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!

Resolving “Unsupported Operating System” Error in Windows Media Player 11

Fresh install of your slipstreamed Service Pack 3 media and missing Windows Media Player 11? Microsoft has yet to update the WMP11 download to support clean installs for Media Center with Service Pack 3, but here’s a fix that should work on any XP installation where you encounter the problem:

1. Download Windows Media Player 11
2. Using WinRAR, 7zip or any other archiving app that can support it, extract wmp11-windowsxp-x86-enu.exe.
3. Run wmfdist11.exe from those extracted files.
4. Run wmp11.exe, also from those files.
5. Enjoy.

Encountered this issue this afternoon, so I thought I’d share a fix. Good luck.

Running Apache, PHP and MySQL on Windows.

Here at home, I run a local apache install to make building and testing my web projects easier. Instead of having to constantly upload files to my web host, I can save them locally and refresh my browser to see the result. It’s easier, and because I run my local server off of my laptop, it provides the added bonus of allowing me to work on projects while I’m out of the house, on a plane, or otherwise don’t have Internet access.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about getting Apache and PHP up and running in a Windows environment, and a lot of people give up and use bundled packages like WAMP or XAMPP. These are fine choices, but I like to do things myself, and install just the components I need or want. I also think it’s important to have a good understanding of Apache and PHP configurations, as they can come in handy when you’re trying to debug your application after it’s gone live on a web host.

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