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I’ve often wondered how to go about encrypting a particular file or folder on my computer, but always figured the process to be so daunting as to not bother to ever try. A recent article on the subject in my PC World magazine has shed some light on the matter. I’m going to fill you in on my experience that I’ve gained thus far. Keep in mind that I am not attempting to encrypt the contents of an entire drive, and I am not encrypting data on removable storage devices. I can’t speak to those scenarios in any way at this time.

I reviewed three possibilities for my approach. First, I’m a Mac user and looked into the FileVault encryption that is built into OSX. That solution is very easy, but it wants to encrypt my whole account user folder. In that scenario, logging into the OS decrypts all of the data. I worry that may slow down my computer, and that isn’t what I was going for in the first place.

Second, I researched the popular PGP encryption solutions. Their products all appear to go above and beyond my needs. PGP adds email and instant message encryption to their desktop offering. I don’t need any of that, and PGP’s products are all pretty costly for my taste, ringing in at $99. I’ve heard good things about PGP overall, but I am not looking to spend that kind of money on my project.

Third, and my favorite solution, is a free open-source application called TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux! It’s free and easy to use. You create an encrypted volume that is stored as a single file on your computer. That file can have any file extension you want, or none at all. You can hide it anywhere you like, and the program won’t memorize locations if you ask it not to. Opening the contents of your volume is achieved by mounting the volume, which allows you to use it with a drive letter of its own. Unmounting the volume encrypts all of the data again. I’ve had a wonderful experience using this program. One downside for me is that I wish the program was faster at unmounting my volume, though speed will most certainly vary depending on your system.

TrueCrypt was definitely the way to go for my needs on this one. It does exactly what I want it to. It’s easy, secure, and completely free!

Early in 2008, the folks at Intuit apologized for not planning a 2008 release of Quicken for the Mac. Instead, they opted for a complete rewrite and have been at work on a new product called Quicken Financial Life for Mac. I applied for their beta program for this new product over the summer. Today, I got an email from Quicken saying that I was not selected for the beta program. That is unfortunate, but their email indicated that they received more than five times the number of beta applicants than they anticipated for this application. That is great news! I hope the company realizes that there are quite a number of Mac users out there who are interested in using Quicken. The final release of the new Mac Quicken is due in the summer of 2009. While that is quite a delay from the original release schedule, I’m glad that the new program hasn’t become “Vaporware”, as the Macworld magazine recently labeled the project.

During the summer, I started using the Mac money management program iBank. I was impressed with version 2, and bought the program when I was promised a free upgrade to version 3. I’ve been using version 3 since its release, which today is on version 3.32. Despite numerous updates to version 3, I have never been completely satisfied with the program. Despite enjoying great communication with IGG, the company who makes iBank, and the fact that it is a Leopard-only universal binary application, minor irritations with my own user experience have never been corrected. I’ll list just a few examples, though they are not the only ones.

1) When I work with a credit card account, I must enter all balances as negative values. When I reconcile my statement with iBank, if I don’t put a minus (-) in front of the balance, even if it is in the thousands of dollars, the program just accepts it, wrecking my calculated balance. This is pure stupid. If they are going to use this horrible method of managing credit accounts, at least provide a warning against entering a positive value.

2) Reconciling statements on any account is very counter-intuitive and confusing. I have to relearn how to enter statements every time I enter one. Anyone used to using Quicken or Money will have a hard time for months trying to figure this out, and I am still baffled at the hoops I have to jump through. Transactions have a date and a time associated with them. Every time I reconcile a new statement, I have to change the time of the final date in the period to 11:59 PM, because the program insists on putting the current time, each and every time. Stupid!

3) When I enter a new transaction that has no recipient name (such as ATM transactions), iBank automatically fills in the recipient field with the last transaction entered. So, if I went to Target yesterday and entered it in iBank, then went to the ATM today, when I save the new transaction today, iBank will insert “Target” in the field for the ATM transaction, despite the fact that it is entered in the ATM/Cash category!

4) When I start to enter any memorized recipient on a new transaction, I still have to manually capitalize the first letter. For example, if I type “lowes”, which I frequently visit, if I start typing the name with a lowercase “L” it fills in “Lowes Foods”, except it displays as “lowes Foods”. I have to manually capitalize even the memorized transactions! Did a bunch of monkeys code this program?

