2009 July - Interrupt19

Dealing with USB Drives and OS X

Jul 30th, 2009

USB flash drive by Peter Hosey Photo courtesy of Peter Hosey
Portable USB Flash drives are one of my favorite peripherals of the past few years. Before USB drives, you’d have to burn files on a CD if you wanted to transfer them to a friend or co-worker. What a waste so that they can look at a 20mb file once and never again.

Now, with sizes ranging into 8gb for about $20, USB Flash drives are more economical than DVDs for moving files around. As wonderful as flash drives are, there are a few catches you need to be aware of with OS X.

Antivirus with a Mac, Do You Need It?

Jul 27th, 2009

by David Balogh in Maintenance and Repairs

Antivirus Partners by Thomas Guest Photo courtesy of Thomas Guest

In the past eight years that OS X has been around, there’s been a few pieces of Malware written but nothing on the scale that Windows users face. This doesn’t mean Macs are impenetrable as many may think. To counteract Malware, there are several Antivirus programs. While it’s a no-brainer that Windows needs them, what about the Mac users? Do OS X users need Antivirus?

Get your Copy / Paste on with Multiple Clipboards

Jul 23rd, 2009

by David Balogh in Work and Organization

Box of Clipboards by Eric I E Photo courtesy of Eric I E

Copy and Paste is probably the one function on a computer that saves the most time. Just ask anyone who had an iPhone or iPod Touch before version 3.0 how much they’d wish it had Copy / Paste.

Now, how can Copy / Paste become even better? With multiple clipboards so you can choose what to Paste! There’s a few of these applications out there, most with a price tag. Here’s how to get this functionality for free.

11 Dumb Things Almost Everyone Does With Their Mac but Won’t Admit.

Jul 20th, 2009

by David Balogh in Maintenance and Repairs

Not My Hat! by Cogdogblog Photo courtesy of Cogdogblog

Nobody’s perfect, although we’d like to think we are. We’d also like to think that we treat our Macs better than anyone else. Chalk it up to ignorance, stubbornness of just being uninformed, here are eleven dumb things we’re all guilty of doing to our Macs at one point or another and why we shouldn’t.

Update – Syncing iCal, Thunderbird and iPhones with Google Calendar

Jul 16th, 2009

by David Balogh in Work and Organization

Google Calendar Photo courtesy of Google

A while back, I wrote an article on how to sync Google Calendar with Thunderbird. Since that article was written, Google has drastically improved it’s syncing ability making things extremely easy. You can now sync Google Calendar with Thunderbird/Lightning, Sunbird, iCal, iPhone/iPod Touch Calendar, and anything else that supports the CalDAV standard. Here’s how you do it: