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How to Create a Mac Snow Leopard USB Installer Disk

Damien — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:00:53 +0000

All Macs come with a DVD drive that you can use, so in most situations, you won’t have the need for a USB installer disk. However, there can be times when your DVD ROM is spoilt and you need to reformat/upgrade your OS. This is where an USB installer disk comes in handy. In addition, with this USB disk, you can also use it to install Mac OS on a machine without CD-ROM (i.e netbook).

In this tutorial, we will go through the way to create a Snow Leopard USB installer disk.

Requirement

An existing Mac with functional DVD-ROM
Snow leopard installer DVD (upgrade set or box set)
A USB thumb drive of at least 8GB in size

Creating a USB installer disk

1. Plug in your USB drive. Backup all the data in the USB drive.

2. Insert your Snow Leopard Installer DVD into the DVD-ROM.

3. Go to Utility -> Disk Utility. You should see the USB drive and the SL installer DVD entries on the left pane.

4. Select the USB drive. On the right pane, click on the Partition tab.

5. Here are few things that you need to do:

Under the Volume Scheme, select ‘1 Partition‘ from the dropdown
At the Name input field, enter a new name for the partition (I choose to give it the same name as the SL installer DVD).
At the Format field, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) from the dropdown.

At the bottom, click on the Options button.

Select GUID partition table.

Click Apply. This will repartition and reformat the USB drive.

6. Once it is done, click on the Restore tab. You will see two input field: Source and Destination.

Drag the SL Installer DVD entry to the Source field.

Drag the newly formatted USB entry to the Destination field.

Click Restore.

This will copy the image from the DVD Installer to the USB drive. You can go for a coffee break now as the whole process takes about 30 mins.

When the whole process is done, you will be able to boot and install Snow Leopard from the USB drive.

To boot your Mac from USB, you just need to select the respective entry in System Preferences -> Startup Disk.

How to Create a Mac Snow Leopard USB Installer Disk originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Easily Mount Your iPhone As An External Drive in Ubuntu

Damien — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:27:35 +0000

For those who own an iPhone/iPod Touch and at the same time is an Ubuntu (or Linux) users, here’s is a good news. You can now easily mount your iPhone in your Ubuntu without having to jailbreak your phone.

In the past, the dirty but effective way to access the iPhone from your Linux system is via SSH. This requires you to jailbreak your phone and it voids the warranty. With iFuse, you can now mount your iPhone/iPod Touch under Linux with just a USB cable. You can also view/edit/cut/copy/paste the file just like any USB disk drive.

Installation

Open up your terminal, type the following to open up your APT sources file

gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

Insert the following lines to the end of the file

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/jonabeck/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/jonabeck/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

The above is assuming that you are using Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty). For any other version, simply replace the jaunty by the respective version name (hardy, intrepid, karmic etc)

Save and close the file.

Back in the terminal:

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com F0876AC9
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ifuse

Once the installation is done, connect your iPhone to your computer via the USB cable.

Open up your Nautilus. You should see the iPhone/iPod entry at the side pane. This show that it is already mounted in your system.

Click on the entry to view the filesystem.

Things that you can do

1. View/copy/download photos.

You can now manage the photos that you have taken with your iPhone without iTunes.

2. Create folders, upload/download files

You can now use your iPhone as a USB drive and use it for file storage. To allow confusion/conflict with the other system files, it is best to create a custom folder (and name it My Folder) and store all your files there.

3. Managing address book/calendar (upcoming)

Work is underway to sync the contact data with Conduit.

What you cannot do now

Manage your music database

Apple uses a cryptographic signing algorithm to encrypt all the music files. While you can access the music folder, there is no way that you can transfer your music over and get it to work in your iPhone.

Note:
1. iFuse is not Ubuntu-specific app. It works for most Linux distro as well.

2. Mac users can also use iPhoneDisk to achieve similar functionality.

How to Easily Mount Your iPhone As An External Drive in Ubuntu originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

42 Useful Portable Apps For Mac

Trevor Dobrygoski — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 12:26:28 +0000

A while back I posted 10 Useful Portable Applications to Run On Your USB Drive. I thought it was time to do the same type of post for all of the Mac folks. If you do not find something in this list to suit your needs, with a few Google searches you are likely to find something to work for you.

1. Cyberduck

Opensource Mac FTP client. If you aren’t using Cyberduck, here is a basic run through.

2. Portable VLC OS X

The play anything media player. Highly recommended if you are using multiple computers.

3. Portable Adium

All-in-one instant messenger (Google, ICQ, Yahoo, AIM, MSN…)

4. Portable Firefox Cross Plartform

Firefox for both Windows and OSX. Use Firefox with add-ons like Xmarks to sync your bookmarks.

5. Portable Thunderbird Cross Platform

The cross platform version of Mozilla Thunderbird will allow you to access your email application anywhere you have a computer with a USB port.

6. Netfixer

Easy to use webpage capture tool. Use the optional bookmarklet to activate the application.

7. Camino

An Opensource web browser built for Macs by Mozilla. Some Firefox-like add-ons are available, but not near as many. Greasemonkey scripts can also be converted for use with Camino.

8. Neverball

Game of skill and patience. Use the mouse to tilt the floor and move the ball; it sounds easy, but it isn’t.

