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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: Gadgets

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. >>

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.