Yes, it’s true.  Finally a way to get your personal files on each machine you work with that gets backed up online without any worry of who is rummaging through your data when you aren’t looking!  It’s the secure online backup you were looking for!

Windows? Linux? Mac? No problem.  Installers are available for all three systems.

DropBox (a glorified subversion system for the rest of us) has finally worked its way out of beta and will become the backbone for our project.  Transmission of data to DropBox is via HTTPS, so we at least have half the problem resolved.

The second problem is DropBox’s STORAGE of my files.  If they defect to the goverment faster than AT&T did with the NSA, then you can be sure your private key and personal bookmarks to porn sites will be used against you.  I wanted the storage of my files encrypted. Since I couldn’t trust DropBox, I turned to my good old friend, TrueCrypt.

The solution here is to create a TrueCrypt volume inside of your DropBox folder.  Even though DropBox has a 2GB folder limit, you shouldn’t use all of it for your TrueCrypt drive.  Unfortunately, TrueCrypt creates the encrypted partition to it’s maximum capacity, which means if you create a 1GB encrypted volume, it actually takes up 1GB on the harddrive even with nothing in it.  And transferring a 1GB file many times for little to no content isn’t the best plan.

Since the volume is filled out to maximum filesize even with no data, it’s best to create a few smaller drives (in the 256MB range) as DropBox has to upload the entire file at least once and you have to download the synchronized file on every computer.  TrueCrypt can mount about 12 volumes automatically, so my recommendation is to keep the volumes small and increase the sizes for volumes you don’t modify often.

Don’t feel guilty about using encyption.  Don’t be guilted into the “If you have nothing to hide” mantra; privacy is your right as a human, exercise it.

I love my little Macbook.  It’s so cute.  And this coming from a guy who has Windows experience back to 3.1, and whose primary job responsibility is to support and manage a Windows domain and hundreds of clients.  So why is my Macbook so nice?

For one main reason: it’s polished. That critical “step-back” after everything is done to say “what can we improve now?”  This is something that Microsoft and companies who build Intel PCs are seriously lacking.

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This Alt-TAB replacement is actually an official PowerToy from Microsoft.  It will add function and beauty to your otherwise near-worthless and boring Alt-TAB window.  In addition to seeing the icon of the application window you are switching to, you will also see a preview of the application as it was running.  This helps particularly when multiple sessions of an application are open.

Launchy is the Windows version of Mac’s QuickSilver. It is free and open source (naturally) and a flexible and relatively lightweight alternative to using Windows Start Menu.

By pressing the hotkey (Alt-Space), you bring up Launchy’s main window and type what you want. A quick type of “fire” brings up your most used entry of “firefox” but doesn’t stop there.  If you have other programs (in this example, Fire Antivirus, SoftFire screensaver or Fire and Motion), it will display them as well since it contains the keyword you typed.

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Ady Romantika has so kindly packaged Pidgin into a nice portable package called PidginPortable for use on USB drives. Take your contacts, log files and conversation on-the-go leaving no trace behind on the computer you use. (I highly recommend the rest of the PortableApps as well.)

Included in his package in addition to Pidgin (the free, open-source, ad-free Instant Messenger client we’ve all grown to love) are the following features:

• Spell check support. Aspell is included with EN dictionary as an example. If you don’t need spell checking support simply delete the contents of the App\Aspell folder and you’ll save 5MB+ of space.
• Off-the-Record Messaging plugin support. Files located in App\Pidgin\plugins\ folder, as otr_*.exe and pidgin-otr.dll
• Included a gtkrc file for CTRL-ENTER key binding when sending messages.

In addition to that, Ady also recommends my custom smileys theme for Pidgin, ForumSmileys.

Chris’Soft has sold out and now a dirtbag company will be producing Yodm’3d under the name DeskSpace. Naturally, these slimes will be charging for this software now.

What they don’t tell you is that Chris’Soft’s version is still free to download. v1.4 might still have minimal bugs, but if you feel that you shouldn’t have to pay for a global find and replace of a program name to a company for software that someone else made, you can still download Yodm’3d v1.4 for free

(Mirrors: http://www.winfuture.de/downloadstart,1185376417,1924.html ~ http://www.portablefreeware.com/download.php?id=1286 ~ http://www.mininova.org/tor/808321 )

ChrisSoft - Thank you for a wonderful piece of software. But true computer lovers aren’t in it for the money. Otaku Software - I wish the worst for you.

Yod’m 3D by Chris ‘Soft is a free virtual desktop manager which mimics the 3D functionality of Beryl by “spinning” your desktops in a cube-like rotation.  This software utilizes DirectX 9 to force your desktop into a cube but does not require that awesome of a video card.

I chose this desktop manager over the others merely for the fancy footwork displayed while changing desktops giving one the illusion of multiple desktops.  Other desktop managers merely show windows, and hide others giving you the impression you are switching.  The inclusion of a mapping of the desktops on a cube allows the user to believe there are more desktops.

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Update: Recommended by Ady Romantika, maintainer of PidginPortable

My custom smileys package for Pidgin has been released. ForumSmileys v0.8 is a collection of smileys from around the web that I’ve found on forums and such. There are over 170 smileys.

A sample has been provided below.  Most icons are in the same style.  Many animations.

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CacheViewer is a plugin for Firefox which allows you easy access to your cache.  It presents a nice easy front-end for your cache directory and allows you the option of saving files from either memory or disk.

XAMPP (eXtendable Apache MySQL PHP Perl, I think) is a quick and easy package for portable web development. It’s main purpose is to be an easy-to-install distribution for developers to get into the world of Apache. To make it convenient for developers XAMPP is configured with all features turned on. Just install one package to get a complete website back-end in minutes.

The default configuration includes the latest versions of the following:

• Apache - The base webserver
• SSL - SSL so you can browse via https://
• MySQL - Database backend
• PHP - Server-side scripting
• phpMyAdmin - Simple web based interface for managing the database

In addition to the defaults, the package includes many other additions, such as mod_rewrite, that just need to be enabled via a config file change.

The windows version is also built as a lite package which does not need to be setup! Just copy to your portable thumb drive and go!