So, when you add things up,that means that I have to use iTunes for a lot of the functionality that I want from my iPhone. Which probably means I’ll end up using iTunes as my default media player from now on.

On further reflection – and after trying to use iTunes as a media player – I have gone running away from it. iTunes sucks ass (no offense to my friends and family who have to use iTunes). It’s a CPU and memory hog, it’s counter-intuitive, not user friendly, and seems to be written specifically so users cannot configure it to their liking. (Actually, since it is an Apple product, it almost definitely is.)

So now I gladly move back to my media player of choice: Amarok 1.4! (Screenshot above) There are very few things I dislike (really, it’s hard to think of anything I dislike), but plenty of things to love. Easy playlist generation, separate views of the Library from the playlist that one has running, very flexible sorting of the files shown in the library, logical groupings for playlists and podcasts.

Other features that I love:

• Amarok has one huge, huge feature that iTunes is lacking: dynamic library tracking. Delete a file on the disk, Amarok automatically removes it from its library. Rename the file, and Amarok updates its library with the new location (without losing ratings information!).
• More flexible ratings system. Amarok is one of the few media library packages that allows rating a track with half-stars. I use 3.5 stars as the baseline for most of my smart playlists. In iTunes (and most other media managers), you can only use half-stars. This is *huge* for me!

That leave the issue of iPod/iPhone syncing. As I mentioned in my previous entry, there just aren’t any Linux apps that can sync everything I want to sync on my iPhone (Apps, ringtones, video podcasts, playlists, etc.) Which means I have to keep a virtual Windows XP machine with iTunes at the ready. I create playlists in Amarok, then export them into an iTunes-compatible format, then use iTunes to transfer them to the iPhone. *voila*!

(As an aside, I put together a short bash script to make the playlist conversion. it is:

#!/bin/bash
sed 's/\/music/M\:/' "$1" | sed 's/\//\\/g' - > win_"$1"


Simple, but I loves me some sed.

I set up the desktop so that only it’s front is accessible. I then disabled the power button in XP via power settings. The only other button on the front is to open the CD-ROM drive. After doing some searching, I found Sidi 1, a freeware app which can do just that. Run it, and it locks the cd-tray. It can still be opened using Sidi.

Now if only there were a way to keep the mouse out of my daughter’s hands…

With TorPark on a USB flash drive, you can bring the power and flexibility of Firefox with you when you travel — and count on Tor to keep your browsing anonymous and secure at the same time.The current TorPark package (1.5.0.2) is available as a 5.6MB self-extracting Windows archive, localized for more than 30 languages. Expand the archive and inside you will find a folder that you can copy directly onto any rewriteable medium (flash drive, hard drive, etc.). TorPark will not run from a CD, since it must write to a local directory.

The folder contains a portable build of Firefox 1.5, a pre-configured Tor installation, and the Torpark.exe executable. Running Torpark.exe establishes an encrypted circuit to the distributed anonymous network of Tor routers, then launches Firefox. You can test whether TorPark is running by pointing the browser at a Web site like whatismyip.com; the IP address reported by the site should be different in TorPark than it is in a native browser.

This little fix will move Firefox to your hard drive when you minimize it, and as a result it will take up less than 10MB of memory while minimized. So far, from my experiences with using this today, when you maximize Firefox it will obviously increase the memory usage. However, it does not seem to go back up to the insane amount that it was at before minimizing it.

I am very impressed with the hacks that are found to improve the performance of our favorite web browser. Hopefully a lot of these hacks are incorporated in the next release.

Do you have a first and last name and perhaps a mailing address? Well, go ahead and take some of Bill’s hard-earned dosh by requesting a Microsoft USB key containing handy FAQs, software licensing briefs, and additional information.

I’m normally not down with promoting anything from Microsoft, but if they wanna give away free stuff, who’m I to stop them?

So you have your tax software do its job, you submit the claim electronically, you print out your forms, and then you have the software save the tax files in case you ever need them. The tax software has done its job, and can then be removed from your computer. All that you need for your own records is the actual tax files the program created.

But there’s one major problem here, something that the tax software doesn’t even try to address: security. These files contain an awful lot of very important personal data. If they were to fall into the wrong hands, you can kiss your identity goodbye. Social security number, address, employer, salary, it’s all right there in one easy-to-handle package. Good for filing your taxes, bad for security.

So what do you do? Personally, I used GnuPG to deal with this mess. GPG isn’t exactly intuitive, nor user-friendly, though, so I’d also recommend adding in kgpg (or whatever it’s Gnome equivalent is) to help with creating/maintaining keys.

But I digress. GnuPG (gpg for short) is an open-source public/private key encryption application. It is the open-source equivalent of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), and provides encryption that is at least as good as PGPs.

(Note: It is outside of the scope of this article to explain public/private keys.)

The basic idea is this: You create a personal private key that is only ever stored on your computer. This key is protected with a passphrase (think a password on steroids) that you generate. Any file that is encrypted using your public key can then only be decrypted using your private key + your passphrase. Assuming you are careful with your private key and passphrase, this should keep anyone but you from being able to access the file.

So I used kgpg’s Konqueror plugin to encrypt my tax files, then used kgpg to shred (securely delete) the original files (after verifying that I could decrypt the original files, of course). Instantly, the security on my tax files has gone way up. Since I don’t have my gpg passphrase stored anywhere on my computer, I am safe, even if someone steals my computer. (Unless they are either lucky enough to guess my passphrase, which is highly unlikely, or they are willing to dedicate some serious computing horsepower to hacking the passphrase.)

