in reverse: unplug all of your electronic devices and home appliances to see if things improve.  If they don’t, then the interference is coming from something outside your environment.  Start plugging them in again one by one until you find the electronic device that is causing the problem. When you find the device or appliance that is causing the problem, consider replacing it.

Extending the range of your network

There are two main ways to extend the range of a wireless network.  The first is using a hard-wired ethernet connection to add an additional WiFi access point, also referred to as a roaming network.  The second is by extending the WiFi network by adding a second wireless base station. In this situation, the second base station is also a wireless client of the primary base station.

In both setups, the configuration of the wireless network on each base station is basically the same.  The difference is that one will be the primary and will “create a wireless network,” where the other will be secondary and will “extend a wireless network.”  Using the Airport Utility, edit the configuration of your primary base station and ensure that its Wireless setting for Network Mode is set to “Create a wireless network.”  Then use the Airport Utility to edit the secondary base station and ensure that its Wireless setting for Network Mode is set to “Extend a wireless network.”  On both, you will want to set the Wireless Network Name, Wireless Security and Wireless Password to the same settings.

Keep in mind that this is not a fix-all remedy and could actually make things worse by adding what is known as co-channel interference.  This is when the radio signal of each of your WiFi base stations are interfering with each other.  To help remedy this situation, you will want to place each base station as far apart from each other as possible.  Also with each deployed WiFi access point, you could degrade the throughput, or connection speed, of the network. This would not show up as a loss in signal, but a loss in network speed.  Since positioning each WiFi base station as close together as possible seems counterproductive, consider extending your network by adding the second WiFi access point via ethernet.

In the end, your best bet is always to try to position a single base station in an optimal location, and if necessary, establish a secondary WiFi access point over ethernet at a location far enough away from the primary base station to avoid each network from interfering with one another.  Though keep in mind, even in the most extreme of circumstances (such as the meltdown at Apple’s WWDC Keynote in 2010), not even Apple was able to remedy all WiFi network issues.

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There are two ways to think about securing information: Enabling access to information that you want to keep, and disabling access to information you no longer want to keep.  In this post, we will focus on the information Mac users no longer want to keep.  If you are thinking that this is as easy as moving a file to the trash, then emptying the trash, think again.  There are numerous data recovery utilities on the market that can recover lost or deleted files.  And these utilities work because most of us do not know how to securely erase information off of our Macs.  The following are some tips on how you can at least make if very difficult for others to recover your unwanted files.

Finder’s Secure Empty Trash

When you just empty the trash on a Mac, OS X no longer keeps track of where the data associated with the file is stored on the hard drive.  The data is still there, it’s just that the Finder can no longer find it.  As you continue to work and OS X saves new files on your hard drive, OS X could write over parts of your deleted files data with the new files data.  What many data recovery utilities take advantage of is the chance that old data is still there, and has not yet been written over by new data.  When you instead elect to use Secure Empty Trash, OS X does in fact ensure that the old data is written over with new data, which will ensure that the old data is no longer there — think of it like scribbling out a written message on a post-it note.  What is not known for sure is how many times Secure Empty Trash writes over the old file’s data.

The U.S. Department of Defense data erasure guidelines require that erased data be written over no less than seven times.  Why seven times?  It just so happens that because of the way hard drives work, there is an opportunity for parts of the data to remain on the physical disk.  There is a mechanical arm that reaches out across the hard drive to read and write data off of a magnetic platter.  That mechanical arm may not pass over exactly the same spot on the hard drive with each pass.  If you remove the platter from the drive, you can actually scan the surface of the drive using a much more precise mechanical arm to read old data off of the drive.  Writing over the data seven times compensates for this opportunity.  Think of it like plowing a field: The more times you plow over the earth, the less likely you are to see last season’s crop lines.

Permanent Erasure Utility

There are utilities that you can use that take this even further.  Available in the Mac App Store is a free utility from Edenwaith called Permanent Eraser.  Tools like Permanent Erasure give the user greater control over how the old data is written over with new data when you empty the trash.  For instance, Peter Gutmann, a computer scientist in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland, had devised a method of overwriting data 35 times, each pass utilizing a different pattern of ones and zeroes.  Permanent Erasure is configurable to take advantage of Gutmann’s research and can apply his technique of writing over old data when the trash is emptied.  In fact, Permanent Erasure goes even further by also scrambling the original file name and truncating the file size to nothing before finally unlinking it from the system.

