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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: Software

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.

Making Your Own Kindle Book Files

It’s hard for me to believe I’ve missed an entire month on my blog. December is usually a very busy month with my juggling 3 jobs, traveling to see my family and the usual seasonal holiday parties. I’ve also been giving my new Kindle from Amazon a thorough workout all month long as well. The abbreviated review is that I’m enjoying it immensely. It’s not perfect, but it’s got so many things right that I feel comfortable recommending it to anyone who loves reading.

There have been many good reviews of the device. Here are a couple I found really fair to the device: Steve Gibson’s review, ArsTechnica and Gizmodo. (In case you’re wondering, that is the same Steve Gibson from the wonderful podcast Security Now.) There’s not much more I’d add in terms of a review so check those out if you’re still on the fence about getting one.

First, some hidden features of your Kindle.

There are quite a few things your Kindle can do that aren’t so obvious. The most useful is the clock. Sure, it’s just a clock, but pressing ALT-T while you’re reading a good book will briefly display the current time in the lower left hand corner of your Kindle’s display. Since it’s a reading device, it writes out the time as in Eight till six instead of 5:53pm.

The Kindle most definitely is not a game machine, but that hasn’t prevented Minesweeper from finding it’s way. Just press ALT-SHIFT-M when you are on the Home screen. It doesn’t seem to work when you’re actually reading a book.

There's more to read. Click here for the rest. >>

Backing Up Is Hard To Do? Not Any More.

There’s a common sentiment among geeks about hard drives. It’s not a question of whether your hard drive will fail, but when it will fail. That hard drive in your computer has lots of moving parts: at least one spinning platter made of metal or glass and at least one read/write head moving constantly to find the data your computer needs to function. That wear and tear will cause your drive to break. That is, if it doesn’t get stolen first.

Whatever happens, it will certainly happen at the most inopportune moment as well.

Now are you fearful of losing your treasure of family photos, financial information, job resume and, God forbid, even your MP3 collection? I won’t question your priorities but I’ll try to help you get a good routine going of making backups of your stuff. It might sound like a bit of a pain to deal with but you will thank me when it comes time to recover your stuff. Let’s get going.

Do you have a MAC?

This is going to be pretty easy.

First, find out how large the hard drive in your computer is. On your desktop, highlight the icon of the drive, probably called Macintosh HD, and then hit command-I. You can also find this command, Get Info, under the File drop down menu on the upper left corner of your screen. You’ll see a window come up with a bunch of information. Under the section labeled “General” you will see your drive’s capacity. You will need to buy an external hard drive larger than your hard drive you are backing up. If you buy a drive that has both Firewire and USB 2.0 connections on it, you will be golden. If you’ve got an Intel Mac, you’ll be find with just a USB 2.0 connection on your external hard drive. I’m using a Western Digital External Drive like you see in the Amazon ad to the right.

Second, now that you’ve got your external hard drive, let’s get you set up with SuperDuper, the software I use to make my own back ups. Visit their site to download a copy. The free version will make a full back up of your data onto your new drive. It will work forever this way for free, but I would suggest spending the $27.95 for the full version. The full version of the software includes very easy scheduled back ups so you will not need to work about manually doing this in the future.

Another feature I appreciate is that it’s got incredibly verbose descriptions of what you’re about to do when you use the software, helpfully labeled “What’s going to happen?”. You will see in the image below what “Smart Update”, an incremental back up feature of the full version of the software, will do. Nice.

What if you have a PC?

I don’t have hands-on experience backing up a PC. I run Windows XP and Vista, but only through my Mac with Parallels, so backing up my Mac in essence backs up my PC too. If you’re a PC user though, there are solutions out there for you too. For XP, Microsoft has included some backup software for you. Since I don’t use it though, I will simply point you to the page on Microsoft’s site called Windows XP Backup Made Easy. Another page on Microsoft’s site tells you how to install it from your installation disks.

If you run Vista, you’ll want to check out a different page on the Microsoft site: Windows Vista - Windows Backup and Restore Center. Unfortunately, one of my big gripes about the multiple versions Vista is sold under comes into play here.

Automatic File Backup helps to keep your files safe and is available in almost all editions of Windows Vista (it is not included in Starter and has only basic functionality in Home Basic edition).

That’s confusing, Microsoft! If you’ve got either Starter or Home Basic version of Vista, you will need to get some additional software to do your back up. Wired recommends SyncBack Free I would recommend checking out Wired’s complete PC back up article.

Offsite backups

Now that you can wipe the sweat off your brow knowing that you’ve got a back up of all your data I will tell you about another really cool service I use for off-site back up called Mozy.

Why would you want yet another backup now that you’ve got an external duplicate of your data? If someone breaks into your home and takes your laptop, do you think they’ll leave that tasty little external drive sitting next to it? It’s truly frightening to think about but, what about a fire in your home? I’m sorry to say that if you lose your computer in that situation, you’ll probably lose your back up drive as well.

Mozy will back up and encrypt your data externally so that you will be able to retrieve the files you simply can’t live without. A small program runs in the background and automatically monitors your hard drive as files change and sends only the files that have changed to be backed up over your internet connection.

You can sign up for a free Mozy account and back up 2 gigabytes of data to their servers. I pay for an unlimited home account which lets me back up any amount of data on a single computer for $4.95 per month.

Do you need both onsite and offsite backups?

Nothing is perfect. Mozy does have a downside. Since data is backed up over your internet connection, only about 9 gigabytes of data can be backed up per day. If your computer has 200 GB to back up, you’re going to need to have it running 24 hours a day for about 23 days to complete your initial back up. And, I should note, I find that very optimistic.

A external hard drive also allows you the luxury of having a bootable hard drive ready for you to get back to work in just minutes when a hard drive failure happens. A remote backup solution does not offer that. That’s why I recommend both approaches to backing up your data.

In a future entry, I will go over some hard drive maintenance and recovery software that I’ve used that will help round out your whole toolkit to keep your data yours.

Got a question about your back up? Drop me a line or leave a comment below.

Zooming Into Photos with the PhotoShop CS3

Check out the image above. First of all, I’m sure you’re stunned by how adorable my cat is, but that’s not why I’ve posted this image. This is a direct export of a very large image from PhotoShop CS3. The beauty of it is that it might look like a low resolution image right now, but hit the PLUS button or drag the small lever at the bottom of the image and you’ll be able to study my cat in high-resolution detail.

This is a technology called Zoomify for Flash, that is only loading the small slices of the image it needs to show you the zoomed in portion you’re looking at. It’s not wasting bandwidth on pieces of the large image you don’t need. Pretty cool, right? (And what cute whiskers!)

How can you do this? First of all, you don’t need Flash, just PhotoShop CS3. You’ll need to find the Export menu under your File menu in PS. There you can set the height and width of the small version of the image. Once you finish the export, you’ll have a folder with an HTML file and another folder that holds all kinds of goodies, like a SWF file, an XML file and a bunch of small chunks of your original large image.

You can simply upload this HTML page to a server and you’re good to go. I discarding the HTML that PhotoShop made and just embedded the SWF file it created in my blog. If you try to do embed the file yourself, you’ll need to adjust the paths so the SWF file can locate XML file and the sliced up photo pieces.