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.

Subscribe with iTunes Subscribe with RSS

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!

10 Years Later, and Linux Still Sucks

I’ve tried to like it, honest to God I have. Time and time again I’ve installed it over the years and tried to make “the switch”. But everytime I fail. The longest I’ve gone with an install is a little over a month, with my own compiled copy of Gentoo. I enjoyed the process of compiling my own kernel and selectively building my operating system from the ground up. However, having tried to get Ubuntu up and running my laptop again today, it appears that Linux still suffers for the same flaws it did ten years ago: It’s too God damn difficult to get any work done in it.

Here’s how the events unfolded:

• I installed Ubuntu last night/this morning around 5:00am. I let it patch while I slept.
• I woke up, rebooted the laptop, selected some cool sounding packages to install and took a shower.
• Rebooted again. Loaded up Epiphany and subscribed to the TWiT podcast.
• After the podcast finished downloading, I attempted to play it. “Failed”, it said next to the episode.
• Downloaded again, figuring it was a network crap up. Same issue.
• Finally I notice this red exclamation mark, I click it and only after does it inform me that I lack the codec necessary to play the file: a simple MP3.
• I look for an MP3 package in the software downloader. Nadda. I end up searching the Ubuntu Wiki, finally coming up with an article on restricted formats, mp3 being one of them.
• I follow the instructions, finally getting MP3 support and a whole bunch of other junk I didn’t really want with it.
• I reboot yet again. Load up Epiphany. I hear the sweet sound of Leo’s voice, but at a volume that felt like it was going to blow out my living room windows.
• I had turned down the volume on my laptop’s volume controls. It showed virtually mute on the volume indicator. Only then did I realize that the volume controls only controlled the back speakers on my laptop, not the front ones… what the *hell*?
• I spend the next 30 minutes trying to get the Sound options working. No good; I can either control the front speakers or the back speakers; not both at the same time.
• I pop in a DVD to watch while I work on some schoolwork, and start Totem (which appeared to be the only app I could find to play DVD media.)
• It detects my DVD, but wont play it. An important looking window pops up… but it’s completely blank. No text, no icons, not even an “Oh Fuck” button to close it. Yet again, I’m clueless as to why my media won’t play.
• I give up. This is far too much bullshit just to get a simple mp3 to play or a dvd to watch without it busting my ear drums. I’ll install Windows and all this will work out of the box.

So, that’s been my day in a nuttshell. From Windows to Linux and back to Windows. This shit shouldn’t be this complicated. I thought the point of Ubuntu and other “user-friendly” Linux distributions was to make this stuff simple enough for my parents to use. I realize why MP3 support doesn’t work out of the box… licensing fees. Why then can I chose to install MP3 support if I want it? Does this magically pay the license for me? If it’s going to magically do that, why not just download and install the god damn codec when I install the OS?

Ugh. Forget it. See you again in 10 years, Linux.