Last weekend I made a key mistake when trying to move some of my daughters photos around but was saved by my backup. You see we have this very old Mac (as opposed to the old Mac) that was the first computer we let the kids use. Theyve downloaded a lot of pictures on it by now so the hard disk almost full, but also little things are starting to go wrong that tell me the computer wont last much longer. So, Ive been moving all of the kids pictures and videos to my file server to free up space and prepare for the day when I have to junk the computer. Last weekend I moved all my daughters photos from 2009 to my server in a folder for her (Im also taking the opportunity to organize them a bit so they dont have 10,000 files in a single folder). I copied them over, looked at the server and the files were all there, and then deleted them off the Mac. However when I went back a few days later to look at the folder, I noticed that a number of the files were 0 bytes in size. Oops! that seems wrong. And basic information theory tells me that very little information can be stored in a 0-length file. I double checked and, sure enough, something went wrong in the copying process so the file names were all there but they were empty. After thinking Oh, no. I realized this was a perfect opportunity to test my backup methods (of course I really should have tested them before the files were deleted, but that chance had already passed me by). I logged in to ...

Using a Parents Account

This is the simplest way to get a kid started using email. It gives you complete control over what is sent and received (just be careful what windows are open and dont leave them alone on your email account in case you have a surprise Christmas gift ordered on Amazon). You can create a personalized email address through your Gmail account using plus addressing (one method of doing that is outlined here http://flagrantdisregard.com/how-to-give-your-young-children-a-personalized-managed-email-address/).

We let our daughter use my wifes account for a while before she got her own account. It worked out reasonably well while she was in elementary school. There were just a few emails a week. We could filter what she saw and what she sent.

Special Kids Email Accounts

Once our daughter turned eleven, it seemed like she had enough friends with email accounts of their own that we should get her one. We decided to get her an account specifically targeted towards kid users. There are a number of services out there, but we went with Zoobuh (www.ZooBuh.com). It gives you a lot of parental control which you can turn on and off depending on your kid and how involved you feel you need to be. The features in particular that we like are:

• Controlling who your child can ...

1. The account you use day-to-day should be a non-administrator account. There is little reason today to be running an account that has full administrative privileges, and it allows malware writers to access your entire computer if they manage to trick you into running their application. If you have kids, their account should be a different one from yours and they never should have access to an administrator account. Yes, it is a pain-in-the-neck to have them come to you to install software, but the point is to exercise some control ...