I listened to the latest 'This Week in Tech' podcast today. They mentioned a screensaver called
FlickrFan. This screensaver can connect to flickr account and images to use in the screensaver. But it also downloads current Associated Press images in high quality and more. This results in awesome pictures from around the world covering the news in HIGH-RES.
B.t.w. it's much more than just a screensaver, but I liked the screensaver-part best.
Since I have an iMac with OSX 10.5 (Leopard), I use
TimeMachine for my backups. This works great actually. But I also need an off-site backup of some sort. Just in case the house burns down or that some f*cker decides to steal my hardware.
So I bought an external
Freecom 160GB USB2 drive (USB powered) for my off-site backups.
I encrypted the entire harddisk with
TrueCrypt 5.0 on my iMac, and copied the data I needed to preserve. After that I wanted to access the data from my work laptop (Windows XP SP2 with TrueCrypt v5.0)..... This didn't work. TrueCrypt didn't recognize the password, or the encrypted disk (AES / SHA-256 full disk encryption).
I tried to access the data on my Mac and everything worked, so there's no data corruption of some sort. Eventually, I recreated the encrypted drive on my Windows XP laptop (lost the backup in the process). This time the disk would mount, and could also be read/mounted by my Mac.
So, I guess that TrueCrypt is Cross-platform, but with the current version (v5.0a) you need to make sure to create the volume on Windows if you also want to mount it on OSX.
I reported this through their bug-reporting tool to the developers. No idea if there are similar problems with Linux.
UPDATE: Pretty soon they released v5.0a, and today v5.1 was released. So development goes on :-)
As you might have noticed, the server was down the last 24 hours. When I got home last night I found my server dead. The green power LED on the mainboard was still on, but apart from that... nothing. So I tried to switch the server on and off a couple of times. After a few tries, the entire room lit up for about a nanosecond followed by absolute silence, and darkness.....
The power supply had short-circuited and took the entire house with it. Byebye power supply.
The initial thought was; 'Well, it's gonna be a nice weekend reinstalling the server from scratch', but thankfully, it was only the power supply that had died on me.
After replacing it, the server ran as before. This got me thinking about the life-expectancy of computer hardware. Frequent visitors may have read
a similar post on my blog last year. So
the power supply that died isn't even a year old. I still might have had some warranty on it (if I hadn't pried it open to see
the internal damage :) ). If I would like to use the warranty, I'm looking at at least a couple of days downtime, and since a new power supply is relatively inexpensive, I couldn't be bothered.
The life expectancy of hardware is obviously shorter than the
Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) given by the manufacturer. The new supply has a (theoretical) MTBF of >100.000 hours, This means >4000 days. Well, mine lasted <365 days.
A couple of weeks ago, I was pointed towards Google Maps on my Nokia e61i (I got a download link when I visited google.com on my mobile). After downloading and installing it (which was very easy), I started the application (which was hiding under Menu -> Installations -> Google Maps).
Most basic features are available on the phone app (directions, searching for restaurants etc., Zoom in and out), and there's the possibility of positioning yourself on the map by using cellular positioning. Thankfully, this is done for you by the application. Downside is that it's not that accurate. In my case, I could be anywhere in a 1.7 mile radius circle.
It's also possible to use a GPS mouse (which I recently bought) for your location. The neat thing is that you can see yourself walk across the map (or drive if you're by car). This is an excellent application.
These is one downside... Google Maps is using a constant Internet connection to update the maps, so make sure you have some sort of flat fee data service (or use wifi when available). Otherwise you might be in for a surprise when you receive your phone bill.
A while ago I started a
search for a GPS Data Logger which I can use for adding GPS coordinates to my photo's. The current status is that most of those devices are Windows only. The
few that might be OSX compatible aren't sold in the Netherlands (yet).
So I had to find an alternative. There is a sourceforge project called '
MTK GPS Data Logger Device Control' which facilitates certain GPS (chipset) devices to function on multiple platforms. So my best guess would be to buy one of those 'supported' GPS Data Loggers. Due to availability, I bought the
Qstarz BT-1000. It's a GPS mouse with navigation and logging capabilities.
First I had to make sure that the device was actually working properly, so I installed the driver and software in a Windows XP Virtual Machine. This was quite easy, and the unit seemed to work properly.
Next thing was to install the opensource program to allow communication between the GPS unit and OSX Leopard.
To get it to work on OSX you need to follow a installation manual. Something I'm not used to :). Needless to say that it took a bit longer than expected.
First of all, you'll need the
software from the sourceforge website. Second,
you need SuperWaba files (free registration is required) [these files seemed to be present in the download package from sourceforge], and the
USB driver. After that you need to follow the instructions in the README.txt provided in the sourceforge package. Note that the script information on the
forum has been superseded by the README.txt in the downloadfile (use the provided
bt747_macosX.command from the sourceforge download package instead).
Eventually, you'll end up with a directory structure whick looks something like this:
Run the
bt747_macosX.command file to start the application.
One thing I must mention is that somewhere along the lines is the mention of using TextEdit to alter (script)files. Do NOT forget to remove the formatting on the files before saving. You might end up with scriptsfiles containing some markup stuff.... And this means that you might be getting some weird error messages.
Anyway, the interface is still very simple, but you have access to lots of features. The actual manual for the application is available on
Google Docs.
I bought some accessories for my photo gear today. Among the items was a new 2GB SanDisk Extreme III CF card. This package came with a 'purse' to store cards, and a CD with recovery software. In most cases you'll only get the Windows version of a product (if there is an OSX version all together)..... But this CD also contains the OSX version of SanDisk's
RescuePro. Downside is that the CD is mini CD (or what you might call it), and those won't work very well with the latest Mac's. The latest Mac's have DVD/CD players without a tray, so insert the CD, and you can ship your Mac for repairs......
And since the Windows OS can't read the Mac part of the CD, there's no way of getting the software of the CD.
One thing I hate is not knowing where I am. I had this in Windows, and I still have it OSX.
By default OSX doesn't show the full path in the finder. This is annoying as hell. Especialy when you're having shares called 'Pictures', and the chances are quite big that you might have a local directory called 'Pictures'. You can't tell the difference.
Using the following terminal command, you get the full path in the Finder. So no more 'Pictures', but '/Volumes/Pictures/'
Terminal command:
defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES
killall Finder
Simply replace the YES for NO to disable the feature. This is OSX 10.5 or higher only!!
The
TrueCrypt developers have
scheduled the release of v5.0 for
Januari Februari 2008. This release will also have Mac OSX version. Now we're getting somewhere. Finally, true cross-platform (Windows, Linux, and OSX) encryption, and it's completely free.
TrueCrypt 5.0
Release scheduled for: January 2008
- Windows system partition encryption with pre-boot authentication
- Mac OS X version
- GUI for Linux versions of TrueCrypt
- Parallelized and pipelined read/write
- and more.
The following features are planned to be implemented in future versions:
- Support for external authentication modules (cryptographic tokens)
- 'Raw' CD/DVD volumes
- TrueCrypt API
- and more.
REDELIJKHEID
