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This is the personal blog of John F. Morton. It's where I talk about the stuff that interests me. Primarily technology, marketing and pop culture. If you are looking for my portfolio of work, visit johnfmorton.com. Thanks for stopping by!

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Filtered by Category: Computers

TrueCrypt - How To Protect Your Private Files From Prying Eyes

I thought I’d try something new today. I sometimes talk about software I use, but now I’m going to try showing it as well. I’ll start with TrueCrypt, a free, cross-platform piece of software that obscures your files securely but still leaves you with the ability to retrieve them regardless what type of computer you have.

Taking Cleaner Screenshots with Camouflage

I’m one of those people who has too many icons on my desktop, but you wouldn’t know if from the screenshot above. It would be fair to suggest that I just organize my icons in my documents folder, but that’s just not the way my brain works. Having all my icons on my desktop is how I work. My desktop servers as an inbox for my live projects.

This week I discovered a free little program, Camouflage, by briksoftware. It lets you easily hide a cluttered desktop screen when you’ve got to take a screenshot. I also use it when I hook my laptop up to a projector for a presentation.

Now I’m just a click away from a pristine desktop. And, luckily, I have just one more click back to my organized chaos.

Fixing Mac OS X Leopards “Open With…” command after installing Time Machine.

After installing Leopard in my Mac Pro, I installed a back-up hard drive to use with Time Machine. After only a couple of weeks, it’s already saved me at least 3 times. When I code in Flash, I tend to make many incremental changes to code and save my file. Sometimes I need to go back to an earlier working version after I’ve gone astray and Time Machine has saved the day. Time Machine has more useful than I ever expected it to be.

One problem I encountered though was that after setting up Time Machine, my “Open with...” command had multiple versions of each program. You find the “Open with...” command by right-clicking a file in the Finder. You will see “Open with...” with all the different applications that the OS thinks can be used to open that particular file. After the Time Machine install, I started to see many copies of each application. For example, I could open an HTML file in around 6 different copies of Safari, or at least this is how it appeared. Since Time Machine mades multiple backups of my hard drive, I assume that is what the “Open with...” command was seeing.

I wanted to fix it though and be sure I wasn’t opening applications from my Time Machine backup. Luckily I found Terminal Commands for Hidden Settings in Leopard, a page of Leopard tips from Mac OSX Tips (macosxtips.co.uk.) It’s well worth visiting. If you just want to fix this problem though, open Terminal and enter the following code (all three lines are actually one line of code) then hit Return. (This works only in Leopard, not Tiger or earlier.)

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/
Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister
-kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

It worked like a charm for me. 

Another Leopard “toy” to check out: Mosaic Photo Screen Saver

As a follow up to yesterday’s iChat tabs post, if you’re new to Leopard, you’ve got a really cool new screen saver. Open your System Preferences, select Desktop & Screen Saver. Be sure you’re in the Screen Saver tab and scroll down the list of available screen savers until you start seeing your iPhoto albums. Choose any of those. Next look for the small selector labeled Display Style under the left corner of the images of the preview box. There are 3 choices there and you should select the last of them.

What you’ll see basically a slide show of your photos, but as they zoom out into infinity, you’ll see that each photo is just one pixel in another of your photos, forever and ever. Trippy, right? Check out the video below of some of mine.

Did you upgrade to Leopard? Don’t miss tabs in iChat.

I’ve talked to a few people who’ve updated their Mac to Leopard who’ve not really seen much “new” to appreciate in Leopard. This won’t change your world, but here’s one. If you’ve used Chax, a third-party upgrade to iChat for older versions of OS X, you’ve already had tabbed chats, but now Leopard users get them built into the system. You can see an example above of what they look like.

Since they are off by default, you’ll need to dig into your preferences to activate them.

When you have iChat on, open your Preferences panel and click the Messages tab. (Click the image to the left to see a full size image of what to click.) At the bottom of that panel, there is an option that you need to check called “Collect chats into a single window” and you’re set. The next time you’re chatting to multiple people, the windows will be tabbed like you see them above. Handy.