The general steps to follow are:

1. Install gpg
2. Install kgpg
3. If you don’t already have a public/private key pair, choose the Generate Key Pair option in kgpg. Be sure you choose a strong passphrase that you can remember. Single words are bad. Dictionary words are bad. A passphrase like “frankie” is going to be broken into. A better passphrase is “Frankie is 33 next week!” An even better passphrase is “Frankie l0vz Pf dS0tM!” How would you remember that? Say to yourself, “Frankie loves Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon!” It’s up to you to remember which letters are upper-case and which are replaced with numbers.
4. In Konqueror, right-click on the tax file (e.g. mytaxes.tax). Go to Actions, and you should see an option to Encrypt the file. Clicking this will fire up kgpg’s front-end. The defaults are fine, so you can choose OK.
5. kgpg’s window will close, and you’ll now have a new file, mytaxes.tax.asc (per our example). This is the actual encrypted file.
6. Copy this new file to an easy-to-find location.
7. Navigate to this directory, then try to open the file. You should be presented with kgpg’s window, requesting that you enter your passphrase (unless you are using gpg-agent, which stores your passphrase in memory). Either way, the file should decrypt.
8. Check the now-decrypted file (mytaxes.tax in our example) to make sure it still works.
9. Once you’ve verified everything works, right-click on the original file and choose the Shred option. Shred will ask if you are positive you want to do this. Assuming the above test worked, it is safe to say yes.
10. Make sure that you Shred all decrypted copies of the file. Shred copies random data multiple times over the part of the disk where the file was stored. On most filesystems, this ensures that the file cannot be recovered
11. Save and backup the encrypted file (mytaxes.tax.asc in our example).

Yes, this procedure is a bit involved. But it is more than worth the time it takes.

But I also ended up with a license for VMWare for Windows, which didn’t do me a lot of good, since my main operating system is Linux (Debian Sarge then, Ubuntu Breezy now). So my license for VMWare just sat around, being buried under virtual dust. I thought of selling it at one point, but something made me decide to hold on it for a while.

Anyway, fast-forward to the year 2006. VMWare released the free VMWare player a couple of months ago: VMWare Player can run virtual machines created using VMWare Workstation. Even cooler, VMWare Player has a native Linux version! So, after a few weeks of thinking about it, I decided to create a Windows 2000 vm in VMWare under Windows, then boot back into Ubuntu and run the Win2k vm in the free VMWare Player.

Well, turns out it wasn’t that easy. The VMWare player wants to build a kernel module, and Ubuntu isn’t set up to allow building of most anything very easily. Fortunately, though, there’s an excellent HOWTO for installing the VMWare Player in Breezy! The best bit of information was linked from another source:

Installing the player itself involves some patience. Get the Linux tar from this page. Most of my instructions will be shamelessly ripped from this lovely tutorial. Fire up a root terminal and do:

apt-get install build-essential
uname -r
apt-get install linux-headers-’kernel version’
apt-get install gcc-3.4
apt-get install g -3.4

After installing the packages, the VMWare Player installs fairly easily (though VMWare went a little overboard on prompts). And then, the moment of truth. I opened up a terminal and typed:

vmplayer win2k.vmx

Up popped the VMWare Player window, and up popped a couple of error messages (e.g.: Path to floppy drive A: not valid. Would you like to replace this with /dev/fd0?). I allowed VMWare Player to make the appropriate changes. And then up popped the VMWare BIOS loading screen.

And then up popped the Windows 2000 boot screen!

SUCCESS!

I knew it was a good idea to keep that VMWare license. Now I wanna figure out where I put the install CDs for OS/2 4.0, and make a virtual machine for that.

It’s ALL good!

Microsoft Outlook uses a rectangular bar above the message header to display information and warnings about the message you’re reading. It may report that you replied on such a date, that an attachment was suppressed, or that line breaks have been removed. Sometimes, though, you might see a very different message—perhaps something like “This message violates the USA PATRIOT Act” or “ERROR: Microsoft Outlook detected. Get a REAL email client!” As it turns out, anybody who can control the custom headers for outgoing e-mail messages can cause such a warning to appear. E-mail server administrators have this level of control, as do spammers, hackers…and you! Here’s how.

I’m not an Outlook fan, and I strongly recommend that other’s use a less-dangerous email client. But this sounds like a lot of fun!

Technorati tags: outlook, hacks

What’s next, Microsoft SQL Server for Linux?

Microsoft will pay Real $460 million in cash to resolve damage claims and $301 million in cash and services to support Real.

Real said it will support MSN Search and Windows media with Real’s Rhapsody to Go.

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Real, lawsuit

From time to time, I find a product that is so good that I have to mention it here. This is one of those times, and Replay Radio is one of those products. Applian Technology describes their product thusly: “Now you can listen to thousands of great radio shows on-demand! Replay Radio 6.0 makes it easy to capture Broadcast Radio Shows, XM Radio™ and Podcasts with just One Click. Shows are copied to your PC, MP3 player, iPod or burned to CD. Everything happens automatically!”

Which is a pretty good description. Basically, this is a simple product which you can use to schedule recordings of internet radio. They have an integrated Product Guide which can help locate internet radio stations (e.g. AM760, Air America Radio) and shows (e.g. The Randi Rhodes Show). Replay Radio records Media Player and Real streams to MP3 (by default) or a number of other formats. It can then dump that MP3 file to MP3 player, iTunes, CD, etc.

Replay Radio has some nice advanced features, including converting the recorded file to a number of formats, splitting the file into X minute chunks (I like 30 minute chunks), compress speech so that talk radio shows don’t take as much time.