Cyber Security and Internet Safety Tips:
While many of these tips may sound like common sense, but there is no harm in going over it. If it saves you from one phishing scam, or keeps your kids from meeting a “friend” they met on the internet it will be worth your time.
- Install all system updates from Apple.
- Never shop online, unless you are familiar with the retailer you’re dealing with Avoid Phishing scams by simply not trusting any financial advice or warning sent in e-mail form. If your bank needs information from you, they will call you, not ask you to e-mail them or fill out an online form.
- Don’t: create passwords using personal information or information someone could guess.
- Don’t: create a password using words in a dictionary, no matter the language.
- Never use the default password or a common password.
- Talk to your children about their use of the computer and discuss any possible dangers they may encounter online.
- Discuss and set guidelines or rules for computer use with your children. Post these rules by the computer as a reminder.
- Keep the computer in a common area of your home, so that children’s activities can be easily monitored.
- Limit time allotted on the computer – watch to see if your child is withdrawing from friends and family.
- Use the Internet with your children.
- Know who your children’s online friends are and supervise their chat areas.
- Consider routing your child’s email into your own email account first in order to screen any unwanted email messages.
- Mac OS X parental controls let you manage your child’s use of the computer, the applications and the Internet. – parental controls can be found in system preferences.
- Back up important files and store them in a secure place in a different location than your computer.
Well, I was searching browsers again and I saw that there were a lot of updates to the major platforms. Chrome 5, Opera 10.5 for OS X, Firefox 3.6. And of course each one claims to be super fast. Normally I will look at the benchmarks and get a fair idea of how they stack up, but this time I wanted to find out they ran on my machine. There is a site, PeaceKeeper, that allows you to run your browser against its tests and it will produce a performance rating based on a variety of factors. So I installed the latest and greatest versions of the three browsers that I just mentioned and Safari, and I scrubbed them against this benchmark. Guess what, on my machine, an iMac Duo core 2.0, Safari is still the fastest. Here are the reports
All of the scores were within comparable ranges, except for one. Opera absolutely demolished the other browsers in the complex graphics test. So it seems that if you want screaming fast graphics, maybe for online gaming, and it supports Opera, you might want to give it a try.
FYI- Safari has the Glims add-on installed, the other browsers were clean installs, so Safari might actually be even faster than reported. I ran each test multiple times, with both an empty cache and after surfing. The reports did not change much. The numbers given are what I consider to be “actual use” comparison.
This amazing app does many things, but it’s basic premise is to allow you to dictate items and then it transcribes them to text. It doesn’t stop there. It also will send you a push notification of the item, or email, or RSS, or chat. With the paid service reQall will also give you the option for an SMS reminder. It also understands words, like “buy”, “note”, “Meet” or “Meeting”, “tell”, “remind”, and “ask”. So if you say “Buy Bananas”. ReQall knows that this is a shopping item and will put it in your shopping list. “Tell John to get bananas.” will create a todo for John, even if he does not have the app. It will send him an email. If you say,”Meeting with John every Thursday at 3:00.” it will create an event every thursday with John AND sync it to your calendar. I have just started to use this little gem, so I am undoubtedly missing more features, but it is Very amazing for an app that costs nothing.
The Squirrel is constantly searching through apps for the iphone and will soon be a writer for the blog. In her searching she has come across many apps that are only available on a jailbroke phone and some of them seemed pretty cool. So, I did some searching and found that in my opinion, the reasons to jailbreak your phone have long passed, other than your just a rebel. The only app that I remotely envy is winterboard. It allows you to fully customize your user interface. Some of the themes out there are really, really cool. But at the expense of speed. THe higher the graphics, the slower the response time. Mutitasking? Don’t start, there’s not enough screen space. It’s reasonably safe. Other than sticking it to “the man”, why would you, or have you? Give us your thoughts. i might be missing something.
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