Daily Cup of Tech

It appears that I have been neglecting a very important segment of our readership, the OS Xers in the crown. Especially in the department of portable applications. Todd points this out to me in an e-mail:

Hi. I’m pretty much a Windows power user kind of guy and really love all of your articles dealing with Windows. However, due to the nature of my profession (photography), I’m forced to use Mac machines during the day, which is no big deal really; there are things that I like and dislike about both platforms.

My question is, can you point me - and possibly others - to any resources for loading a USB drive with utilities for use on a Mac? Specifically web browsing and email clients. I love the Portable Apps site and haven’t been able to find such a site with Mac stuff.

Thanks.

Todd

Well, Todd, that’s a pretty tall order but I think I can be of some help. Here is a list of portable OS X applications that I have found:

Read the rest of the story…

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2007/04/06/portable-osx-applications/trackback/

A recent comment from Erik made my day! It seems that he has found a unique way to use the Lost Drive application that recently appeared in Popular Science. Erik writes:

This little program saved my wife and I a lot of of grief and emotional trauma while on vacation. Read on.

I am a PopSci reader and linked to DCoT via the mag. My family, which includes two VERY energetic boys, five and three, went to Disneyland for a little get-a-way. Before we went I told my wife about the ‘I’m Lost’ program that one can install on a jump drive.

We decided to buy three 32Mb drives, which are a dime a dozen nowadays, one for each boy and one for us with the same program and ’secret phrase’ on it. We also included our cellphone numbers. Two lanyards with dangling USB drives that had a ‘I’m Lost’ label adhered to them and tucked into their shirts later, we had two boys that if got lost would be found and be reunited with us quickly.

We told the boys to cry for mom or dad if they wander off or got lost and then give the USB drive to the person that found them.

Our three year old did just what we thought he would do - Disappeared. Within 13 minutes of being ‘lost’ though, my cellphone rang. My three year old whom we thought didn’t understand what we told him about the funny thing around his neck actually did what we told him. The account from our boys ‘finder’ was humorous and panned out like this: My little redheaded boy was SCREAMING for his mom. The ‘finder’ came to help him, the boy showed the ‘finder’ the labelled USB drive, the ‘finder’ then brought him to security, security plugged the USB drive in to his computer, saw the message and called me on my cellphone. When we went to retrieve our boy the security guard asked for our USB drive with the secret phrase on it. The USB drives performed just as set up to. It had my cellphone number, my boys’ first name (first name only!) to calm him down and his favorite treat.

To say the least, D-land security was very impressed and the ‘finder’ equally impressed and my redhead boy was wearing M&M’s on his lips and chin.

There it is. Not only can you retrieve lost USB drives with this you can also find lost kids. Thank you!

First of all, I’m really glad to hear that everyone is safe and sound. The biggest fear that I have is that something will happen to my kids. That must have been the longest 13 minutes of your life!

Second, that is a really cool way of using the application. I had never thought of it in that way but it is definitely something that I would consider setting up for my kids.

Third, this really makes my day. There are times when we all wonder whether or not we are making a difference in the world. Well, I sure don’t feel that way today! Thank you for sharing your story and I wish all the best for you and your family!

Technorati : child, freeware, lost, popular science, usb

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2007/03/22/dcot-helps-find-lost-child/trackback/

My favorite encryption tool, TrueCrypt has just released version 4.3. The primary purpose for this version is to support Vista.

From their website, here is a complete list of changes for this version:

New features:

• Full compatibility with 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Vista:
  • Support for User Account Control (UAC).
  • All .sys and .exe files of TrueCrypt are now digitally signed with the digital certificate of the TrueCrypt Foundation, which was issued by the certification authority GlobalSign.
  • When moving the mouse on a single-CPU computer while reading or writing data to a TrueCrypt volume, the mouse pointer stopped moving for a second every few seconds. This will no longer occur. (Windows Vista issue)
  • Other minor compatibility-related changes.
• TrueCrypt volume is automatically dismounted if its host device is inadvertently removed.Important: Before you physically remove a device (such as a USB flash drive) where a TrueCrypt volume resides, you should always dismount the volume in TrueCrypt first, and then perform the ‘Eject‘ operation (right-click the host device in the ‘Computer‘ or ‘My Computer‘ list) or use the ‘Safely Remove Hardware‘ function (built in Windows, accessible via the taskbar notification area).
• Support for devices and file systems that use a sector size other than 512 bytes (e.g., new hard drives, USB flash drives, DVD-RAM, MP3 players, etc.)
• Support for devices with a GPT partition table (GUID partitions). (Windows Vista/2003/XP)
• After a partition is successfully encrypted, the drive letter assigned to it (if any) is automatically removed. (Windows)
• Volume name (label) is displayed in device/partition selector. (Windows)
• New hotkey: ‘Wipe Cache’. (Windows)
• New command line switch ‘/q background‘ for launching the TrueCrypt Background Task. (Windows)

