Podcasting What Geeks Really Want To Hear

I’m a fan of TrueCrypt on Windows (still using encrypted HFS on Mac).

Anyways, a new version, 4.3, is out, with many new features. From their website:

We are pleased to announce that TrueCrypt 4.3 has been released. Among the new features is full compatibility with 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Vista, support for devices and file systems that use a sector size other than 512 bytes (such as new hard drives, USB flash drives, DVD-RAM, MP3 players, etc.), auto-dismount when a host device (e.g., a USB flash drive) is inadvertently removed, and many more. In addition to new features, there are many significant improvements. Some portions of the TrueCrypt device driver have been completely redesigned and several bugs have been fixed. For a comprehensive list of changes, please see http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=version-history

Travis mentioned in Episode 51 about hating USB thumb drives with “U3” technology. Especially scary since it shows up as a CDROM drive on windows (usually with an ‘autorun.inf’ file – very bod). Anyways, my buddy Brian just happened to bitch to me tonight about this shitty USB drive he had. I grabbed it up, did some Google searches, and about 5 minutes later, reformatted his USB drive without the U3 partition (and gained an addition 5MB of space).

I don’t know the legalities of distributing it, so I’ll just say ‘do a google search for U3_Uninstaller.exe‘. It’s Windows only, takes only a few seconds to run, and worked like a gem on the drive I tried it on.

Yes – Episode 51 is finally up and episode 52 has already been recorded and will be up later this week.

I’d like to thank all of our listeners for being patient – late February and early March were brutal for me. Two photo shoots (still doing editing work!), writing the biggest grant of my life (and doing all the prep work behind showing that the hardware will do what we want it to do) and getting the flu (hey, I work at a university) all took huge chunks out of my time.

Anyways, we’re not dead – I’ve just been super busy. But I’m committed to getting episode 52 out this week as well, so enjoy!

– Nem

Episode 51 URLs & Notes (MP3) (AAC)

• Dimitri & Sourcetrunk
• My dead iBook ;-(
  

  • YouTube – hard drive movements
  • YouTube: hard drive – how to kill a drive
  • YouTube: hard drive workings with an australian accent
    
  • FedEx
    

• Bill Gates on Vista and Apple’s ‘Lying’ Ads
  
  • Window Managers
    
    • Beryl
      
    • Enlightenment
      
    • Project Looking Glass
      
    • FVWM
      
  • LittleSnitch
    

• DST – Clocks to spring forward early
• Planex’s 750GB NAS server and BitTorrent client: make a label hate you – Engadget
  
  • BitTorrent
    
  • ASUS WL-700gE Multifunction Wireless Router ($200)
    
    • Which has had some pretty poor reviews on Newegg.
      

  • Jamendo : Open your ears
    

• Apple – Thoughts on Music
  • Responses:
    

    • So sue me » Blog Archive » DAAP Licensing
    • So sue me » Blog Archive » Steve on licensing FairPlay
    • So sue me » Blog Archive » Steve’s misleading statistics
    • So sue me » Blog Archive » Steve’s Thoughts on Music
    • globeandmail.com: Music industry fires back at Apple
      

  • Privately, Hollywood admits DRM isn’t about piracy
• Seagate introduces us to DAVE
  • USB & U3
    

    • Hak5 USB Switchblade article
    • Hak5 USB Hacksaw article
      
    
    

So, I found out that I can post to GeekMuse through Word 2007. Nem and Trav might have something to say about this, but we’ll see if it works and how well it works. Lets post a picture…this is my parents standing next to a Boeing Stearman PT-17 that he flew in Florida recently (It’s a WWII trainer).

