Security is always a hot topic when it comes to computers. The amount of usable data for hackers and thieves on any given laptop would be enough to severely affect your life no matter how well insured you are. One of the most basic things you can do to protect yourself on a regular basis is to change your password. This means that anyone spying on your Mac or using it regularly that may aim to make changes or steal information using your password will no longer be able to do so. Changing your password is a simple affair and can be done at any time. You do, of course, need to pick new passwords that mean something to you and that you can easily remember. You don’t want to lock yourself out of your machine. The process itself is so simple that we can tell you in just two clear steps, which makes it inversely proportional to just how much safer this can make your machine.

Step 1: Preferences

Load your System Preferences from your Dock or from the Apple menu and then click on the Accounts button in the System section. Then, with your account selected hit the Change Password button.

Although the ready-made templates in Pages are stylish and beautifully designed, occasionally you may want to break away from the restrictions of using them and instead create your own bespoke design, particularly if you want something to accurately reflect the nature of your business. If you don’t feel confident designing something from scratch, have a look at some of the Apple templates or other examples, to get some inspiration and to get a rough idea of what you like and don’t like. You could even try sketching something out on paper first (something that many graphic designers still do). This tutorial will show you how to create an invoice from a blank page, using a little bit of originality and creativity combined with borrowing a little bit from a pre-made template and adapting it to suit your own design.

Every podcast you listen to will have a number of elements that can set it out and make it sound more professional than the rest. One of those elements is a bed, a loop or track of music that plays underneath presenters’ voices during spoken elements of an episode. Beds can be used to convey the mood of a specific part of a podcast, or set the pace of the episode as a whole. While not every podcast has or needs a bed, your one may well benefit from one, so it’s useful to make your own and try them out to see what works. Making your own podcast beds in GarageBand is fairly easy, especially considering the number of pre-loaded loops and tracks that it has to offer, so fire it up and follow these simple steps to make your podcast that little bit better.

Behind every great action movie is a great score – the continuous music that weaves itself in and out of the film to build tension, create drama and help immerse the audience in the action. If you’re thinking about filming your own action movie you’ll want to record a score to go with it. There’s a few common themes, or conventions, that underpin every action movie score such as crescendos (where the music gets louder), orchestral hits, long string parts and high-tempo parts in fast-paced scenes. Using GarageBand’s built-in instruments, loops and effects, emulating all these things is easy and we’ll show you how to create an action movie score to rival those in Hollywood blockbusters.

There are a number of reasons why you may want to cancel Photo Stream, whether it’s a space issue on your iPad or iPhone, or just an urge to set the system up again with fresh snaps. The only way to reset the system is to go to the heart of iCloud – www.icloud.com. Here you need to log in and then access your account information. From here you can reset the stream. Apple has made the OFF switch online so that you can access the controls from anywhere. So if your iPhone, iPad or Mac is stolen, you can wipe the personal information in the stream using this reset technique. In order to have the change filter through to your hand-helds, you’ll need to turn the stream off in their settings, too.

Photo Stream is an excellent concept, letting users share and back up their latest and greatest photographs with little to no effort. The system is based on iCloud, so you will need to have OS X Lion 10.7.2 and iOS 5 set up and running on your Mac and iOS device respectively. With the updates added and iCloud already set up, all you need to do is enable Photo Stream and the system will begin to collect your most recently taken shots on your iPhone. They then become instantly visible on your iPad and Mac (as long as you are connected to Wi-Fi). There are a couple of conditions attached to Photo Stream, which is to be expected in a free service. The limits imposed on storage are up to 1,000 pictures or 30 days’ worth of images. If you reach either of these limits then any photos taken or stored afterwards will replace the earlier ones added. So, as a backup, you have a limit but as a sharing service you always have the most recent pictures. Photo Stream is wonderful because you will never need to connect your iPhone to iPhoto again, as they are automatically saved in a new event. Similarly, you need never load pictures onto your iPad again.

With the new update to Lion (OS X 10.7.2) comes iCloud support on your Mac, and if you’ve not already connected up to the cloud, now is the time to do so. Everyone can sign up for a free email address with the @me.com domain name, so if you’re looking for some extra storage, or even if you just want a cool personal email address, you can sign up now right on your Mac. iCloud will allow you not only to send and receive email to your Mac, it will also let you back up all your data to the cloud, so if you’re using iWork for your documents or iPhoto for your snapshots, all of these will be stored safely in iCloud, just in case you ever lose or delete anything important.