Gutmann’s technique is quite dated, as it was originally applied to a variety of consumer grade hard drives available back in the late 1990s.  While widely considered the most secure means of erasing data off of an old hard drive that you still intend to use, some have speculated that this technique is no longer entirely necessary on modern-day, high-density and large-volume SATA drives.  Some security forums online have speculated that a single pass of random ones and zeroes is sufficient on modern equipment.  Even though there are tools that make utilizing even the most secure of techniques easy, you do wear down the drive and decrease its lifespan by overemploying this technique on a daily basis.  It is probably best to utilize the Finder’s Secure Erase on a daily basis, and use tools like Permanent Erasure when you have recently deleted something important that you want to make absolutely sure no one will be able to access again.

Time Machine Backups

Lets not forget about Time Machine and other backup solutions you may have implemented.  Going to extremes to erase a file from a hard drive that you routinely back up could be seen as a fool’s errand if you neglect to erase all of the backup copies as well.  But there is a way to delete all backed up versions of a file from within Time Machine.  Before you delete the file you want to remove permanently, open Time Machine and click on the gears to expose a menu.  From the menu select “Delete all backups of this file.” This will remove all references in Time Machine showing that the file ever existed.

This feature of Time Machine will not implement the same technique as Secure Empty Trash or any more advanced utilities like Permanent Erasure by writing over the data on the drive that the original file occupied.  It just so happens that a halfway decent automated backup strategy could end up being the Achilles’ heel of a halfway decent security strategy.  Once you backup your files online for instance, you may not have any way to delete individual files from all of the redundant backups that your cloud-based service provider has elected to employ.  The data is still out there, somewhere.

Disk Utility’s Secure Erase Options

Looking at this problem from an individual file perspective is good if you intend to keep using all of the old hard drives you have ever owned.  But what if you want to sell or give away your old equipment to somebody else?  At such a time it is a good idea to securely erase an entire drive’s data.  Fortunately Mac OS X’s Drive Utility has you covered.  Just open Disk Utility and select the drive you want to erase.  Choose the selector labeled “Erase” and click on the “Security Options” button.  Here you will find a range of options from “Fastest” to “Most Secure.”

Unfortunately, Disk Utility stops short at just a seven pass overwrite and does not employ any other technique of securely erasing an entire drive.  And since OS X 10. 7 Lion, you no longer have the option to boot from DVD in order to gain access to Disk Utility in order to wipe the internal hard drive of your Mac clean.

One of the most widely used and highly recommended tools to use in cases like this, Darik’s Boot And Nuke (DBAN), can be accessed from a bootable CD/DVD on your Mac.  You can also create a customized USB drive that will boot to Ubuntu where you can install and use the terminal command “wipe“ (there is also a GUI interface for “wipe called Parted Magic).  Your best bet is to stick with something like Micromat’s TechTool Pro Wipe Disk feature, which will also boot from DVD or USB.  Any one of these three tools will wipe the internal drive of your Mac completely clean.

Hardware-Based Accessories

You can always try booting your MacBook in target disk mode in order connect to the hard drive externally and securely wipe the internal hard drive.  However, wiping a drive clean may be difficult if the Mac that the drive is in no longer boots up.  There are two hardware accessories for sale at MacSales by NewerTech that can come in handy once you have decided to remove the hard drive from your old Mac.  If you only need to do this on a rare occasion, consider the SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Universal Drive Adapter.  It supports both IDE and SATA formats for 5.25-inch, 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drives.  If you are looking for a more permanent SATA solution, one that you can connect to via eSATA, then get the NewerTech Voyager hard drive dock.

If you happen to do this a lot, or if you are the go-to person when it comes to IT issues, you may consider investing in a hardware-based wipe solution to securely erase all of the hard drives you have to work with.  WiebeTech’s Drive eRaser Ultra will wipe your IDE and SATA drives clean and won’t lock up your Mac in the process as it is a standalone wipe accessory.

