Evan Sims

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.

TwitterBash launches

Today marks the launch of TwitterBash, a concept conceived and designed by my good friend Judson Collier. Judson hired me on to work on the project about a month and a half ago, and I think we’re both quite pleased with how it turned out.

TwitterBash takes the concept of the long Internet-famous bash.org, which allows folks to post snippets and quote conversations from IRC, and applies it to Twitter. Just sign up for an account, then head to the submit page. Pop in the permalink for a tweet you want to quote and you’re done. Tweets can be voted up or down by users, and we base our popularity index off that score (which we call karma.) You can even embed quoted tweets into your own pages using a number of methods.

I think Judson came up with a great concept here. It’s simple, it’s fun, and people will hopefully have a great time using it.

For those curious about the tech behind it (that was my department, after all), TwitterBash runs atop PHP5 and the wonderful CodeIgniter framework. Thanks to CI, I was able to rapidly pump out a prototype in a matter of days for Judson and I to begin playing with.

Give it a look, bash your favorites and have a good time!

Blogger states obvious: Spore Creature Creator is fun, a productivity blackhole.

I love me some Spore Creature Creator. Acquired it through some more nefarious means earlier this week and have been having a blast. It’s a pity you can’t take your creature out and play a dummy level or something, just to see how it performs in the wild. Oh well, we’ll just have to wait for the real thing! ;)

Firefox 3 lands; download it now!

Firefox 3 is arriving today, and brings with it a whole host of lovely new features that I’ve grown to love using the betas and release candidates these last few months.

Some of the features I love in particular:

• The “awesome bar” (a new aspect of the address bar) gives me a central location to not only search my history but also my bookmarks and tags (see the new feature on those.) I can start to type “opendns” and not only will I find any pages I’ve visited recently with opendns in the URL or page title, but also any of my bookmarks with that word in it and bookmarks with that tag. It makes getting from A to B just that much faster.
• The all-new Bookmarks system is a huge improvement over not only Firefox 2 but every other offering out there on the browser market right now. The new system uses a SQLite database to store your bookmarks, reducing potential instances of data corruption and speeding up read/write time over the traditional .HTML file.

  The new UI makes things faster from the user experience, too. Want to bookmark a page your on? No problem! Just hit the star. The page is instantly bookmarked and sorted un an “unfiled” section of your bookmarks so you can manage it later. If you want to customize your bookmark right now, hit that start again and a little dialog pops up allowing you to name your link, tag it, describe it and so forth. All of this additional meta information is used for the “awesome bar” and really allows you to customize your browsing experience.

• Firefox 3 is fast! The new version of the Gecko rendering engine they’ve implemented is noticeably peppier than previous versions. And I can’t forget to the mention the drastically reduced memory consumption- Firefox 3 beats out every other browser on the market in that regard.
• It’s more secure; Mozilla has really beefed up their phising and malware detection system, and what’s more have made it much more obvious in the user interface when you’re browsing a secure site and when you’re not.
• Firefox finally has a native look on every platform. Now it doesn’t matter what OS you’re running the browser on, it’ll fit right in and look great. OS X, Windows 2000/XP, Windows Vista and Linux all have great default UIs that won’t make you cringe anymore.

So, download Firefox 3 today, and tell ‘em Evan sent ya’.

And hey, while you’re at it why not switch to OpenDNS? It makes your browsing experience that much safer, not to mention faster. Like Firefox it’s free, and unlike Firefox it doesn’t even require a download to set up. Just set your DNS servers to 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 and you’re done. Not sure how to do that? OpenDNS has a great guide on on the matter right here.