So, the cool thing is that this is all built into Word 2007 and it has support for other blog engines (on the right, including Blogger, TypePad, Community Server, WordPress and the obligatory MSFT Windows Live Spaces and SharePoint). The really sweet thing about it is that formatting is now trivial. As you can see I embedded two pictures and didn’t have to do anything other than determine how the text was going to wrap around the pictures. Its all very slick. –Chris (resident Windows guy)

This is an obvious evolution, but it looks pretty nifty.  Bascially its a wireless router that can interface to your EVDO data capable cell phone.  What this means is that you can share your EVDO connection with those less fortunate non-EVDO-capable friends by serving up an access point that routes out your cell phone data service.  Now, you could do this by hacking together a machine to talk both and run HostAP but this is a nice “all in firmware” box that, theoretically, you just have to plug-in to the wall and your cell phone and “just works”. The advantage here i sthat you won’t have to set up yet another machine to run it. The disadvantage, as with anything firmware-based, you won’t have the control over exactly what its doing, and/or you won’t have the power to create the exact configuration you want, but if all you want is EVDO to 802.11 and back again, this could be the device for you… http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=524

redemption in a blog – Sharing a USB printer from Mac OS X to Windows

After some trial and error, first with what made the most sense, and then with stuff I could glean off the Internet, I finally arrived at something that works. Maybe this would be useful for the next unfortunate bloke that needs to do this sharing of printers from Mac to Windows machines without a print server.

Kudos to Cheah Chu Yeow’s blog entry on getting a USB printer attached to a Mac to work from Windows. The solution is pretty typical – set up a simple queue to act as a filter. In this case, a filter that really does nothing, but is named more nicely (short and no spaces). Anyways, I’m happily printing from all my boxen (yes, boxen) to my crappy HP DeskJet printer, so thanks much, Chu!

“Heard Microsoft is coming out with a new OS, called Vista, what do you think?”
It’s not management of a bad product, it’s just a product of bad management. (Read more)

Episode 50 URLs & Notes (MP3) (AAC)

• The Daily Show and The Colbert Report
• Widescreen vs Standard displays
• Uproar over latest MOAB vulnerability
  • Colloquy
  • Irc versus I. R. C.
    The note at the bottom of this page seems to imply “irk” instead of “eye are see”
• Response to listener Brian G.’s comments on Apple TV
• Apple to charge for 802.11n upgrade
  • AirPort Disk: Easy Network Storage
• FUSEWiki – FileSystems
  • Remote files: sshfs, ftpfs, gmailfs, davfs
  • Encryption: EncFS, PhoneBook, CryptoFS
  • Databases: RelFS, DBToy, Fuse::DBI, fuse-dbfs, mysqlfs
  • Versioning: CvsFS, Wayback, CopyFS, hierfs
  • Torrent: BitTorrent File System (Slave Repeater)
  • Compression: fusecram, compFUSEd, FuseCompress, LZOlayer fs, Apretujado, Cromfs
  • ISO images: Cddfs, fuseiso, Mountlo, DVDfs
  • Logging: LoggedFS
  • Union: FunionFS, unionfs-fuse
  • NTFS: ntfsmount, Captive NTFS, ntfs-3g
  • Music: FUSEPod, TagsFs, Yacufs, playlistfs, mp3fs, fusedaap
  • Searching: beaglefs, SpotlightFS
  • Other: ferrisfuse, ZFS, rofs, BloggerFS
  • Some ideas: RSS-fs, LDAP-fs, CSV-fs & Excel-fs, mbox-fs (pop-fs, imap-fs)
• MSFT pays people to edit Wikipedia
• IntelliAdmin.com: The 5 sins of Vista

The Google Code MacFuse project has released a new version, along with an sshfs GUI (the main thing being a ‘recent servers’ list. The other release is Spotlight filesystem.

How does this work? Well, the simplest way is to run their SpotlightFS application, which creates the mountpoint, and then you create a directory in that mountpoint for doing a specific search. Their example:

$ mkdir /Volumes/SpotlightFS/Hasselhoff
$ ls -lrt /Volumes/SpotlightFS/Hasselhoff
[… output omitted to avoid embarrassment …]

Basically, it creates a Mac “smart folder”, with the results from Spotlight, instead of just the filesystem.

Also, if you’re big on python, you can try out this blog post on GmailFS for Mac (again, using FUSE).