Today I was presented with the final nail in the coffin for iBank. iBank routinely notifies me of any software updates when I launch the program. I typically exit the application and download the update. When I install the update, it says it can’t update because some process of iBank is still running. This has happened with every single update I’ve tried to apply. Only a full computer reboot will stop the error. Is iBank still running something in the background after every use? What?! Today, I used the program and when I was notified of a new version 3.32 update. I restarted the computer and tried to install the update. The update would not install, and after that iBank will not load at all, saying that the program is not compatible with my Mac system.

I’ve had it. Full price for iBank is $59! That is double what it is actually worth. I didn’t pay full price for this program when I bought version 2, which was less expensive, and I received the free upgrade to version 3. I have now deleted the program and will go back to using the frustrating Quicken 2007. Quicken was due to release a new Mac version called “Quicken Financial Life for Mac” this winter, but their website now says it will be pushed back to the summer of 2009. I think I can tolerate Quicken 2007 until that time. I just can’t overlook my frustrations with iBank any longer.

If you like to burn CDs and DVDs, but are sick and tired of the expensive, incredibly bloated offerings from Nero and EasyCD Creator, I have a solution. CDBurnerXP is a free disc burning utility for Windows that will do everything you need, completely free of charge. It’s both lean and powerful, supporting double-layer DVDs, ISO files, and even Blu-Ray disc burning! The Microsoft .NET Framework must be installed to use CDBurnerXP. Download the .NET Framework from Microsoft. One use and you’ll probably not want to look back to the $100 offerings of the competition.

This weekend I decided to pit the latest releases of Fedora and OpenSUSE Linux against my current installation of Ubuntu 8.10. I downloaded and burned the Live CDs of both distros. I played with the Live CDs and installed both of them (separately). My test computer is an old P-III 933Mhz with 768MB of RAM, an NVidia GeForce 5200 FX 128MB graphics card, and wired Ethernet. This is a pretty old computer, but runs Windows XP and Ubuntu pretty well for basic tasks. When working with Linux in this experiment, I was using a completely blank hard drive that bypassed my main drive, which had XP installed. I set my BIOS to boot to that blank second drive for this test.

Fedora:

I tried Fedora. I’ve tinkered on and off with Fedora since version 2. The latest, version 10 was released in November. Fedora’s best quality is its clean, polished interface and visual theme. It is very attractive. That said, under the hood it doesn’t seem as refined. Boot time is very slow, and it was generally slow during general use in comparison to Ubuntu 8.10. There were many pauses in boot and execution, which several moments of no hard drive activity of any kind. What was it thinking about? I don’t know.

Fedora is committed to free open-source software, and doesn’t provide easy access to extras like codecs, Flash, and Java. In Ubuntu you can install Flash directly from Adobe’s website. Not the case with Fedora! Also, no proprietary graphics drivers are available for NVidia cards in Fedora 10, period. In addition, system sound was disabled by default at install, and Fedora admits to this. Huh? This all makes for a difficult setup to me. OpenOffice is not provided by default, with AbiWord installed instead. Attempts to add extra software from repositories was both complicated and confusing. My efforts to add OpenOffice made no sense at all, with the system showing literally dozens of packages available, ranging from converters to fonts, etc.. Why isn’t there a single package to install? This extreme difficulty, lack of out of the box offerings, and general slowness has turned me off of Fedora.

OpenSUSE:

I tried OpenSUSE 11.1, which was just released last week. I’ve used past releases of SUSE with pretty good results. The new Live CD worked well on my PC and the OS felt polished and smooth. Scrolling and window switching was remarkably smooth on my old PC. However, attempting to install the OS to the hard drive from the Live CD resulted in a failure. It complained that I had only 768MB of RAM. It froze while installing GRUB. I tried twice with the same result. Frustrated, I went to my Dell laptop and ran the Live CD from there. Again, it booted quite slowly, despite my laptop having much faster hardware. The Live CD functioned for a while, but not long after connecting to a wireless network, the whole system froze. I have never had this happen with any past Ubuntu release. My limited test concluded that OpenSUSE is not very reliable for my taste. A command line installer of the OS on the CD would have been a nice addition.

In closing, this non-scientific experiment has reinforced my belief in Ubuntu being the best Linux for the desktop. I highly recommend it head and shoulders above the competition. Granted, Ubuntu’s default theme is not as pretty as either Fedora or OpenSUSE, but the raw mechanics of it are unmatched in my mind.

