Technology

Look, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, it happens to everyone: your Mac has frozen up and won’t respond. I know, I know, for years we Mac folks used to love poking fun at Windows because it freezes up. Apple even made a commercial about it. As someone who has used both, I will say that I have seen this far, far less frequently with Macs… but it happens — via The Unofficial Apple Weblog

What to do if you're locked out of Gmail? It's a question too many users ask, after they are already locked out and are attempting to recover their account. Given the incredible amount of personal and financial information we keep in our inboxes, gaining access to a compromised Gmail account is incredibly important. Here's how to recover your Gmail account, and what you can do now, to make a future recovery easier.

One of the benefits of open source software that many people are most familiar with is that it’s free to download. This means you can grab great applications — such as Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser, the OpenOffice.org office suite or the GIMP photo editing program — without paying a cent. However, the other major benefit of truly open source software (some “open source” software licences are more restrictive than others) is that you’re allowed to modify a program and redistribute your altered version so other people can enjoy it — via Good Gear Guide

Microsoft has unveiled a new all-in-one web development suite called WebMatrix. It’s more than an IDE or a framework, it’s a whole suite — a web server, a SQL database, and a database-ready framework, all wrapped up into a single development environment that makes it easy to build, test and deploy some fairly complex web apps. WebMatrix is free, and it’s available for Windows users as a beta download.

Would you like to clean up the Open with menu in Windows Explorer? Here’s how you can remove program entries you don’t want in this menu on any version of Windows — via How To Geek

Create PDF files, comment and review, save PDF forms, extract text and images, type text directly onto the page, and more. Start working with PDF files the way you always wanted — via Nitro PDF Reader

If you have iTunes 9.2 and iOS4 installed on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, the iBooks app can view PDF files in addition to other e-book formats. That means you can easily bring any PDF with you for reading on-the-go. An anonymous MacOSXHints.com reader found an easy way to add almost any kind of document to iTunes's Books collection:

Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdesigners, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages, and it focuses on editing dynamic and interactive websites. See features for an extensive overview, take a look at the screenshots, or download it right away. Bluefish is an open source development project, released under the GNU GPL licence. Bluefish runs on most (maybe all?) POSIX compatible operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS-X, OpenBSD and Solaris, and in addition it runs on Windows.

Windows: Jalapeno Keyfinder retrieves serial numbers for a variety of programs on your PC—and even for most versions of Windows—so it’s not such a big deal next time you misplace your serial number and need to reinstall — via lifehacker

An iPhone 3G tester that only works via Safari. The back/forward buttons are flaky, but the emulation is very good

It’s not hard to turn an extra USB stick lying around that’s collecting dust into extra memory for your computer, allowing it to run speedier and manage more applications better — via Instructables

If you're an iPhone 3Gs or (future) iPhone 4 owner, you can opt out of Apple's targeted ads, as explained by iLounge, by heading to http://oo.apple.com from your phone.

sing Smart Folders or aliases presented a few drawbacks, as a lot of applications (not to mention other operating systems) don’t understand them, so creating symbolic links (symlinks) was the best option. The following AppleScript creates symlinks into a single folder from multiple sources — Mac OS X Hints

We have a free static website template to give away today, built by Matt Corner. This theme is called “Aurelius,” and hosts a variety of nice features. If you happen to be in need of a starting point for your next website, feel free to use this one how you wish — Nettuts+

Got a link like http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2085/2177060015_258bcfaff9_m.jpg and want to find out which user posted it, more images by that user, see the full-size version, etc? Seek no longer, the answer is very simple — via Bram.us

Live SkyDrive is an awesome service. 25GB of web storage for free? Yeah, that sounds good to me. Sure, the 50MB per file limit is a little bit of a downside but it's still a great place to store documents, music, and photos. Heck, if you tell an app like 7zip to chunk big files up into 50MB pieces you can store whatever the heck you want. If only there was a way to access your SkyDrive storage like a local hard drive without an app like Gladinet or SD Explorer…Why, that'd make it like a free Dropbox account x 12.5! As it turns out, there is a way to do that — and it's pretty darn easy to do now that Office 2010 is here.

Scams come in all shapes and sizes, even on the Internet. One thing that I’ve noticed while doing research for RescueTheWeb is that the scammers are persistent in inventing new architectures that meet their needs. This article is a brief survey of the scamming link architectures I’ve found — via RescueTheWeb

Out of some behind-the-scenes frustration on the TUAW team email list, we seem to have discovered a quirk in Mac OS X 10.6.4. Using the built-in screenshot tools, you can copy a screenshot to the clipboard using Command + Control + Shift + 3 (or 4, for the crosshairs screenshot). From there you can paste into Preview or Mail or any other application which can take images from the clipboard — via The Unofficial Apple Weblog