Tutorials

Every month or so, another scary story about a huge security compromise (a.k.a. a hack) surfaces on the Internet, and this month is no exception. Earlier this month, the whole Twitter corporate heirarchy had a lot to worry about, as a hacker (that's kind of a misnomer... hackers are usually nothing more than persistent, patient and sly computer users) accessed many Twitter employees' email, iTunes, Google, etc. accounts, all because of the fact that one of the employees (probably not the only one, though) left an open door via a few small missteps, security-wise.

The hacker, after gathering tons of personal information gleaned from all over the web, was able to recover a user's Gmail password by guessing a few personal questions Gmail asks on the password recovery form (i.e. "Who was your favorite actor?," "What is your maiden name?," etc.). Then the hacker simply searched through the user's emails for something like "username password," because he knew that a lot of websites (like the Joomla! forums, some gaming sites, online stores, etc.) simply send an email upon a new user registration that contains the person's username and password. Once the hacker got ahold of a few more passwords this way, he was on his way to 'hacking' all the user's accounts... because like most people online, the user had only one or maybe two passwords he used for everything.

...but using the same password for multiple sites/services isn't necessarily a bad thing. Not if you follow these steps:

Something you don't think about every day, but something that could save you enough change to get a Big Gulp every now and then: You can take a few simple steps to drastically reduce the amount of power consumed by your computer. Especially when you're doing many things at the same time with multiple hard drives and the screen turned on at full brightness!

This article is written specifically for the 24" iMac (late 2008), but applies to pretty much any Mac that uses electricity (read: ALL of them). By following the steps in this article, you can save a bit of power, which translates into saving a small amount of change each month. And who wouldn't like a few extra nickels in this economy?

The Discovery

I recently purchased the APC Back-UPS NS 1250, and one of the most amazing features of the UPS is the ability to see how many watts are being actively consumed by a device plugged into it.

I found the results of my testing to be quite interesting. When I had the iMac running with the screen at full brightness, the computer was using the energy equivalence of an old 100 Watt tungsten (i.e. 'energy sucker') light bulb! I don't typically run the screen this bright, though, because the lighting in my computer room is typically subdued. So I turned the brightness down all the way (a comfortable level for my vision), and looked again. This time, the computer was using about 75 Watts. NICE!

(Big bright chart for visual learners).

Whenever you're designing a website, one of your primary goals, besides communicating the mission of the organization for whom the website is being made, should be to make the website accessible to all visitors, no matter what kind of computer or browser they have, and no matter what kind of disabilities they have (whether it be blindness, deafness, or other problems).

Luckily for you, there's a free and easy-to-use tool on the web that lets you check how well your website conforms to coding standards:

The W3C generously provides this service to further their mission of having an open, accessible and free web. The tool is dead simple to use: just type in your website's URL, and click Validate. Errors will then show up, and you can go back to your source code and fix the little mistakes you've made. But there's a lot more about Validation that needs to be said!

Mac OS X's Mail program has a very handy feature called 'Previous Recipients' that does a very nice thing: It saves a list of every person and email address you've ever sent an email to. Then, it automatically fills in that person's email address when you type it or the person's name in the 'To' field in a new message. This is usually a good thing, because it saves you time (you don't have to look up the address again!).

However, there are times when you want to send an email to a specific email address for that person, and the email address that Mail automatically inserts is—gasp!—the wrong address. For example, I want to send an email to my friend John, so I type in "John" in the To field. Mail fills in the address I usually send emails to: john@example.com. But I want to send the mail to John's alternate address, johntheman@example.com... and I want to start sending emails to that address rather than to his first email address all the time. There are two easy solutions to this problem: