EFS

Microsoft,  since windows 2000, has provided EFS, a way to encrypt your data. Sadly, for windows 2000 and XP, you have to use the Professional version to be able to use this. With windows Vista, you have to use either Premium, Business or Ultimate to be able to get this goodie. EFS is actually a subset of the NTFS filesystem. It allows you to encrypt single files of groups of files directly on-drive. The file names are still visible when the files are accessed without the key. There are some security issues, but from what I understood, if you’re running windows XP or better, your files seems safe.

Be cautions though, you can get bit by EFS quite hard if you’re not. When windows is recommending you to backup your key, do it. It will save your precious bytes. Without that key, it is virtually impossible for now to view the content of these files. Furthermore, to rescue the content of encrypted files from Vista, I had to reinstall Vista, Windows XP seemed to be unable to read them, even when I provided it the key I made. Here you’re warned.

Bitlocker

Vista Ultimate has a new feature called Bitlocker which can encrypt the entire drive. I have no experience with it, but it seems to be a secure way to encrypt your hard-drive. To do so you will have to either have a TPM chip in your computer or a USB key with your encryption key on it. I’ll let you within the capable hands of Microsoft to continue your research about Bitlocker.

Truecrypt

Truecrypt is the solution I was using to encrypt my files on Windows XP Home Edition and during my first love with Linux. It is a cross-platform (currently Linux and Windows 2000 and better) and open-source encryption utility. It can either encrypt a virtual container, a file which will act like a drive, or a partition. Using a file as a container will probably be slower, you have to add the speed of accessing the file from its parent filesystem with the speed of truecrypt, but even then, I find this quite fast.

It has many features, some more useful than the others. There is currently a total of eight encryption algorithms, and three hash algorithms. The encryption algorithm you choose will affect the speed and the security of your data. The hash algorithm is for securing the key, it won’t affect the speed, I think.

Truecrypt has an advanced security feature, hidden volumes. Hidden volumes can act as a plausible deniability by having your actual encrypted data in another container hidden inside the first one. The user can store less important data in the first volume, the outer one, while storing critical files in the inner one. This means that if the thugs comes home and wants to see, let’s say, some files and you don’t want to show them, you can decrypt the outer volumes while keeping the inner ones safe. The thugs will probably let your kneecaps in place as there is no way to tell if there is an hidden volume.

Anyway, I’m back at using truecrypt, I don’t want to get bit again with the way Vista handles file-encryption.

And sure, there might be many more ways to encrypt your data within windows, but I’m only presenting the ones I know and have experience with. If you want to have your word, do it in the comments, as usual; I would be glad to have some feedback about this article. Have fun securing yourself, and try not to lock yourself out of your data!

So, in my mind infinite bandwidth is possible. Some thoughts about what we could do with it include: unlimited High Definition two-way video streaming (not like little YouTube screens, but to video walls), immersive and lifelike collaboration environments (think Second Life on steroids), limitless file transfer and backup (no more burning data to DVDs), real-time photo sharing (grandmothers will love this), and complete data mobility for both personal and work information (regardless of what type of data you have, you can access it from anywhere).

The idea of instantaneous backup transfers is quite interesting. But there are some bad consequences that are currently not thought of, your storage space is not infinite. In my case, I would certainly fill my hard drive and every of my external storage spaces from anything I could find on the web, be it the content of wikipedia, the whole series of shows I want to watch, many pictures or even people playing guitar under the shower (nsfw)¹. Until the idea of infinite storage is there, the infinite bandwidth won’t be as useful as it should.

Anyway, it doesn’t mean that infinite bandwidth should not exist. It only means that either be it really large or infinite, we won’t see the difference. I will let you meditate on this question: “Is our universe really large or infinite?”

_{1. Readers of xkcd will understand.}

Mine is Color Cop. The application itself is well-done and has lived through ages. Jay Prall first released it in 1999, and I discovered it a couple of years ago. Using it never grew old on me as it was and is still a breeze to use. You simply drag the picker from the application to your color and you’re done. There’s even a magnifier to more precisely select your color when a bunch of pixels are not the same one. You can also get the average color of a bunch of pixels if needs be.

