Great advice on using encrypted disk images

Tidbits has an excellent essay on using encrpyted disk images. I particularly like the technique that requests a password on startup -- storing the password in the keychain is a bad idea, but having to remember to open the image each startup is a nuisance ...

TidBITS: Unintelligible Garbage Is Your Friend

... Add the encrypted disk image file to your login items. Choose System Preferences > Accounts and click the Login Items tab. Click the plus sign button, find the .sparseimage file, select it, and click Add (or just drag the file into the Login Items tab). Now, whenever you restart or log in to your account, your Mac will ask you for your decryption password and mount the virtual disk on your Desktop. You can eject the virtual disk to protect the files if you're putting your computer to sleep, or even just stepping away from your desk.

For extra convenience, put an alias to the virtual disk where you used to keep the unencrypted files, so it behaves just like the folder it's replacing. If you give it the same name, other programs that expect the unencrypted folder to be there should still continue to work while the volume is mounted. If your encrypted volume isn't mounted, trying to open the alias will prompt you for your password...

Information visualization goes mainstream

Crooked Timber: Data ain’t just for geeks anymore

Gapminder. A great exercise for the next time I teach information visualization.

JBL On Time Time Machine Alarm Clock/Dock for iPod - worst purchase ever

After some research I bought the JBL Time Machine Alarm Clock/Dock for iPod - White (JBLONTIME).

Here's a quick list that I'll expand on over the next week or so, after which I'll put this on Amazon.

• It does not work with my 5G iPod. The iPod wakes up and starts to show the last song played (as designed), but it then starts playing the first song in the Library. It is unacceptable that the vendor sells this device as though it worked.
  
• With my old 3G iPod it behaves as designed. It awakens to the last song played. I use it with my 3G iPod so I won't return it.
  
• It has a really dumb eerie blue glowing LED at the top. I guess that's for those who want to dream of alien abduction. It serves no purpose, it doesn't even illuminate the clock controls (that might have been useful). I taped over it.
• It starts quietly and the volume ramps up. You can't control this. That's the worst "feature" so far (and a surprise -- so much for the Amazon reviewers!); I'd prefer disable this depending on how I arrange my playlist. A remote would have compensated a bit, but ...
• There's no remote. I decided that was ok because it's one less thing to lose, one less set of batteries, and one less place for designers to move controls to. This thing is, after all, an alarm. We don't get to sleep in. Ever. The volume ramping does make me miss this more than I'd expected however.
• The documentation is weak with multiple typos and grammatical errors. It doesn't tell you what the RDS On/Off setting does, for example.
• The sound is ok, very acceptable for an alarm clock. It's not a high fidelity system but it's fine.
• The buttons seem flimsy and cheap.
  
• It has a big, heavy, wall wart power brick. At least the color matches.
• It's not documented, but if you have young eyes and good light you'll find text describing the matching iPod beneath each of the cradle inserts.
  

The system reminds me of the gulf between Apple and most other consumer goods manufacturers. Apple stuff does not have ugly wall warts, mistranslated manuals (of course their printed manuals are rather brief, but they're good), ultra-cheap buttons and gratuitous glowing diodes. Apple would have given us the option to disable volume ramping.

So how come design nuts like me are so rare in the world? Grump. Two stars for users of older iPods.

Update 2/16/07: Since I bought this thing about 6 months ago it's been no end of bother. The internal OS would crash every few weeks, then it began losing time. To make the alarm reliable, I have to mount the iPod, press the mysterious "on" (really is a Play button, not an On button) button, and double check that the play state of the JBL is in sync with the "play" state of the iPod. I'll eventually check out the warranty. Blech.

Update 11/30/09: This was one of the worst purchases I ever made. It was so bad I couldn't get it to die. The horrible UI, the frequent crashes, the missed alarms ... Today, after my son was late for school, we bought an extremely crummy clock/radio and the JBL became a basement mini-stereo. Ironically, as a mini-stereo, it's not bad. I've got an old, unused iPod in the cradle loaded with music, an aux-in from one of our two half-broken combo DVD/VCRs, and it gets FM and AM stations. My kids may get some use from it at last.

Call Recorder for Skype

I tried using Audio Hijack Pro once to record a Skype call. It as a real nuiscance.

So this interests me: Ecamm Network: Call Recorder for Skype - Automatically Record Calls On Your Mac. I own AHP and know it, so I might not buy this, but if it works it would have real value.

Nikon 18-200, Canon ???

My friend torments me by flaunting this Nikon lens - he knows I have a Canon D-SLR. The Amazon review, sorted as always by lowest to highest, are very positive. It's dirt cheap by lens standards - $700.00. The vibration damping at 200 mm is astounding.

Canon doesn't have anything to match it. Hmpph. Canon, have you no sense of shame?

OS X Leopard: my one wish

Leopard will be preannounced in the next few months. I have only one wish for it. No, not XP virtualization -- we have Parallels and that will suffice for me.

I want a remote access capability that's at least as good as Microsoft's ancient remote desktop protocol. This is a capability Windows has had built-in (XP Pro) for eons. True, Apple has something called 'Apple Remote Desktop', but I've never seen it in action. I don't have a trusted source to tell me if it really works for remote control. Not to mention that it costs more than a new version of OS X.

I believe Jobs has decided not to do this (ever?), and I expect to be disappointed. Other than that, there's not much in Leopard I'm likely to care about. (Vista? Surely you jest.)

Phil Bradley on search engines - from Exalead to Grokker

Phil Bradley is a Library science guy who blogs about libraries and search. I've read him for years, he's great. Now that Google's Firefox sync has made bookmarks useful again I'm using his web pages to rebuild my collection of search engine links. I always start with Google, but if Google and Google Scholar and Google Government disappoint, where should one go next? (Ok, so he doesn't discuss Bloglines Search yet ...).

Phil has two great resource pages on this topic:

• Search Engines on Squidoo: Squidoo is some kind of social network ranking site ...
• tabular representation: Same material, very succinct presentation.

I'm picking a few of my favorites from the collection, like Exalead (Bradley's fave), Brainboost, MSN Encarta Search, Dogpile, Thumbshots, Clusty, Ask.com, Wisenut, Yahoo Mindset and Grokker.

Update: Turns out I've written about this before! What's new is I can now sync these bookmarks across four machines - painlessly.