As Dyna mentioned in a recent post, we love Apple products. Tomorrow is the big keynote at this year’s Macworld conference so you can expect us to be glued to our computer monitors at 12pm EST reading text updates of what’s going on. The sad part about this year’s keynote is that Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO and all-around genius, is not presenting it like he normally does. He’s the guy that helped introduce the iPod, iPhone, and just about every other awesome piece of gear that starts with a lower-case ‘i’, so having someone else present the keynote is like having stand-in parents hand you your gifts on Christmas morning. (more…)

There’s nothing worse than losing all of the data on your computer, especially when most peoples’ lives revolve around their digital companions. Over the holidays, my brother and my sister-in-law both lost everything, one due to a hardware malfunction and one to an accident while installing Apple’s Leopard operating system. Now they’re forced to start from scratch. The data on the malfunctioning hard drive could theoretically be recovered…for about $500. This is a scenario that can easily be avoided. You can hop online and find tons of deals on external hard drives to make backups of your important files. Most desktop and laptop computers nowadays have DVD burners built in. USE THEM! A single-layer DVD-R can hold 4.7 gigabytes of data. That’s a crap-load of pictures/songs/documents. If you’re lucky enough to be running Mac OSX Leopard (10.5), the built-in Time Machine application is absolutely brilliant. All you need is an external hard drive and it will automatically make backups of everything on your computer.

In short, take advantage of the tools that are easily available to you and don’t risk losing important data.