There are other features like the complementary color palette, which shows you 42 colors that might fit with the one selected and the history of picked colors. Other than that, you can head over Color Cop’s website to watch an animated gif of it in action and, hopefully, download it and use it. Sadly, it’s windows-only. In the linux world I used gcolor2, not knowing anything better.

Have fun picking colors!

Here’s what the cat does:

[The cat] has an habit of catching various animals, dragging them inside through the cat door and letting them loose so they can be chased for hours.

Disgusting. To control the opening of the cat door, he uses an image recognition software he seems to have made himself. The image at the beginning of the article is Flo with a mouse, as seen by the software.

This is quite an interesting idea, would someone here try a similar apparatus at home?

This description alone sells the product, Here it is from the product page:

A few of us monkeys at ThinkGeek had this great shared dream a few months ago. In it, the whole world was 8-Bit, just like the video games we grew up on. We found ourselves having to leap from platform to platform, to search for pieces of the Triforce of Wisdom, and to fight scary mutated plants and animals. The music was awesome (and still stuck in our heads) but the coolest part was what we were wearing: a tie. But not just any tie, an 8-Bit tie!

At 20$, it may be not-so cheap, but think of it, you’re going to establish yourself as the geek in the place. Sadly, I don’t wear anything that a tie can go with, but if I were, I would buy one.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about those machines:

A Rube Goldberg machine is an exceedingly complex apparatus that performs a very simple task in a very indirect and convoluted way. It first appeared in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary with the definition, “accomplishing by extremely complex roundabout means what actually or seemingly could be done simply.”

Oh, and here’s an extra one from an Honda Accord ad.

I recently bought a game, Trackmania United, and it has in-game ads that are downloaded from their servers. The ads are local, I’m seeing ads from sympatico, a Canadian ISP. I’m wondering currently if it should be considered a [[clean thing]] that game companies do to put in-game ads in the games we buy. I can understand that the previous game, Trackmania Nations, which was free, had ads in it, but why are they forcing us to look at ads in a game we bought?

I’d like to have your input on that matter. What do you think about that? Do you think it’s acceptable from those companies to put ads in bought games? If you’re into that business, drop us some words on your views on that matter, it would be nice.

Personally, I think that it’s a bit hypocritic. They could give us the game or sell it at a real discount price, as they will continue to earn money from ads. They don’t even host the servers on which we play, so it is not that much a relief for them. Anyway, my views could change if someday I’m into this kind of business, but currently, seeing it could be a trend that continues to evolve, I want to take a stance: Don’t!, please don’t put ads in-game, where there souldn’t be. An acceptable case would be a billboard that does not change in a modern city. This would be okay to me, as it is unconceivable to see a city without these today.

Anyway, I wanted to add that even then, the game’s awesome! Trackmania Nations and Trackmania United are fun “racing” games, you have to get to the finish line as fast as possible. Try Nations risk-free, it’s free, as in beer. I will try to review Trackmania United soon.

A service that keeps track of what music you listen to, and then produces a large number of features personalised to you.

You can use Last.fm to listen to music, find out about artists you may like, other people with similar music taste, gigs in your local area, charts and quilts for your personal site, as well as much more.

In fact, it could be described as a social music hive. You can talk to people in groups that likes the same music than you, get music recommendations from them or give some. There are user-generated content such as reviews of either artists albums or events. Everyone can participate to this. To begin with Last.fm, you will need an audio player which has support for it. Here is a page from their website that can help you find plugins or audio players compatible with their system. The implementation is available, so it can be quite easily to any player.

After registering, everyone has a profile page (here’s mine) viewable by anybody. It lists the last songs you listened to. There are some stats available on the page such as a comparison of the different artists play ratio, either overall or from the week. You can see the neighbours and friends of that person and even shout something in their shoutbox. An interesting feature is the personal radio of someone. It can be really fun to hear what kind of music other people listen to. Something else of interest might be the attending events list; it lists which event someone will attend to.

