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 and white. Even maps are useable in black and white.

At IvanExpert we tend to agree. Our office has an inexpensive black and white HP laser printer that we’ve had for many years, and we don’t have a color printer at all. There are so many advantages to a black and white laser, so it’s what we generally recommend to our clients. Just a few reasons:

• inexpensive to purchase
• workhorses, they last a long time
• no breakdowns: the mechanics are pretty simple so you rarely need a tech to come
• very inexpensive to print, per sheet
• toner cartridge runs out infrequently, so you don’t spend lots of money on ink, nor do you need to have lots of extra cartridges lying around

And if it’s really necessary to have color, there’s always the corner copy shop.

There are rare occasions when we do recommend a color printer to a client. A few examples of those exceptions:

• The business is in a field that’s highly visual: photographer, art gallery, fashion house, graphic designer. People in these businesses routinely need to print out full-color images or designs.
• The business is in marketing or PR and does a lot of small mailings or in-person presentations. Often a compelling visual is required in these cases, and color is a good way to get it.
• A company logo looks really awful without color, and the company does a lot of written correspondence.

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The inside of a hard drive. Photo by Elsie esq., courtesy Flickr Creative Commons.

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 places is your Home folder. It’s got the image of a house, and it might have your name next to it. Double-click on this.

3. Inside your Home folder, double-click on the Pictures folder.

4. Inside your Pictures folder is an item called “iPhoto Library”. If you have a lot of photos, this item is probably large (over 1 GB). This is your entire archive of photos.

5. Drag the iPhoto Library item to the external drive you want to back up to.

6. If you’re using a hard drive, after the copy is done you can eject the drive. If you’re backing up to CD or DVD, you can now burn the disk.

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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 Time Machine backup every few weeks to make sure it’s doing its job. Here’s how.

1. Under the Apple menu, click on System Preferences and then on Time Machine.

2. Make sure the on/off switch is set to on. What does it say under “Latest Backup”? Does it show today’s date, within the last hour? If so, that’s good.

If not, does it say it’s scheduled to back up at a certain time within the upcoming hour? If so, check back at that time and ensure a backup is happening.

3. In the menu bar at the top right is an image of clock hands with an arrow circling around them. This is the Time Machine icon. (If this isn’t in your menu bar, you can add it by going to Time Machine in System Preferences and checking the box that says “Show Time Machine status in the menu bar.”)

Select the Time Machine icon in the menu bar, and from the dropdown menu select “Back Up Now.” Does it start a backup? You’ll know if the arrow starts spinning.

4. Select the Time Machine icon in the menu bar and select “Enter Time Machine.” You will enter space and see lots of windows going back into the distance. On the right-hand side are 2 arrows; click the up arrow once (which shows you the last backup). Is it dated earlier today? (Look in the bar at the bottom for the date and time.) Click the arrow again. Does it take you back another hour from the previous one?

If you’ve created a new Word file or other document recently, can you find that file in the Time Machine?

When you’re done looking around, click Cancel on the left-hand side.

5. If System Preferences doesn’t show a very recent backup, OR when you click “Back Up Now” it doesn’t start backing up, OR when you go into the Time Machine you can’t go back to a time and date within the last day, then your Time Machine drive may not be working and needs to be reset from scratch.

These checkups are not guaranteed to avoid Time Machine problems but they’re a good start.

You should also do the following:

6. Set up an additional off-site backup system for your personal files. You don’t need to back up all your system files and applications if you don’t want to; focus on the personal items that are irreplaceable (Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, emails, photos, etc). There are many products that do this, including Carbonite, Mozy, Dropbox, and SugarSync.

7. And/or make a one-time backup of your computer every few months to a separate external hard drive that can sit in a drawer in between backups (not your Time Machine drive). We recommend Carbon Copy Cloner as the software to aid this procedure.

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A recent post is called The Future of DRE Voting Machines. DRE (direct-recording electronic) voting machines store individuals’ votes in the computer memory, and these machines are easy to hack to adjust the actual tallies.

They decided to prove how easy it was to reprogram these DRE machines, so they obtained one and programmed it to run Pac-Man. So not only does it prove how easy it is to hack these, but it also shows these  machines can be “recycled” for other uses.

