Evan Sims

Everything is so shiny and new

Friends and visitors to my site may have noticed a rather dramatic change this afternoon; I decided to bite the bullet and push my redesign, even though I still have a few things left to tweak and polish. Yeah, I’m really taking a note from MobileMe’s launch on this one.

In any event, there’s nothing revolutionary about this upgrade- it’s really just an evolution of the previous design. My goal from the beginning on this was to clean things up, improve readability and have a more useful sidebar. For readability, I increased the maximum content width, increased the whitespace (particularly in the navigation) and softened the background image. For the sidebar, I’ve added Lijit back for blog search, a Disqus panel for browsing popular threads and seeing who’s active, obviously kept my FriendFeed widget, and slapped together a Brightkite location widget which I’ll be releasing shortly.

As I said, I pushed this out a little early, so I’m sure there will be bugs. If you notice any issues, please feel free to let me know in this entry’s thread. Thanks!

FriendFeed “Neo” released

It should come as no surprise to any of you that I really, really like FriendFeed, given the things I’ve done with the API and the unholy amount of time I spend browsing, commenting and liking people’s stuff. However, I’ve had a hard time converting most of my friends into “true believers” and using the service. I know it’s not for everyone, but the potential value of the service to some users seems to get lost in the UI. Me? I love it. It’s simple, it’s elegant, it’s precisely what I need and nothing I don’t. But, again, it’s not for everyone.

The biggest complaint I get? Hard on the eyes. No, not the design. But the color scheme. Black on white isn’t the best pallet choice when you’re potentially spending hours browsing pages. Thus, my theme FriendFeed Neo was built. It inverses the scheme, placing white text on a black background. It also softens the blues, removes the rounded edges and does nifty little things like highlight friend’s comments in threads to make them more noticeable.

I have more plans for the theme, but for now I’m releasing it so I can start getting feedback. So, please, give it a try and let me know what you think- preferably in the evansims.com room on FF or here in my blog comments.

Grab it at Userstyles.org

Thanks!

Renovating Our New Place

My folks bought a new house in Arcola, IL, and they’re doing a whole-house remodel of it before we move in. Ironically, it’s located directly next door to a home we lived in 5 years ago, which they also remodeled.

Encrypting Your Drive with TrueCrypt

Today I thought I’d try my hand at a video tip, a screencast walkthrough of encrypting your hard disk using TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt whole-disk encryption is a fantastic option to further secure your data against prying eyes, and the software is free and open source. Whole-disk encryption is precisely what you might think it is, encrypting your whole hard disk and locking it down with a password. After your encrypt your disk, you’ll need to enter a password every time you boot up or resume from hibernation to unlock the data on your drive.

Whole-disk encryption is a far superior method of securing your data than BIOS passwords or user accounts; user account passwords are easily bypassed or cracked, and BIOS passwords are locked inside the motherboard rather than the hard drive, so anyone could just yank your drive out of your machine, hook it up to theirs and access your data as if you’d never set a password at all. Whole-disk encryption is per-disk or per-partition, and uses a variety of very high level encryption algorithms, so you can’t get much more secure than this.

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This video is also available on Vimeo, Viddler and YouTube. Please favorite it on your service of choice if you find it useful!

You can download TrueCrypt from it’s website, http://www.truecrypt.org, and if you’d like to use the image burning software I use it’s available for free from http://www.imgburn.com/.

Any questions? Don’t hesitate to ask!

Take advantage of Firefox 3’s color profile support

One of the big complaints I’ve heard from the more photographically inclined about Firefox 2 was the lack of color profile support in the browser. The simplest way to explain color profiles (or embedded ICC) is to look at some examples of images rendered in browsers that don’t support color profiles (in the left frames) and those that do (in the right frame.)

Images provided by SmugBlog.

What do you immediately notice? For me, it was the depth of shadowing. What you being to realize as you look at the difference between the images, however, is how much more “real” the image feels to you; the expanded range of colors really makes the images pop out.

When you’re seeing an image on the web with a color profile in a browser that supports color profiles you’re seeing it in a closer representation to what the author intended. At this time, Firefox 3 and Omniweb are the only browsers to fully and properly support color profiles. Safari has a buggy implementation of it, and Internet Explorer… well, it’s Internet Explorer. They’re still scratching their heads over how to CSS working.

How do I enable color management support in Firefox?

Shockingly, Firefox 3 doesn’t come with color profile support enabled by default. This feature was one of the most praised and eagerly awaited aspects of the new version, so I have no idea why they would chose to not enable it from the get-go. Apparently Mozilla chose not to enable the feature by default over performance concerns. On a page with lots of color profile-enabled images this feature can slow down rendering time.

None the less, enabling color profiles is very simple, you can either:

• Install the Color Management extension; keep in mind that the extension is still in the experimental/review phase as of this writing, so you’ll need an account with the Mozilla Addons site to get it.
• Alternatively, you can enable profile support by hand, which is actually very simple and the method I recommend. In Firefox 3, type about:config. If you get a warning, just say OK and continue on. In the filter bar, type: gfx.color_management.enabled. It should have a state of “false”. Double click it to turn it bold and toggle it to “true”. Restart Firefox.

You can test if your color profile support was successfully enabled at this site. Another great demo page is over at SmugMug- try loading it in Firefox 3 with color profiles, then Internet Explorer or Safari. Big difference, no?

How do I export my images from Photoshop with ICC profiles?

By default Photoshop does not embed color profiles in images exported using the Save to Web & Devices interface. To enable this, choose the JPEG format and checkmark “ICC Profile”. Simple as that.