There’s even a player that lets you listen to music similar to what you seem to listen, but you can’t control what’s coming next, even on your own player. You can listen to some audio extracts from different artists on their artist or album pages. There are some free full-length tracks available sometimes, but I currently haven’t found something, in my opinion, worth for me. I think those tracks are the same for every users.

The system lacks some polish someplaces, especially with mistagged files. Currently, it entirely trusts the user with the tags of the song being “scrobbled”. There is an effort to bring a fingerprint function to the songs so the songs will be verified to be what they claim to be, and possibly you will be able to verify your own library for mistagged files.

At last, there is some novelty to use this service, as you can have a picture you can append to, let’s say, a forum signature and everyone knows what you last listened to.

Here’s what I listen to.
I’m sorry if this last image breaks the design a bit at the end of the post, hopefully this text will push the “social icon bar” far enough to not break the design much…

Everyone likes to listen to music, to some extents. Some will just like the background noise, some will appreciate the music they hear and some, like me, want it tidied-up the best way possible. I currently use, on windows systems, musikCube to do my biddings.

What I like about it

It is a quite powerful audio player with integrated library management, quite iTunes-like. You can view and edit tags of your music from within the player. It can also work for you by either tagging your audio by the filenames or by renaming your file by the tags.

The library is maintained through a SQLite backend. It means that I can create some queries with an SQL-like syntax easily to create a Dynamic Playlist. It is possible, let’s say, to create a playlist which contains only the less-played songs from your library which are tagged 0 stars or more (-1 are disliked songs) randomized.

MusikCube has integrated crossfade feature, something Quod Libet (my favorite Linux audio player) has not and I would want. It might seem stupid, but I find it is nice.

The player also has a plugin system. Last.fm support is available through a plugin. There’s also a winamp emulation plugin; it will allow other programs that use the underlying functions of winamp to work with MusikCube.

What I don’t like

It has no integrated album art feature! This is something that I would really want. Maybe I’m blind and/or stupid and I missed something, but it doesn’t seem to exist from within the program.

Balloon tips won’t work with Vista. Well, they won’t work for me, I don’t know if it is a known behavior, but I can live without that.

It lacks some finish in some places.  As an example, there’s the place where I can see how much time I’m into a song, when I click onto it, I can see how much time is left to the song. This setting doesn’t register and I have to click on it every time the program is started.

Other than that, it could be nice to have a better skinning system, but personally, I wouldn’t use it. I want a useful music manager, not a fancy player that’ll eat all my resources!

Even with those little problems, I still haven’t found a better music player/audio management software for Windows. On Linux platforms, there’s the fabulous Quod Libet, but that’s going to be a matter for another time, I need to have something to write about later!

First of all, I’m a French-speaking Canadian from Québec. This might explain why my blog is in french and why I needed a place to post my (interesting) stories in english. My nickname SamuelDr comes from my first name and my family-names, Dionne-Riel; it is not for doctor.

I currently am studying in computer sciences (DEC+BAC en informatique) in a CEGEP in Québec city. My interests revolve mostly around computers and technology. I’m a self-professed geek. I’m a Free and Open-Source proponent and I like Linux. Sadly, I’m currently castaway from Linux as is has not a great support for my new-ish laptop (2 weeks old), a Sony VGN-SZ650Q. I like games, either board-games of video games. I like RTS, FPS and RPGs a bit. I like to code, I currently don’t know as much as I would want, but well, I can’t do anything else than learn.

My main goal by posting here is to have a better visibility on the internet and to kick myself in the butt to post things more often, by having a commitment. Oh and what I will write here will be mostly featured both on my blog and here, on Arsgeek.com. My posts will most probably be about what I use technology-wise, open-source software, tricking Vista into using less resources and molding it to something I’ll like more and probably games.

I hope that my future stories will be appreciated amongst the readers and if you don’t like one, if something is unintelligible (misused expression mainly), if I forgot something, if you would like some precision or even if you like it, you can comment on my stories, I’ll be glad to answer to any comment.