Many (including, of course, the DRE voting machine manufacturers) are against this type of hacking. Others (including me) feel this type of experimentation is vital, for 2 reasons:

1. If you own a product, don’t you have the right to do what you want with it? As long as you’re not ripping music or movies and giving the copies away, which is a violation of copyright (and I do believe in copyright).

2. To improve security. If “white hat” hackers (the good guys) can test out the security of electronic systems of all kinds, thus leading to improvements, it makes it harder for those systems to be hacked for nefarious purposes by the “black hat” guys.

Does the recent Library of Congress ruling, that jailbreaking your iPhone isn’t illegal, also apply to this type of issue?

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Jackie Robinson's jersey. Photo by rocknjosie, courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons.

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 you’ll remember, and then tweak it.

Say you choose “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina). Then you take the first letter from each word, and maybe turn the i’s into 1s and the o’s into 0s. So you end up with:

Hfaaa-euf1u110w

Nobody will ever guess that one!

Where to pull your phrase from:

• The opening sentence from your favorite book (or any sentence from your favorite book)
• Your favorite movie title (if it’s a long one)
• Something you say a lot
• Or something someone else says a lot

2. Choose your two best friends’ or relatives’ names, and then tweak it.

Say you choose Sarah and Jessica as your two names. Spell them backwards and put a few random capitals and numbers in. So you end up with:

acisseJ45hara6S

Other ideas:

• Go with last names instead of first names, especially if they’re unusual
• You could also use town names (just make sure they’re not too short or obvious)

Don’t do these:

• Choose your partner’s/spouse’s name (too easy for someone to guess)
• Choose your dog’s name (same)
• Choose your child’s name (same)
• Use your own name (duh)

3. Choose sports team players and records, and then tweak it.

This is a good way to put some numbers in easily, if you’re a stats person. Say your favorite baseball player is Jackie Robinson, and you know that in his first season in the Majors he had a .297 batting average and scored 125 runs (thanks, Wikipedia). Rearrange a few things, reverse some digits, add a capital letter, and you end up with:

rob792inSo521n

Just make sure to remember where you put the numbers and capitals into the name…

Other ideas:

• Dates are good to use because they’re easy to remember; pick an event that means a lot to you, and consider reversing the digits (and don’t use your birthdate or wedding date–too easy to guess!)

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If you’re wondering what I was doing at an Apple II convention, well, I love the Apple II, and so do some other people. It’s a beautiful computer.

I also presented a couple of sessions in which I introduce new software I developed for that computer, but unless you use(d) one, they might not make much sense.

Here’s the full blurb of the panel discussion: The incredibly open nature of the Apple II for development, down to the inclusion of schematics in every box, encouraged a generation of users who were also programmers. By contrast, today we have the walled garden of iPhone OS, where Apple judges all. Between these polar positions is the Macintosh. How have Apple — and Apple users — evolved over the years? Has using computers become more or less creative? What tradeoffs have we made between accessibility and empowerment? How do the Apple II and its users measure up in modern times? Panelists: Ivan Drucker (IvanExpert), Martin Haye (California Digital Library), Mike Maginnis (The Computist Project). Moderator: Ken Gagne (Juiced.GS).

Entourage stores all email in one giant database, which gets bigger every time you get or send an email. And having a big database means frequent database corruption.

Time Machine backs up everything new once an hour, which means Entourage can take up lots of space on your Time Machine drive. Plus if you’re using your Entourage database, the Time Machine backup is not always reliable.

So how do you back up your Entourage email on your Mac?

Once a week (or however often you feel comfortable), you should back up your Entourage database to another location on your computer. That way, Time Machine can back up the mail database properly. Here’s how.

1. Quit out of Entourage.

2. Go into your Home folder, and then into your Documents folder. In there is a folder called Microsoft User Data. Open that folder.

3. Inside you’ll find a folder called Office 2008 identities (or Office 2004 Identities, if you’re still on 2004.) Go inside that folder.

