SysAdmin – Quick & Dirty File Encryption For Online Storage

It's tax season and I like to backup my tax files to Dropbox. That way I've got offsite storage. To mitigate the fear of putting sensitive information on the cloud I encrypt it using the OpenSSL software available on all OS X Macs via Terminal. Archive All The Files I'm old school and use tar...

Sexy iPhone Apps – Byword Text Editor

I find it ironic that my first iPhone app purchase was Byword. It’s a text editor. How un-sexy is that. In the old days I’d go to the stationary cabinet and get a new pen. Today it seems that I’m getting a new text editor. My main motivation was to get away from iPhone Notes....

Back to School – Loading Bootcamp

Loading Bootcamp onto my daughter's Mac was a pain 😦 Overall the process is straight forward, but there were a few major gotchas for us . I found a really good "howto" to get me going. http://www.simplehelp.net/2009/01/15/using-boot-camp-to-install-windows-7-on-your-mac-the-complete-walkthrough/. The gotcha's for us were that our disk wouldn't partition via Bootcamp Assistant. Google searching on this was...

Adam Pash’s Hackintosh Series is “Sooooo Tempting”

It would be great to get a Core 2 Quad 3.0GHz OS X system for around $1,200 CDN ❗ I've had very good success with Adam's past hacker stuff like DD-WRT home routers. So I've been following his Hackintosh series with serious interest. Last year it seemed like too much maintenance required. But this weeks...

Learnin’ Python on Mac & Cygwin

I bit the bullet and started scripting in Python instead of Perl this spring. There is plenty of Python help on the web, but I find that I still need a book. I found these 2 books very handy. Learning Python by Mark Lutz & David Ascher At first it seemed to easy, but it...