Evan Sims

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!

Yesterday’s Apple Keynote in 60 seconds

Awesome. I dig the iPhone 3G changes, and love the price tag for the Touch upgrade; MobileMe sounds really great, though it’s lack of support for non-Safari browsers in it’s bookmark sync makes it a no-go for me. I suppose you could couple it with other options, like Foxmarks, but I love an integrated option. Also, Apple’s choice in the “me” font brought back some very bad memories for me.

Here’s the full video, complete with exceedingly boring third party app demos, for the masochists among us.

Viddler’s Facebook app goes to Beta

Everyone’s favorite video sharing community Viddler unveiled it’s new Facebook app yesterday to a select number of beta testers. Colin made use of Twitter and Pownce to invite people to the test, and the demand has been quite impressive.

The Viddler app is everything a Facebook app should be; it integrates seamlessly, is easy to use, and provides a legitimate use. It’s essentially a front end to much of what you can do on Viddler already; you can record and post videos from your webcam right in Facebook, you can watch videos your friends have posted, and you can share videos you have posted yourself with visitors to your profile. Nothing new that you couldn’t do before, but now it’s all wrapped up and tightly integrated, so you can access everything Viddler has to offer without having to leave Facebook.

Here’s a video I recorded from within Facebook using the app:

The quality, as usual, is pretty damn good; what’s more, it’s ridiculously simple to record videos like this. Congratulations to the Viddler team; you’ve done another bang up job here and really raised the bar for video on Facebook.

Want an invite to the beta? Add me on Facebook and let me know.

SmugMug gets a Flash player- and it doesn’t suck!

Earlier this evening Don MacAskill twittered that SmugMug released it’s new Flash-based video player and I must say, it’s very slick indeed. Not many folks realize that SmugMug supports video, but it does a real bang up job of it. If you’re a Power or Pro account holder, you can upload videos up to 2.5 or 10 minutes in length respectively. They don’t cheat you on the quality, either; as long as it’s less than 512MB in size, they’ll take your video up to true HD resolution (1280×720) and encode it in H.264, which is quickly becoming the most popular video compression codec.

SmugMug won’t scale your video to an ugly resolution, or artifact the crap out of it to save space on their servers. It’s just your videos, in great quality, without the bullshit.

Alright, alright; all my sweet nothings about their service aside, I really like what the SmugMug did here. The interface is sleek an unobtrusive, it’s quick to load/buffer/whatever (not sure how that works in Flash exactly, especially since you’re loading an external video file) and… have I mentioned the quality? ;)

Below is a glimpse of their new Flash-based player in “web resolution” (425×240), which I only chose because of limitations in my own site’s design. Regardless, hit up this page to see it in all of it’s HD glory.

If you want to give SmugMug a try, there’s a free 14 day trial. I recently made the switch from Flickr, and I totally recommend it.