4. You’ll see a folder called Main Identity, or possibly you will have multiple folders that say Main Identity 1 and Main Identity 2 and so on. If you have multiple folders, you need to figure out which one has your current email database. Do this by opening each folder, and finding the file called Database that has today’s date.

5. Once you’ve figured out which Main Identity folder holds your current database, you want to copy that entire Main Identity folder. Hold down the Option key and then click and drag the Main Identity folder to another place in your User folder.  (For example, I made a folder in my User folder called Backups, and I put all my Entourage backups there.)

6. Once the folder copies over, you want to rename it, so that Entourage doesn’t get confused. Name it with today’s date and “Main Identity” or “Entourage backup”.

Now Time Machine will back up your Main Identity backup folder the next time it runs. You can even keep multiple Main Identity folders, with different backup dates.

Remember that the more frequently you follow these instructions to back up your Entourage database, the less mail you will lose if your Entourage gets corrupted and you need to revert to an earlier backup.

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What’s the easiest way to set up your Mac for SugarSync?

SugarSync synchronizes files across multiple computers. So if you have a computer at work, but you want to do some work on files at home, you can sync your files from your office to your home computer. (SugarSync works for the PC and the Mac.)

It’s also a useful backup tool, as it means your files are stored on SugarSync’s servers as well as on your other computer(s).

So how should you set up your files and folders, to make it easy to sync your work documents with your home computer? Here are step-by-step instructions.

1. On your work computer, inside your Documents folder (which is inside your Home folder), create a new folder called “Work.”

2. Move all work-related files and folders into the Work folder. Perhaps you have a folder called Marketing, and another one called Sales, and another is Financial, and so on–just put all of them into the Work folder.

3. Download and install SugarSync on your work computer.

4. In SugarSync’s Manage Sync Folders, click Add Folders from this Computer, and then choose the following folders:

• the new Work folder, with all your work documents in it
• your Desktop folder, which is in your Home folder

That’s the first half. Now the items on your desktop and in your Work folder are getting uploaded to SugarSync’s server. (The upload can take awhile, depending on how much data you have. Be patient.)

5. Now it’s time to set up your home computer. On your home computer, Inside your Documents folder (inside your Home folder), create a new folder called “Work Files.”

6. Inside the Work Files folder, create 2 more folders: “Desktop” and “Work.” You want these to have the same names as your computer at your office, because it makes syncing so much easier. Don’t put anything inside these folders–leave them empty.

7. Download and install SugarSync on your home computer.

8. In SugarSync’s Manage Sync Folders, under the Other Computers column, click on the Work folder and then click the Sync button. To tell SugarSync which folder on your home computer to sync to, navigate to the Work folder on your home computer and choose it.

9. In SugarSync’s Manage Sync Folders, under the Other Computers column, click on the Desktop folder and then click the Sync button. To tell SugarSync which folder on your home computer to sync to, navigate to the Desktop folder inside the Work Files folder on your home computer and choose it. (Careful! Don’t sync with your home desktop–sync with the “Desktop” folder inside the “Work Files” folder.)

Now all the files on SugarSync’s server should be downloading to your home computer. And in future, anytime you make a change to any file in the Work or Desktop folders on either computer, the change will appear on the other computer.

Keep in mind that email, contacts and calendar do not get synced with SugarSync; it’s for files and folders (Word docs, PDFs, spreadsheets, and so on). Also keep in mind that you may need to purchase more storage space at SugarSync, depending on how much data you have.

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But what if there isn’t a key command set on the Mac for something you do regularly? Here’s how to set your own key commands.

1. Under the Apple menu in the top left, choose System Preferences.

2. In the System Preferences panel, choose Keyboard. (It’s in the Hardware section.)

3. At the top, choose the Keyboard Shortcuts “tab.”

4. Click the + button at the bottom. A window pops up.

5. Under Application, choose from the pop-up list which application you want to set a keyboard shortcut for. Then under Menu Title, you need to make sure to enter the exact name of an existing menu item for that application (so look at names of menu items before you get to this point, and copy the name down exactly as it appears in the menu). Then under Keyboard Shortcut, do the shortcut you want to assign.

6. Click the Add button.

In the Keyboard preference you can also change some of the existing keyboard shortcuts.