How To

If you have been using OS X Lion, you will find that Apple has implemented an elastic bouncelike feature to its scrolling behavior, where when you reach the end of a document while scrolling, the page will appear to stretch beyond the extent of the page where it reveals a gray texture pattern, followed by sliding back to its expected location. This behavior occurs when you use multitouch input devices such as Apple's trackpads or Magic Mouse, and while fun from some perspectives, it's a feature that some might not want to have on all the time.

While more

If you prevent access to your computer with just a password, you are missing out on an alternate (and more secure) way to lock down your computer.

Predator, a free Windows program, turns your USB drive into a key that locks your computer when it's removed. To unlock your computer, you'll have to plug the USB drive back in. (Talk about having secret-agent-style security.)

Anyone who attempts to access your computer without the USB flash drive will be hit with an epic "Access Denied" message. To get started, follow this guide:

Step 1: Download and install Predator.

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As far as I'm concerned, we have a global musical crisis on our hands.

The cassette tape was the dominant music format through most of my childhood. The first read-along books I had as a kid were on cassette tape. The first time I ever bought music with my own money, it was on a cassette tape (which, by the way, I'm proud to say was Run DMC's "Raising Hell"). The first time my band ever released a demo, it was a demo tape.

For independent musicians of the '80s and '90s, cassette tapes offered the first more

A security hole has recently been found in the latest version of OS X 10.7.3, through which a user's password may be written to a log file in plain text if that person is using the older legacy FileVault data encryption technology from past versions of OS X.

While the hole may be a problem for a certain group of people who still use the legacy encryption scheme, there are several things that can be done about it.

The hole happened when an Apple software engineer apparently left a debugging flag enabled in the production release of more

Google Drive's shortcut in Windows 7/Vista shows up in your Favorites folder, while in Windows XP, it shows up in your My Documents folder. The shortcuts are easy enough to use, but if you find using a specific drive letter to be more convenient, there's an easy way to map one to your Google Drive account.

If you're comfortable using the command prompt, you can use the DOS command: subst. A better and easier way to create the drive association is using a small program called Visual Subst. It's basically a GUI front-end to the more

Your trusty USB flash drive is much more versatile than you might realize, packing capabilities that go well beyond storing and transferring files.

These little-known tricks can be utilized by computer newbies and technogeeks alike to achieve anything from restoring a virus-ridden computer to launching and playing portable apps right from the drive.

Unlock our top-10 ways to use a USB flash drive with the guide below. Thanks to fellow How To blogger Ed Rhee, and the team at CNET, you'll be surprised to find that storing files might not be the best use of thumbdrives after all.

1.

USB devices can be hot-swapped, but their convenience is hindered by their need to be removed safely by using the Windows Safe Removal option. There's a policy for each USB device, however, that allows you to set them for quick removal, at the expense of a very minor performance hit.

Here's how to check to make sure that your USB device's quick removal policy is turned on:

Step 1: After you've inserted your USB device, launch Device Manager by hitting the Windows logo key, then typing "device manager" and selecting it from the search list.

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The Java SE 6 runtime that has shipped with past versions of OS X and which has been available on-demand for Lion users is the last version that Apple will officially support in OS X, but this does not mean Java for OS X is dead. Java's parent company Oracle has taken up the reins for Java development in OS X, and yesterday announced the first version of the upcoming Java SE 7 runtime for OS X.

This update is good news for Java developers, and for end users who run Java code on Mac systems, as it is more

Dropbox has released version 1.4 of its Mac and Windows app, which enables a feature called Camera Upload. If you're looking to get started with the Windows version, Lance Whitney explained how to set it up in an earlier post.

You may remember during beta testing of the camera upload feature, you had the chance to get up to 3.5GB of free Dropbox storage, just by uploading photos and videos. The additional free storage carries over with the official release, giving you 500MB on your first upload and up to 3GB of storage. If you don't more