Gmail is the best web-based email that exists today. It still carries a “Beta” tag, which is absurd, but I digress on that point. I use Gmail daily for all of my mail and communications. Google has slowly introduced some great new features to Gmail over the years. That said, some of the new features have been downright silly. With that in mind, there are two glaring omissions in Gmail that should have been added long ago.

First: I want there to be a user setting to define a default font for composing messages. I don’t like to send messages in the generic font, which I think shows up as Arial on most Windows computers. I like to choose Verdana or Tahoma as my outgoing font. My problem is that I have to highlight my text and change the font from the pulldown list after I compose each and every message. This is annoying. I want to choose a setting in my Gmail preferences to always compose in Verdana, unless I choose otherwise at the time of writing.

Second: There needs to be a method to sort messages by size, or another easy way to single out large attachments. I have written Google in the past and begged for this very feature. Currently, you can only do an advanced search on your mailboxes and check a box that says “Has Attachments”. Within those search results, there is no indication of any attachment sizes without viewing each message individually. It would be to Google’s own benefit to make it easier for users to spotlight giant messages, since deleting some of them would probably result in less storage and backup that Google would have to worry about on their end. It’s ridiculous that this wasn’t a feature from the start.

While on the subject, it would also be nice if they would add the ability to remove attachments from messages, while keeping the message itself, but that isn’t a feature yet, either. Oh well.

Uninstalling programs on the Mac is a very easy process. Simply navigate to the Applications folder and drag a program icon to the Trash. Easy as pie. However, if you want to remove an application along with its extra remnants that reside elsewhere on your computer, you may want something more.

I wrote a post back in May that outlined my favorite software for the Mac. In that post, I cited AppDelete as my favorite such uninstaller. While that program is free and quite adequate, I have recently began to favor the program AppZapper. It seems to be more robust than the AppDelete program. AppZapper is $12.95 to purchase, but the company allows five free uses before you must purchase the software. I am very impressed with it so far, and think that $12.95 is a very good price for this program. I now recommend it as my primary method of completely uninstalling various applications and everything that is associated with it. Try it yourself.

Rumors have started circulating that Apple will unveil a new revamped Mac Mini at the 2009 Macworld Expo. I hope this is true, as it is long overdue! Read the potential details on Wired.

I just realized an asinine omission in Apple’s Mail application on the Mac. There is no way to set a default reply-to address! To date, there is a reply-to field that you can access on outgoing messages, but you must type in an address for that field each and every time you send a message! An online search turned up questions and complaints about this issue dating back to 2002! In all of the versions of Mail that have been released since that time, why has this basic feature not been added to the program? I have read where people have created Terminal commands to achieve this result, and others have written AppleScripts as well. I have tried neither of those methods. Having to jump through those hoops is absolute absurdity.

This needs to change, and now. And while Apple is adding that preference, extended the automatic Bcc option to include an address that is not limited only to myself. And furthermore, the mail checking intervals could use some more options than the paltry list that is currently included in Mail.

I posted on my blog recently about how I had a feedback letter printed in a recent issue of MacWorld. Now, low and behold, I have another letter that was just printed in the latest PCWorld magazine! It’s the January 2009 issue. I’ve scanned in my letter, shown below.

AppleInsider has published an article that predicts a $99 Apple cell phone will eventually come to the market. Could it be? I wonder what feature set a $99 Apple phone would have.

I don’t have an iPhone. I think they are fantastic gadgets, but I don’t want to spend that kind of money on a phone. Nor do I need all of those extra features. I already have a digital camera, a video camera, iPod nano, and Razr v3 cell phone. Personally, I don’t want to use my phone to take crappy pictures, play games, surf the Internet, and listen to music. How much battery life could I possibly have to left talk on the phone after I’ve been using it for everything else?

Read the AppleInsider article.

I installed the new Ubuntu 8.10 on my laptop this weekend. I’m highly impressed. I’d been thinkering with the slightly older 8.04 release on my old desktop PC, with great results. However, since installing the new 8.10 on my laptop, I’m blown away at it’s power and speed. It’s now blazingly fast, and installing addons and extras is now easier than ever. The OS boots in no time flat, a point that I cannot emphasize enough. It runs with grace and speed all around. If you’re doubting Linux in any way, Ubuntu 8.10 will surely change your mind.

That said, I’m disappointed that the new OpenOffice 3.0 is not included, and to date, Firefox still sits at version 3.03, despite the fact that 3.04 was released nearly a week ago. I don’t understand those decisions, but the operating system as a whole is fantastic all around. Try it yourself.