So busy and moving and stuff.
May/092
I’ll kick this blog back up soon but right now it’s been crazy. Commuting to NYC almost four hours out of my day sucks. Once the move to weehawken is settled and my commute is sane. I’m sure I’ll be blogging a bit more.
Things I’m excited for:
- Short commute = more time with the family
- easy access to NYC offerings
- Fios internet at 20/10 Mbps down/up
- Some great local restaurants.
- scale down to one car. (we are looking at the VW rabbit)
All New.
Mar/093
Oct. 31, 2008. New Baby.
March 30th, New Mac Book Pro.
April 1st, 2009 New wife.
April 2nd, 2009 New Job.
Some Highlights. I will be starting a new job on April 2nd the day after Elizabeth and I tie the knot. Hagen will finally have some proper parents. 
I am celebrating my new position by treating my self to a new mac book pro. I’m pretty excited as this will be my first legitimate apple computer. I’m posting this on my Dell 600m running leopard which I’d be willing to sell for a mere $300.
My must have firefox extensions.
Mar/093
Everyone knows that firefox is one of the most flexible browsers due to it’s many extensions. here are a few I simply can’t live without.
- Foxmarks. Foxmarks is a bookmark extension that enable you to sync all your bookmarks to multiple computers. Simply sign up for an account and install this extension on each of your computers and voila! all of your bookmarks are available to all of your computers and online. Simple and absolutely necessary for me.
- adblock plus and helper extension abp element hiding helper. These two will block almost every ad out there including text based ads. get it and never be annoyed on the internet again… well at least by ads.
- fire gestures. I know this isn’t for everyone but once you get use to using it you can’t live without it. I find myself performing gestures in all applications and I’m always disappointed. basically you can navigate and perform tasks with just a simple flick of the mouse. Do yourself a favor an try it.
- grease monkey plus grease fire. Grease monkey allows you to customize any web page with your own javascript, sounds too geeky and you don’t know the javascript? That’s why we have grease fire. This one will pick out scripts from userscripts.org and automatically install them for whatever page you are on if scripts are available.
- Firebug and web developer toolbar. These two are pretty much all I use for any web development anymore.
- Speed Dial. This one is probably best explained with a screen shot. You can load up your most visited sites and have direct access to them from your browsers start page. It supports tabs and custom colors.
That’s it. I’ve tried a bunch of extensions over the years and these are the ones I find myself lost without. Every new firefox install get’s these extensions right away.
Encrypting the data you travel with.
Mar/090
Almost everyone has a portable drive of some type these days. Whether it’s a little usb flash drive or a small external hard drive it seems to be a critical component of today’s office worker. However it’s important to keep your private data private. This will show you how to keep your private data safe while being kinda sneaky about it, Sort of a plausible deniability thing.
First step is to go download and install true crypt. True crypt is free and open source, it’s available for Window, OSX, and Linux. I’ll focus on the windows installation. You can install true crypt in two ways. One is just like any other application, you install it to your hard drive. The second way is in traveler mode. This mode creates the files and folders to run it independently on a portable drive. You can tell the installer where to put these files so for the sake of convenience we will place the true crypt folder right on our portable drive so we don’t need to move it later. I’d recommend installing true crypt on your main system as a standard application and then installing in traveler mode to the portable drive from the base install. You will need administrator privileges to do both installs and you will need admin to run true crypt off of the portable drive on a guest computer.
Let’s begin, shall we.
Make sure the drive you want to use is plugged in and available. Backup any data on this drive that you want to keep then format it. open My computer > right click on the drive and click format…
Choose FAT32. Choose Quick Format. Click Start.
You will be warned so if you didn’t back up your data click cancel and do it NOW! If you’re all set click OK.
Good. We are all fresh and ready to install true crypt to this device. I’ll assume you already installed the executable and true crypt is running local on your machine. Now we will launch true crypt and set up traveler mode.
Once this is all done we are ready to create our secret place.
we walk through the wizard for creating the encrypted container.
When it’s time to create the file name for the container I generally choose something that would be large in size like an AVI for ISO file. This just will give the impression of a large file. Choose a strong password that you can remember because there is no retrieving it if you forget. Once completed you will mount the file name as a device and it will show up with a drive letter of your choice. The file will look and behave similar to the extension you give, Here we go…
Turn off the ACL feature in Windows Vista
Feb/090
The user account control feature in Windows Vista is supposed to make your system more secure but I find that if you are slightly competent it is merely another annoyance when trying to do routine tasks in Vista. Here is how you turn it off and get rid of the security centers warning. Use at your own risk.
turn acl off full screen video
Changing the mail handler in FireFox.
Feb/093
FireFox is the browser of choice for a lot of people and for good reason. With better security versus IE, extensions that can enable almost any feature imaginable, and a faster and more enjoyable browsing experience over IE it’s no surprise people have been switching to firefox.
One of the questions I get a lot is about using web based email such as gmail or yahoo as the default mail handler in firefox. By default when you click a link in firefox it will launch your operating systems default mail program. So if you are using windows it will most like launch outlook or windows mail. This is annoying for a lot of people that use web mail and here is the quick fix.
Revamp nearly complete
Jan/090
The rebirth of lilelvis is almost complete. This is a yearly tradition anymore. I’ve switched back to wordpress and I’ve automated as much as I can for now. I’ve got the mobile version set up and I’m posting from my iPhone so all is good. Now I just need to extract the mysql data out of the old database and import it into wp.