Improvements:

• Portions of the TrueCrypt device driver redesigned.
• Maximum allowed size of FAT32 volumes increased to 2 TB (note that NTFS volumes can be larger than 2 TB).
• Traveller Disk Setup improved. (Windows)
• Volumes hosted on read-only media will always be mounted in read-only mode. (Windows)
• Improved support for big-endian platforms.
• Other minor improvements (Windows and Linux)

Bug fixes:

• The built-in FAT format facility now functions correctly on big-endian platforms.
• Improved handling of partitions and devices during volume creation. (Windows)
• Improved handling of low-memory conditions. (Windows)
• Fixed bug that rarely caused system errors when dismounting all volumes. (Windows)
• Tray icon is recreated when Windows Explorer is restarted (e.g. after a system crash).
• Other minor bug fixes. (Windows and Linux)

Security improvements:

• Improved security of set-euid mode of execution. Volume can be dismounted only by the user who mounted it or by an administrator (root). (Linux)

Miscellaneous:

• The option ‘Cache passwords and keyfiles in memory‘ in the password prompt dialog window no longer sets the default setting (to set the default setting, select Settings > Preferences and enable or disable the option ‘Cache passwords in driver memory‘). (Windows)

Removed features:

• It is no longer possible to create new volumes encrypted with 64-bit-block encryption algorithms (Blowfish, CAST-128, and Triple DES). 64-bit block ciphers are being phased out. It is still possible to mount such volumes using this version of TrueCrypt. However, it will not be possible to mount such volumes using TrueCrypt 5.0 and later versions (this applies also to volumes encrypted with AES-Blowfish and AES-Blowfish-Serpent, which have been in the process of being phased out since TrueCrypt 4.1). If you have such a volume, we recommend that you create a new TrueCrypt volume encrypted with a 128-bit-block encryption algorithm (e.g., AES, Serpent, Twofish, etc.) and that you move files from the old volume to the new one.

This is a must upgrade for all of you that are working with TrueCrypt.

Useful Links:

• TrueCrypt Website
• Downloads
• Screenshots
• Documentation

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2007/03/21/truecrypt-with-vista-support-released/trackback/

With the growth and popularity of the flash drive, portable apps seem to be everywhere. Now you can add chatting online to the portable application phenomenon. Originally, IMers had to make do with the online versions of AIM and Yahoo IM which were limited in their scope or were blocked by schools. A later alternative was to go to http://www.meebo.com and login and chat that way. Today, we have one of the grails of Instant Messaging that you can run right from your flash drive: Portable Trillian.

For those that don’t know what Trillian is, it is an all-in-wonder IM service. It combines AIM, YIM, MSN IM, IRC, and ICQ in one neat little app as well as plugin and custom skin support. The team at Trillian Anywhere (http://www.trilliananywhere.com/) have provided step by step instructions on how to make the application portable. I’ve used this myself and it works like a charm. The total amount of space needed is only the amount of space Trillian uses. The site gives instructions on how to perform this with both the Pro and Basic versions.

Still here? Wait are you waiting for? Go and chat on the go.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2007/02/17/trillian-to-go/trackback/

Back when I was just a lad (Man! I’m starting to sound like my father!), I remember reading about a trick when installing Windows NT workstation. If you put a floppy disk in the computer during installation, you could skip a number of steps because it would have all of the information on the disk for you. This would (theoretically) speed up your installations.

Fast forward to 2007 and things sure are different. Hardly anyone used floppy disks anymore. Even the trusty CD-ROM ’s days seems to be numbered. All the cool kids are using USB drives these days. But can they help you with your workstation installations?

According to Josh at Windows Connected, it sure can! His article Creating A Bootable WinPE 2.0 USB Key walks you the process of putting the WinPE environment on a USB device. Josh’s article relies heavily on the Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK) which performs all of the work. According to the Microsoft website:

The Windows Automated Installation Kit (Windows AIK) is designed to help original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), system builders, and corporate IT professionals deploy Windows onto new hardware. The Windows AIK is a set of deployment tools supporting the latest release of Windows. This guide describes the methods, tools, and requirements for deploying Windows.

WinPE is a very powerful tool. Not only can it help you to install systems, but it can also help you to repair these systems after you have put them into production. If you have never worked with the WinPE environment, now would be a good time to look into it.

Links:

• Windows AIK Download
• Creating A Bootable WinPE 2.0 USB Key
• Windows PE 2.0 for Windows Vista Overview

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2007/02/07/howto-make-a-winpe-usb-key/trackback/