Physical Destruction

There are ways to render a hard drive completely useless to others through the means of bashing, grinding, shredding, incinerating and even exposing the raw elements of the drive to a phase transition by vaporizing all of its components.  Rather than try to handle this yourself by purchasing your own Model 22 HDD Hard Drive Disintegrator, there are services that will take care of this for you.

But even professional disintegration services recommend that you first perform your own due diligence by securely wiping off any private information before submitting the equipment to them for disposal.  One thing to look for when shopping around for such a service is to see if they are NAID Certified, if they offer an audit trail of the destruction process and will issue some sort of certificate of destruction.

Solid State Drives

This is all well and good provided you only have a traditional IDE or SATA hard drive that uses mechanical arms to read and write data off of rotating platters.  But what if you have a solid state drive (SSD), what then?  SSDs utilize a completely different technology that renders many of the above techniques ineffective.  The Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory of the University of California San Diego’s Computer Science and Engineering department has commenced a study to look at the effectiveness of various sanitizing techniques on SSDs. What researchers found was that a new approach to securely wiping a drive is needed.

The SSD’s wear-leveling technology, while designed to prolong the lifespan of the drive, makes it almost impossible to guarantee that a given file has been overwritten.  The implementation of many SSDs’ buffering technology, which was designed to help compensate for memory failures, also challenges many of the established erasure techniques.  The only recourse then is to always use full disk encryption on SSDs.  SSDs store the encryption keys in a Key Storage Area (KSA).  This KSA can be cleared to make the data that remains on the drive practically impossible to recover.  Some newer SSDs provide an “erase unit” command, but this has not been implemented uniformly across all drives and is not exposed in popular drive utility tools currently available to consumers.

When thinking about both your security as well as your backup strategy, think also of the reverse side of the equation — not just how can you continue to securely access your most private information, but also how can you prevent access to your private information by wiping it clean off of any device it has been stored on when you no longer want that device.  Paying attention to someone can access your files stored on old discarded computer equipment is key to any good security strategy.

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Step 1: Cables

First off, you need to make sure the right cables are plugged into your Mac. The most important is the video cable connecting the display to the laptop. For a recent Mac, you’ll need a Mini DisplayPort cable if you’re using a new 27-inch Apple Cinema Display, or some kind of adapter, such as Mini DisplayPort to VGA or DVI. Older Macs will most likely require Mini-DVI adapters.

The next cable you need is your laptop’s MagSafe Power Adapter (the charging cable). Without having that plugged in, your laptop won’t stay awake when you shut the lid. Having the charging cable plugged in all the time shouldn’t harm the battery of your portable, but if you’re worried, you can always unplug it when you turn off the computer.

Finally, you’ll also probably want an audio cable so that you can channel sound through either your display’s speakers or a set of external speakers. While this isn’t necessary, the audio from a laptop’s built-in speakers doesn’t sound too good when the laptop’s closed. Usually you’ll audio cable is plugged into the headphone jack of your laptop, which is one of the small circular ports at the end of the row.

Step 2: Peripherals

If you want to continue working when the laptop is closed, it’s essential that you have an external mouse and keyboard, since you won’t be able to access the internal ones once the lid is shut. It doesn’t matter whether they are wired or wireless; as long as they are connected and working before you shut your laptop, it’s fine to carry on. Before continuing to step three, make sure your input devices are connected, and that they are working properly. Wireless devices can sometimes be notorious for not connecting straight away, so make sure you check.

If you’re using wireless input devices, open System Preferences and navigate to the Bluetooth pane. Click Advanced… and you should see four checkboxes. Make sure Allow Bluetooth devices to wake this computer is checked. This ensures that clicking the mouse or pressing a key on the keyboard will wake the computer from sleep mode.

Step 3: Shut the lid

Next is the all-important part: actually closing the laptop. It tends to work best if the Mac is already up and running when you do this, so if your computer is turned off, I’d recommend powering it on before continuing. While your computer is running, simply close the lid. At first your Mac will enter sleep mode, and any connected displays will go blank. This is fine, since Mac portables automatically go to sleep when they’re shut. Once your computer is completely asleep, either tap a key on the keyboard or click the mouse to wake it up. After a few seconds, your external display should come back on and be displaying your desktop. Be patient, since your Mac could take 30 seconds or so to wake back up.

