Before I started working day-to-day in a collaborative office environment, I never thought about security. Whenever I left my office, I would simply get up and go; allowing my PowerMac to naturally fall asleep to save energy. But when you’re developing web content, and have all kinds of keychains unlocked and auto-fill form data in your web browsers, leaving your machine open to a floor full of people isn’t a smart idea. Sure, I doubt anyone would really try to do anything malicious, like erase the root directory or buy a plasma screen off bestbuy.com, but you never know.
To my surprise, turns out OS X has native screen-locking built-in; though you wouldn’t know unless you dug around. To enable it, open your Keychain Access utility in the Applications / Utility folder. Under the “View” menu at the top, select “Show Status in Menu Bar.” A black padlock will appear in your taskbar in the upper right-hand corner. Close Keychain Access. Now when you click on the padlock, you have a “Lock Screen” option in the drop-down. Selecting it will cause your screen to fade to black and engage your screen saver. Click any key to open a login / password dialog box, and you’re back in.
You can also require a password every time your screen saver is disengaged in the “Activation” tab of your Screen Effects preference window, but then you would have to enter your password each and every time your screen saver engages, like when you’re on the phone, working on another machine, etc. With the above keychain / taskbar method, you only turn on protection when you know you’ll be away from your Mac for an extended period of time - like at lunch or overnight.
Besides, you never need to shut down or restart your Mac because OS X is built on Unix…right? Right?
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