Turn your Macintosh into a TiVo-Style Digital Video Recorder

Fall is the time of colorful foliage, going back to school, cooler weather and best of all, the return of your favorite TV shows. Personally, I don’t like to a locked into the network’s broadcast schedule. Nor do I care for inane commercials. Sure, you could buy a DVR or TiVo.. Or I can show you how to turn your iMac, MacBook or even older Macintosh desktop into a decent DVR solution.

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Avoid Getting Burned by Apple’s Mysterious Ways: When to buy Apple products.

Apple likes to surprise the public with its product announcements. This secretive behavior has spawned many a rumor site, some of which have been sued for predicting actual products. While Apple has its reasons for doing this, this usually means one thing for the consumer – buying an Apple product can be a bit of a mystery. I’ve both benefited from this and suffered. Fortunately, from my experience and observations, I’ve come up with four guidelines to accurately predict if its a good time to buy an Apple product or if you should wait a month or two.
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Eliminate Printed Picture Clipping by Resizing your Photos

Now that the summer is ending, what to do with the thousands of vacation pictures filling up your iPhoto library? While pictures on the computer screen are nice, its not the same as printing them out and creating a photo album. If you’ve ever printed out digital photographs, you’ll know that sometimes the pictures get cut off or cropped during the printing process. This leaves heads cut off, missing details and sometimes a completely different picture than you intended.

One way to avoid this is to resize your photos ahead of time, eliminating the dreaded auto-crop. You can do this for free with OS X and Preview. Here’s how:
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35 OS X Resource, Knowledge and Information Sites

The internet is a wealth of information. Of course some of this information is better than others. Apple and OS X articles, tips, tutorials and knowledge are all over the web. However, many instances of OS X information deal with legacy versions such as 10.1, Jaguar and Panther. Even the Tiger information is becoming dated and some of these sites haven’t been touched in years.

How can you find relevant information without wasting your time on old articles? The biggest help is knowing where to look. With this in mind, I’ve compiled a categorized list of thirty five Apple and OS X related web sites that are informative, useful and current.
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How to Create a Super Secure, Easy to Remember Password

What holds your personal and private files, documents, financial reports and pictures from the world? Is it a simple five letter word which happens to also be your dog’s name? Alma mater with the year of your graduation tacked on the end? Did you know that a simple password that’s in the dictionary (including foreign languages) with either a leading number or trailing number can be broken trivially by someone with the right tools? Did you also know that that someone with the right tools could be anyone who’s able to find and download them? The simple solution to this is to create a strong password and this tutorial is to show you how.
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