If your display doesn’t come back on, double-check that you have the power cable for your Mac plugged in. Also check that the display hasn’t turned off completely when the Mac went to sleep, rather than entering standby mode. Now you can use your Mac portable as a home theatre PC, or as a makeshift tower for your home computing needs.

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So you’ve just installed tons of apps from the Mac App Store, but now you realize you don’t really need that fifth Twitter client. How to uninstall it? Unlike Windows, OS X doesn’t have a “Remove Programs” tool, but the answer is actually simpler than that.

All you have to do is navigate to [Your User Name]/Applications, locate the app you want to remove, and drag it to the Trash icon on your dock. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Command+Delete. Since Mac applications are all packed into bundles (that’s the icon you drag to the Trash) just deleting the bundle removes the app.

However, there is one catch. A lot of apps leave behind external files, such as preference files, dotted around your system, which don’t get deleted when you send the application bundle to the Trash. You could hunt around and manually delete those files, but it would be very time-consuming and there’s no guarantee you’ll find every one. Luckily, there are some third-party apps that will handle this for you.

AppZapper is one of those apps. When you want to uninstall another app, fire up AppZapper. Instead of dragging the application to the Trash, drag it to the AppZapper window. AppZapper looks through your hard drives for any files related to the app you’re deleting. It presents you with a list, and you can uncheck any items you’re not sure you want to delete before finalizing the process. All files are sent to your Trash bin, too, so if you have second thoughts you can also recover them there.

Version 2.0 of AppZapper introduced a new feature called Hit List which lets you see all your installed apps, and filter them according to when you last used them and how much space they’re taking up on your drive. It’s a great addition for those who’ve neglected their Applications folder for a while and aren’t sure where to start cleaning up.

AppZapper isn’t the only ‘uninstaller’ for the Mac. There are others, such as AppDelete. Whichever you choose, it’s a good idea to use one to make sure your Mac is clear of potential ‘bloat’ left behind from apps you don’t even have any more.

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Before you start, it’s always a good idea to do a backup of your system, or at least your sensitive files. These are very basic steps that don’t incur much risk, but you’re always better off having a backup than not.

Do It Every Day: Empty the Trash

It might seem obvious, but emptying the Trash is a great way to claim back hard drive space, which can, in some cases, speed up your Mac. To do this, simply click and hold (or right-click) the Trash icon in the Dock. Then click Empty Trash in the pop-up menu which appears. You’d be surprised how often you might forget to do this for days or even weeks at a time.

Do It Once a Month: Give Your Battery a Break

If you’re like me, and you never completely shut down your MacBook, instead only closing the lid occasionally to put it to sleep, then your battery might be getting a bit worn out. It could even be losing the ability to charge completely. Once in a while, turn your laptop off completely to give the battery a rest. Apple even suggests regularly running the charge down until the notebook turns off, then waiting a while to let it run out completely before recharging.

You can check the condition of your battery if you’re running Snow Leopard (10.6.x) by holding Option and clicking the battery status icon in the Menu Bar. If it shows ‘Replace Soon’, your battery may be losing the ability to hold its charge. If “Replace Now” or “Service Battery” is displayed, you should contact Apple about getting the battery replaced, especially if you’re still covered under warranty or AppleCare.

Do It Once Every Couple Months: Verify and Repair Disks and Permissions

Repair Disk Permissions
Repairing disk permissions can sort out strange goings-on, particularly those related to starting up your Mac. Open up Disk Utility (Found in the Applications>Utilities folder) and click on the disk you’re interested in using the source menu on the left. Click the button on the left, Verify Disk Permissions. Disk Utility will automatically take care of the rest.

If you need to, you can click Repair Disk Permissions to iron out any errors that get picked up. I’d suggest doing this before restoring and erasing disks and so on. Oftentimes repairing permissions will sort out the problem, without having to resort to a disk repair.

