Written by Ruhani Rabin on February 14, 2006.
Free, open source disk encryption software TrueCrypt allows you to secure your thumb drive (among other things) so that you don’t need to worry about losing sensitive information if you lose that little drive.
Main features:
- Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk.
- Encrypts an entire hard disk partition or a device, such as USB flash drive.
- Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent.
With TrueCrypt installed to AutoRun on your thumb drive, you just plug in your drive, enter your password, and work like you normally would. Unplug it, and anyone trying to use it again will need to enter your password before they can access any of your information.
Written by Ruhani Rabin on February 13, 2006.
Windows only: Free program Process Explorer, by the good people at Sysinternals, is a Windows Task Manager replacement tool with all kinds of added functionality.
Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded.
The Process Explorer can be a great tool for diagnosing problems, especially when you’ve got tasks running and you can’t figure out what program keeps starting them. The right-click Google search of a process is an especially cool tool. If you prefer Process Explorer, you can set it to replace the Windows Task Manager so that the usual Ctrl+Alt+Delete will bring up Process Explorer instead by selecting Options -> Replace Task Manager.
Written by Ruhani Rabin on February 13, 2006.
The Quicktime Wiki at Wikicities has a great tutorial for compressing video at low bit rates while retaining a high quality.
Certain codecs and settings can be used to achieve high quality to perceptually lossless compression at relatively low bit rates. This tutorial is intended to demystify the process.
The tutorial requires Quicktime Pro (sorry), but looks like a good starting point. I’ve done minimal video encoding with Quicktime Pro, but what I have done has been relatively unsuccessful due to lack of a good starting point. This tutorial would definitely have helped.
You do much video encoding?
