One of the (many!) reasons I’m a happy OS X user is that the operating system itself has a swathe of productivity enhancements built in right out of the box. Most people know about the Grab application for making screen shots, but there are some shortcut keys to make the screen shots without the need to start up a separate application that are much less well known.

Command-Shift-3 (note: that’s 3 folks, not F3!) saves a picture of your entire screen right to the desktop. That means, whatever is being displayed on your screen goes into the file, even if you are running Dashboard Widgets, Expose, Spaces or even Quick Look at the time!

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When I upgraded my macbook to Leopard last year, I was really quite surprised to discover that Time Machine and FileVault really don’t work well together. The thought of having my laptop stolen is traumatic enough, without also having to worry about someone sifting through my finances, bank statements and other personal files. Until Leopard, FileVault had been a real boon for keeping all of those sensitive files locked safely away in a password protected, encrypted container. Unfortunately, Time Machine then treats my whole home directory as a single giant file, and backs up a new revision of the entire thing every time I make even the tiniest of changes to any of the files inside it: Another copy of my 60Gb of iTunes files and 10Gb of iPhoto files to fit on my overstuffed Time Machine drive!

All is not lost, however! The trick is to make a small mountable encrypted disk image of your own to securely store all your confidential files. Here’s how to make a 660MB image to do just that with the Disk Utility application, so that you can turn FileVault off entirely. As a bonus, as long as the files you need to store inside will fit into less than 660MB, you can also keep a password protected backup on an 80 minute CD-R:

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 Hi Everyone.

Welcome to Machaxor. Gary V. Vaughan will be posting here as our main author, soon we will get more regular posts just like Linuxhaxor. The site still has some glitches and broken links (I think), so if you come accross anything or have any suggestions, do let me know.

Thanks!