Verify and Repair Disks
If something strange starts happening on your Mac, it’s a good idea to verify that your startup disk is okay. If the structure of the disk’s file system is changed in some way, then your Mac might start behaving strangely. In order to check that everything is as it should be, you can once again use Disk Utility. Select your startup disk from the list of drives on the left and hit Verify Disk. Disk Utility will go ahead and check the status of the disk you selected. Don’t worry if your computer is unresponsive during the test; that’s normal.

If Disk Utility finds an issue with a disk, you can use the Repair Disk button to have your Mac try to repair it automatically. Most of the time, a simple repair will sort out any issues you’re having with a disk.

Sometimes, though, you will have to boot your Mac from your OS X install disc in order for Repair Disk to work. To do that, make sure your OS X install disc is in your Mac’s drive, reboot your computer, and hold C. Don’t reinstall OS X, but instead choose Disk Utility from the Installer menu and try to verify and repair once again.

Getting It Done Automatically

It can be a pain to remember to carry out maintenance on your machine regularly. Luckily, there’s an application, OnyX, which can perform maintenance such as checking permissions and cleaning out temporary files automatically. OnyX can perform daily, weekly and monthly scripts which do all the boring things for you. Plus it’s free. OnyX can’t empty the Trash, but it can clear caches and temporary files. It also checks the status of your startup disk whenever you launch the application.

Got any maintenance tips of your own? Share them in the comments.

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On Microsoft Windows, the application is the window, and you can use either alt-tab, win-tab, or the task bar to switch between windows. On the Mac, there are three main ways to manage windows, here’s a rundown of each, and how to use them to play up the strengths of OS X.

The Dock

The first way most new users to the Mac try to manage windows is the Dock. Clicking on a running applications icon in the Dock will bring that application’s windows to the front, which works great for apps that are only using a single window.

If, however, you have multiple windows open at once, like several TextEdit windows for example, clicking on the TextEdit icon will bring all of the windows to the front, which may not be exactly what you want.

The trick to using the Dock to manage windows is by clicking and holding on an icon. This will trigger Exposé in “Application Windows” mode, hiding all other applications and thumbnailing all of the open windows for that application. Then you can just click on the window you want to come to the front.

Exposé

Now that you’ve seen one part of Exposé in action, it’s time to see how the rest of it works. Open up System Preferences and click on “Exposé and Spaces”. You can think of this part of the preferences as the command center for managing windows.

At the top is “Active Screen Corners”, followed by keyboard shortcuts. Make note of the function key set for “All windows;” on mine it’s F3 to match my Apple Bluetooth keyboard. Open up a few different applications (it helps if one is a movie), and press F3. In one smooth animation, all of the open windows will shrink into thumbnails, with open windows at the top, and minimized windows at the bottom. From here you can click on any window you like to bring it to the front. If there are still too many windows open, you can press the tab key to cycle between the windows of running applications.

Having a function key is great, but too often I find that I need to look down at my keyboard to find the right key. That’s where the Active Screen Corners come in. Each corner of the screen can activate a function of window management. I always assign the bottom left corner of my screen to activating Exposé for All Windows, and the bottom right to Desktop. Then I put my Dashboard in the top right corner, and leave the top left blank. This gives me super quick access to all of my windows, widgets, and files I’m working with on my desktop.

You can also drag files into Exposé. For example, here’s a common workflow I run into all the time. To get a file from my desktop into a window open in the background, I’ll flick my mouse pointer to the bottom right corner to show the desktop. Then, I’ll drag the file to the bottom right hand corner to activate Exposé. Finally, while still dragging the file, I’ll select the window I want to bring it to the front, and then drop the file onto the window. Super easy, and super useful, once you get used to it.

Spaces

If, however, you still find yourself drowning in windows, or you just like to keep things clean and organized, you can enable Spaces. Spaces gives you extra desktops to work with. The default number of spaces is four, but you can assign up to sixteen. Personally, I’m normally happy with just two. I’m a developer, so I work in Xcode all the time. Some development tools, like Interface Builder, open up several windows, and can clutter up the screen quickly. So it’s nice to keep Xcode and Interface Builder in separate spaces. I always assign the CMD+Arrow Keys to switch between the spaces, and F8 to activate the spaces overview.

