The NY Times on-line can hijack contextual menus (those you get when right-clicking — or control-clicking on a Mac) to enable their Lookup Word “feature”. This happens in Firefox even if you tell Firefox to not allow websites to change contextual menus in Options menu > Content panel > Advanced JavaScript Settings > Disable or replace context menus.

You can disable JavaScript entirely (and that will make your browsing safer, as there are many JavaScript security flaws out there), but that will change your web experience, because JavaScript is used for many of the web’s common advanced features.

A less slash-and-burn alternative is to use the Firefox extension Adblock, which, as its name implies, is mainly designed to block ads from appearing in your browser window.

Thanks to a note by “Goozak” at http://userscripts.org/topics/58200, I learned that the NY Times JavaScript file that messes with your contextual menus is found at http://graphics8.nytimes.com/js/common/screen/altClickToSearch.js. Just add a filter for that site in Adblock and you get your contextual menus back, without killing any other JavaScript features.

iPhone and iPod touch backups are stored in a user’s “~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup” folder after each sync. If your device gets corrupted, lost, stolen, etc, you can restore it from this file using iTunes. (Click on “Restore” from the iTunes syncing summary screen, which will completely erase your device, then iTunes will ask if you want to restore from backup.)

That backup is handy to have, but iTunes only stores ONE backup per device. If you want to go back to an earlier state of your device, you can’t do it directly through iTunes.

If you back-up your Mac with Time Machine or other backup program, you can manually copy an older device backup into your “~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup” folder and use that to restore.

If you really like mess around with your iPhone/touch and want to easily restore it to an earlier state, I would suggest being a little more proactive and occasionally copy the backup stored in “~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup” to another folder. The backup is in a folder named with long string of seemingly random letters and numbers. When you want to restore from it, just put it back into the “~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup” folder (put the backup stored there in another spot temporarily to be safe).

For more info, see Apple’s Knowledge Base article HT1766: “iPhone and iPod touch: About backups”

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1766

The excellent Mac tips podcast Mac Geek Gab aired a comment by me on backup strategies (show #230, about 18 min 30 sec in; http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/features/mac_geek_gab_free/).

In a nutshell, my backup strategy is this: two external hard drives, one a clone of the main startup drive, the other a file backup, plus off-site backup.

The clone drive gets automatically updated every night (using Carbon Copy Cloner — free at http://www.bombich.com — or something similar). If my main hard drive crashes, I can use that one to start up my machine and be working again right away. The second drive is copies of all current files, plus as many old versions and deleted files as will fit on the drive. Mac OS 10.5 and later have a great utility called Time Machine that automatically backs up your files like that every hour. There are other backup programs available that run on earlier OS versions. You should also have an off-site backup of irreplaceable photos, etc, because if your house burns down or floods, the external hard drives are gone with your Mac. For off-site, you can manually copy to DVDs, external disks, etc, and store them somewhere else, or use one of the many on-line backup sites.

And you MUST have a backup. It is not whether, it is when, your hard drive will fail. Maybe you will get lucky and it will fail in a way you can get your data back easily, but I would not bet on it.

I like to have my Downloads folder sorted by when things were added to it. Unfortunately, the only obvious choices in the Finder are “Date Created” and “Date Modified”, which don’t change on the file when you download it.

The following script will use UNIX command to “touch” files as they are added to a folder, changing their “Date Modified.”

To use it, open Script Editor (should be in the “AppleScript” folder of your “Applications” folder). Copy the code into a new window and save it as a script (best place to save it is your home folder’s “Library/Scripts/Folder
Action Scripts” folder. Control-click on your Downloads folder and select “Attach a Folder Action…”, then select the script. Anything added to the Downloads folder will have its “Date Modified” changed the time when it was added.

Note this will NOT change the dates of items already in your download folder, only items you add after attaching the folder action.

Code follows:
on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items
repeat with file_ in added_items
tell application "Finder"
set file_ to POSIX path of file_
do shell script "touch -c " & quoted form of file_
end tell
end repeat
end adding folder items to

Western Digital does NOT support booting Macs from ANY of their external drives. It MAY be possible, depending on which drive/Mac you have (see their list).

Considering that they do not support booting, I would NOT recommend buying any external Western Digital drive. Even if you not expect to boot from a drive, it is handy to have the option to do so.

Macs with Intel processors (basically any Mac made since early 2006) can run Microsoft Windows like any HP, Dell and so on. Apple provides a program called Boot Camp with the Leopard 10.5 operating system that makes loading Windows onto your Mac easy. The problem with Boot Camp is that it only allows you to start up your Mac in Windows, so you can’t use the Mac OS at the same time. Two commercial applications — Parallels (http://www.parallels.com/) and VMware Fusion (http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/) — let you run the Mac OS and Windows simultaneously, but if you just want to give it a try, you probably don’t want to spend $50-70. Sun has made similar “virtualization” software available free (http://www.virtualbox.org/).

All these products require a copy of Windows, which goes for more than a hundred bucks (it is hard to give an exact number — there are so many versions). If you want to do it all free (and legal), Microsoft is providing copies of the “release candidate” of the next version of Windows — Windows 7 (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx, you’ll need a free Hotmail account or Windows Live ID). This free version will work normally until March 1, 2010, when it will start shutting down after two hours of use; it won’t work at all after June 1, 2010.

For help on getting it going on your Mac, check out http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/0,39029471,49302269,00.htm, or give MacSST a call.

So you have been sharing one Mac OS account with someone else and have decided you want to go your seperate ways — or at least use separate accounts. How do you “split” one Mac OS account into two? You can create a new account and then copy or move files from the old account into the new one, but then the new account user will not have proper permission to access the files and you might miss things and have to go back and forth to make sure you got them all. Another way to do it is just copy the whole account and then each user can then delete the stuff they don’t want at their leisure. The steps to do that:
1) In System Preferences’ “Accounts” panel, create the new user account (NEW). Don’t log into it yet.
2) In the Finder, open the /Users folder at the top level of your start-up disk. In that folder, you should see all the accounts on the system, plus one folder called Shared.
3) Option-drag the OLD account into the shared folder. That is, hold down option key while dragging the /Users/OLD folder into /Users/Shared. That will make a complete copy of the OLD account in the Shared folder, so it will take a lot of time and hard disk space.
4) Go into the /Shared folder and single-click on the copy of the OLD account folder (/Users/Shared/OLDcopy) so it is highlighted.
5) While /Users/Shared/OLDcopy is highlighted, choose “Get Info” from File menu (command-I).
6) At the bottom of the Get Info window, in the Ownership & Permissions section, you change the Owner of /Users/Shared/OLDcopy to the NEW user. You will need an administrator username and password. Then be sure to click the “Apply to enclosed items” button on the bottom.
7) Log into the NEW account.
8) Move everything in the /Users/Shared/OLDcopy folder into the /Users/NEW folder
9) Log out of NEW account and then back in. The account should be an exact copy of the OLD account. The NEW user can then change and delete whatever they want without affecting the OLD user account and vice versa. A good suggestion for the first thing to change is to make the desktop backgrounds different in each account, so you can see at a glance who is logged in and you won’t mess up each other’s stuff.
NOTE: The “Apply to enclosed items” button sometimes doesn’t really change all items in all enclosed folders, so if the NEW user has trouble opening/editing some files, you may have to change the owner of some folders and files individually. Or you can use an application like iRepair or BatChmod to change the permissions. Or you can use the Terminal application (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) if you want to get some practice using UNIX commands. Or you can give MacSST a call and we’ll do it for you…