Like many people, you may have received a new computer for the holidays.  If you’re already an avid user you know how to set it up, install your favorite apps and get to work/play.  But if you’ve just moved to a new operating system (Windows 7, OS X or even Linux) you may be a little lost as to the new functionality in your new toy.  Luckily lifehacker has put together a great list of tips and tools for whatever system you’re baffled over.  Take a look at this list and let me know if you have another cool trick you’d like to share.

image from bolti22 on flickr

Password protected , encrypted disk images

There are times when you may want to keep files away from prying eyes. A great way to do this straight in OSX is to make an encrypted image that you can mount and write to. So first open up disk utility. I am going to create an image on a usb drive so that I can take it with me.

As you can see I have made a partition called test. Highlight the partition then goto File –> New –> Blank Disc Image

Select the Save as and give it a name, You may also give the volume a name but it is not necessary.

Choose volume size and select custom, enter a size smaller than what the volume in question can hold ( as you see in the video I choose 1.8 GB). Select the encryption type, the partition should be changed to harddrive and the image format should be changed to sparse image.

Click create, it will ask you for a password. When you hit create it will start the process and automount the image for you. It will not ask you for a password because it will have saved it to your keychain.

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Click in any icon that you want to change, I will use my internal computers hard drive as an example. Highlight the icon , then press apple key I. Highlight the icon up on top as seen in the picture.

You can now drag any icon to the highlighted icon on top. If it was successful the preview icon below should change as well.

Congratulations! You have changed your icon. Easy wasn’t it.

Lets face it, Leopard is great, but you mac may be long in the tooth. What to do? You can always stick some more memory in the machine. I know, times are tough and you don’t want to spend money. Believe it or not , the 3D dock in Leopard takes up bit of resources just to make it shiny. “We don’t need that”, you yell at me. Very well, this is how to get rid of it.

Open up terminal ( it’s in your application folder under utilities, you can also just type terminal in spotlight).
Enter this in the window:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

The dock should close out and open up in 2D mode. There you have it, a short and sweet hack. If you ever want to change it back all you have to do is set the Boolean value to NO in that command.

http://www.winzip.com/index.htm winzip
http://www.powerarchiver.com/ osx powerarchiver

http://www.7-zip.org/

http://www.rarlab.com/rar_add.htm

Archiving files

Why archive files? There are a few good reasons to do so. Back in the day when harddrives were expensive and space was at a premium, it made sense to compress files that were not used everyday to save space. It also made sense to take many files and put them in one archive to storage or transmission reasons. Back when data was transmitted over phone lines or even isdn ( if you were lucky enough to have that) you wanted to transmit the least amount of data. In compressing folders you concatenated many files into one and made the size smaller.

Over the years there have been quite a few archive utilities. The venerable zip , the new standard rar, and one new addition, 7zip. Each one of these has good and bad traits.

Zip is now incorporated into the last few editions of windows, it is not the fastest or the best compression.

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Have you ever been at work and realized you forgot a file that you need for that presentation on your computer at home?  How about on vacation and remembered that you didn’t submit that file that needed to be in before a deadline that will pass before you get back?  What if you’re trying to convince your boss to let you telecommute once or twice a week but you don’t know how you’ll access your files while you’re gone?  There’s easy to use, free software out there to help you with these scenarios and more.

The best solution I’ve found is LogMeIn.

LogMeIn is most basically a remote desktop platform.  What sets it apart from older applications such as VNC is that you don’t need to make any changes to your firewall or forward any ports, LogMeIn takes care of it all for you.

Their free version is excellent and does everything most people need in a remote desktop application.

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Where did all my drive space go?

Who hasn’t asked this question. It seems that no matter how much room you have on your hard drive , it seems to just disappear. Well fret no longer. There are a bunch of programs for both Windows and OSX that will show you graphically what you have on your hard drives and where it is. Think of it as a different way of seeing your files.

Install the programs , and have them scan your drives ( this can take a while depending on the size and fragmentation of your drive).

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OSX is great when it comes to certain things, PDF’s are one of those things. Not only does the Operating System open up PDF’s by default, But with a simple program you can also fill out PDF’s that have forms. The program is called formulate pro.

All that you need to do is open up the PDF with FormulatePro instead of the default OSX viewer.  You get a small pop up that includes options for check boxes, scribbles, type, and a few more. When you’re done filling out the form, you can export it to PDF, or just hit print in choose OSX’s PDF printer. Did I mention that it is free?

There is another program that is even better, but this one is not free, PDFPen. This however has many more powerful options in which you can actually edit the pdf itself, as opposed to just filling in forms in an overlay.

PDF’s are a great way of exchanging information and making sure that the information looks the same on your computer as a computer a thousand miles away. Leverage that power with one of the apps above!

Sharing folders for your iphone

If you did not hear, apple released the MobileMe iDisk App, of course you will need a mobile me account. OSX users really should have one, let me list the benefits:

- get an new email address ( you choose what it is ) belonging to the .me domain
- can set up galleries through iphoto and upload your pictures to it for anyone to see.
- get a website that you can manipulate with iWeb.
- get 20 GB of space to share between your website/pictures/email or whatever else you want
- get access to a backup application tht will backup whatever files you want to the iDisk ( after it is set up)
If you have an iPhone you can track it if it is ever lost

And the best part? Its all in sync and push enabled (Email , contacts, calendar)

When you have MobileMe installed on OSX or Windows, goto your settings/control panel and make sure you are logged in and iDisk is set up. You should see it under devices in finder or under my computer in Windows.
So either use Itunes to search for the MobileMe IDisk app or use your iPhone/iTouch device to install the device (app store).
Its a great tool to keep your files accessible to you wherever you go.

Usually , barring a hardware problem (especially if its just software that is mounted) an application or .dmg can be locked and impossible to eject if it has open files. In OSX it can be very simple. OSX mounts things under /Volumes/mountname . If you open up terminal in OSX, and list out the Volumes (type ls /Volumes/) you can see the name of whatever is mounted. The next command is lsof ( list open files) , run that on the offending mount and find out what file is preventing you from ejecting the offending application (lsof /Volumes/mountname).

Its easy to do and gets you closer to unix command line mastery.