Once in the spaces overview, you can activate Exposé to see all of your windows, in all of your spaces.

Exposé, Spaces, and the Dock are the three main elements for window management. You can also use CMD-tab to switch between applications, or optionally, check out a third-party application like Witch that can give your keyboard even more control. If you’re new to the Mac, I hope this article helped, if you are experienced and think I missed something, feel free to mention it in the comments.

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Apple’s primary document explaining Target Disk Mode covers nearly every Firewire equipped Mac beginning with the slot-loading iMac back in the PowerPC G3 days of 1999. Today, there are over 150 docs on Apple’s Knowledge Base that incorporate the use of Target Disk Mode in troubleshooting.

Apple obviously notices the trend that its customers are not using this powerful tool any longer. Two of Apple’s current Macs don’t even include Firewire (MacBook and MacBook Air) and this technology simply won’t work over USB.

Why would someone need this anyway? Let’s say you start up your Mac and nothing happens. There’s no login window and no boot screen at all. You hear the hard drive whirling around but that’s it. After inserting the Mac OS X disk, you can see the HDD is mounted and you only have two options. The first is to erase the disk for an OS reinstall and the other is to scan the drive for errors. Well, an error check doesn’t help and now you’re stuck with a non-booting Mac and a few important files that weren’t backed up.

On most modern Macs, pulling out the HDD and putting it in a 2.5″ external HDD enclosure will do just fine but you need those files now. All you must do is plug in a Firewire cable and connect the other end to another Mac with Firewire. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that you must be lucky enough to have a spare Mac with Firewire laying around.

Once the two computers are connected, simply boot up the healthy Mac login. On the other computer, hold down the “T” key and hit the power button. With a little luck, the previously non-booting machine’s HDD will appear on your functioning Mac’s desktop. Voilà, you can now successfully copy those files to your working Mac and run the dead machine to an Apple Store.

Target Disk Mode is a powerful utility that can really help out in a bind. What other users for it have you found?

Setting up two Macs to network and share files can be done wirelessly or wired (if you do it wired just run a regular network cable between the two computers). The following steps are generally the same for both Leopard and Tiger users. There will be a few interface differences, so if you have any trouble just post your question in the comments.

1. Open System Preferences on the computer that you want to share files from.
2. Under the Internet and Network section open the “Sharing” folder.



3. In Leopard, click the box that says “File Sharing”. In Tiger there should be a prompt stating “Personal File Sharing is Off” on the right hand side of the sharing folder. You should always turn personal file sharing off when you are not actively using it to protect your personal information. Under the prompt there should be a button that says “Start.” Click the start button.



4. Now that you are sharing your personal files with the other Mac (and any other computer around you) can see your public folder in Username/Public. Anything you put in that folder your friend will be able to get.
5. After your done sharing, be sure to turn file sharing off.

I often use this technique to quickly move mp3′s from my laptop to my desktop because it’s faster than ziping and uploading them to a server.

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An onscreen keyboard can be a powerful tool for screencasters. This tutorial will show you how to turn on the onscreen keyboard that OS X has built in.

To turn on the onscreen keyboard:

1. Go to the System Preferences panel
2. Select the “International” icon



3. Go to the “Input Menu” tab
4. Select the “Keyboard Viewer”



5. You now should have an American flag in your menu bar. Click on the American flag and select “Show Keyboard Viewer”



6. You now should have a keyboard on your desktop that displays whatever your press on your keyboard. Quick, easy, free!

* If you click the plus arrow in the upper left hand corner of the keyboard it makes it much larger.

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To create a zip file in OS X (Tiger or Leopard):

1. Right click on the file or folder you would like to zip
2. Select “Compress … ” or in Tiger “Create an Archive of …”

Creating zips is great if you heavily rely on email for your main form of communication; instead of attaching several documents to an email I make a new folder, name it properly, drop in all of my files, and zip it. Then I log into my favorite email client and attach the one zipped file instead of several single files, which saves me time and is easier for both me, the sender, and the receiver who now only has to download one file.

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• How do developers ride the Siri wave?
• Connectivity means making the machine disappear
• Access vs. ownership: Why UltraViolet has already lost