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With people storing more and more personal data in the cloud, concerns raise about the security of the traditional username / password login mechanism. This is something that has bothered me for quite a long time. There are so many different places where I login to my Google account, for example. Everytime I log in from a machine which is not my personal one I have to make sure to be properly logged out and – more imporantly – that this particular system and network can be trusted.
A simple way to circumvent the issue is to regularly change the password. While this is ok for a disciplined individual, it doesn’t really scale to the masses.
As an increased security feature, Google has come up with a 2-step verification scheme. It works like this: Everytime you log in to your Google account, you will first have to enter your username and password, just as usual. After that, you will be prompted to enter a verification code. This code can either be obtained by phone or via the Google Authenticator app available for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. It’s actually quite similar to the procedure we know from secure online banking services. Only that you don’t need to enter the verification code at every single login as you can define the interval at which the code is requested.
After activating 2-step verification, all your non-browser apps like Gmail on iPhone will stop working. You will have to generate a specific password for these applications.

Originally the 2-step verification service was only available for Google Apps customers but recently Google has announced that the service will be rolled out to all accounts in the next days.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/advanced-sign-in-security-for-your.html

Recently someone had this very strange problem that emails sent from Apple Mail to a specific Outlook receipient resulted in all text being cut off after an attachment if it was embedded in between the text. All text that was before the attachment was unaffected. The attachment itself was there too but all text that was originally after the attachment was contained in a second attachment as a text file.
Since I honestly havent’t seen any mail client before that allows for attachments at any place in the message, my first suspicion was that the guys in Cupertino implemented some non-standard functionality that is only supported by their own mail client. Diving a bit deeper into the issue I noticed that the receipient uses Exchange and that the problem didin’t occur with other receipients.  After a little Googling I finally found out what the real problem is: Exchange rewrites the message and adds instructions telling the mail app to render everything after the first attachment as attachments (assuming that attachments only occur at the end of a message). Apple and all other mail client developers are unable to influence this behaviour, it would have to be fixed in Exchange.

The good news: there is a solution to the problem, at least in Apple Mail. You can make sure that all attachments are put at the end of the message by selecting Edit -> Attachments -> Always Insert Attachments at End of Message.

There is a thread about this issue at the Apple discussion forum: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2006191&start=0&tstart=0

The built-in PDF converter in Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac really sucks. It produces files of approximately 10 times the size of other generators.

I found an easy workaround. In Word, export your document to PDF, via the print command or “Save-As PDF”. Then open the document in Preview and save it again. At the drop-down menu for Quartz Filters, select “Reduce File Size”. The resulting file will be significantly smaller in size than the original PDF generated by Word. 

I haven’t yet tried this on Word 2011 for Mac but hopefully will do it soon.