9. FSuite

Over 40 portable apps spanning everything from games to word processors, media players to a BitTorrent client, you shouldn’t be lacking anything in this pack of applications.

10. SmillaEnlarger

A image tool used to resize, especially to magnify .BMP files in high quality.

11. iStumbler

Find AirPort, Bluetooth, Bonjour and other wireless signals and services. Lots of extra information about the networks available in the area.

12. Bean

Free rich text editor compatible with Microsoft Word.

13. ViewIt

Quick-to-open image viewer which supports nearly all commonly used image formats.

14. Inquisitor

Lets you find information on the web in the same way you use Spotlight. Start typing and it will begin to return sites based on your criteria.

15. iBackup

Simple, small application to help automate backups.

16. Paintbrush

A simple Cocoa-based image editor for when Photoshop would be too much of a hassle.

17. Maintenance

System maintenance and repair utility, with different versions for Tiger and Leopard. Some uses are: repair permissions, delete applications, reset Spotlight’s Index, run periodic scripts…

18. Tofu

Text reader that arranges text on a page in columns sized properly for the window you have open. No scrolling up and down, just left to right.

19.TextWrangler

Very powerful very free text editor great for distraction free writing.

20. Portable Abiword

Opensource word processor. Read, write and save to OpenOffice.org, Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, Rich Text Format.

21. Xmind

Opensource mind mapping and collaboration application.

22. Portable Gimp

Opensource image editing. Many very powerful features in a very lightweight package.

23. Portable Inkscape

Opensource graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw or Freehand

24. Portable OpenOffice.org OS X

Complete Opensource office suite able to read and write to most commonly used file types.

25. AppCleaner

An app uninstaller that removes all of the accompanying application files.

26. PureFTPdManager

Opensource multi-user Secure FTP manager, great fro servers or networks.

27. Portable Nvu OS X

Opensource web authoring similar to Dreamweaver

28. Portable Audacity OS X

Opensource recording and editing software.

29. Google Chrome

Google’s web browser on a stick.

30. Smultron

Simple text editor with a massive amount of features

31. Highlight

Screen highlighter (great for presentations)

32. OnyX

Maintenance, optimization, and personalization utility (10.4 or 10.5

33. uTorrent

P2P file transfer. (Here are some set up instructions)

34. Fugu

An opensource SFTP, SCP and SSH client. Esay to set up and use.

35. Portable Check Off

Stand alone to-do manager.

36. Transmission

BitTorrent client. Great for creating and downloading torrent files.

*37 through 42 are listed to only work with OSX 10.4

37. Portable Safari

Bookmarks and preferences on your portable drive.

38. Portable Mail

The same mail and preferences on your portable drive you are used to on your main Mac (use with Portable Address Book).

39. Portable iCal

All your calendar events can go with you on your portable drive.

40. Portable Address Book

Contacts are kind of essential, take them with you on your portable drive.

41. Portable iChat

Keep all your buddies on your portable drive.

42. SyncPAppX

Sync your portable apps with local ones.

Which portable Mac apps do you use?

image credit: Michael Dale Bernard

42 Useful Portable Apps For Mac originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Password Protect Your USB Drive Without Administrator Privilege

Damien — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:00:59 +0000

Password protecting my USB drive is often the most important thing that I do when I went on travel. With all the confidential information in the USB drive, the last thing that I want to see is to lost it and have others to access all my precious data.

Although I have previously covered two useful software for encrypting USB drive: Windows 7 BitLocker and TrueCrypt, one thing that prevented me from using them on the move is that these two software require administrator privilege (or the ultimate version of Windows 7) to use, which in most Internet cafes, you don’t have access to.

There are also several others encryption software out there, but the one that worked well for me, and apparently free and does not require any administrator privileges is Rohos Mini Drive.

What Rohos Mini Drive does is to create hidden and encrypted partition on the USB flash drive memory. When you plug in your USB drive, you won’t get to see the hidden partition. Only when you run the Rohos application (within the USB drive) and enter your password, then will the hidden partition appear. Since the Rohos application does not require access (or modification) to the computer’s system, it doesn’t require any administrator privileges to run it. This is great for those who need to access their encrypted data on a public computer that they don’t have administrator access to.

Installing Rohos Mini Drive

The initial step to create an encrypted USB drive requires you to install and run the application in your own computer. This will require administrator privileges.

Download Rohos Mini Drive (Windows only).

Double click the application to install it in your computer.

Once the installation is done, insert in your USB drive. You don’t have to reformat the drive, but you have to make sure that there is enough space to create the new partition.

Open the Rohos Mini Drive application from the Start menu.

In the main window, click Setup USB Key

Rohos Mini Drive will proceed to detect your USB drive. Click Change to edit the partition configuration.

In the configuration window, you can configure the Disk letter that the hidden partition to be mounted to, the encrypted partition size (maximum 2GB), the file system type and the encryption algorithm. The last thing is to point the installation location to your USB drive. The encrypted file will come with a .rdi extension.

Click OK to proceed.

Back to the USB Key Creation window, enter your password and make sure that it is a safe one. Click Create Disk.

Encryption completed.

Now open your Windows Explorer and navigate to your USB drive. You should see only the Rohos Mini application (which was not there originally).

Double click the Rohos mini application. Enter the encryption password when prompted.

You should now see your hidden partition prompted in the drive letter that you have chosen earlier.

You can install all your portable apps or store your confidential data on the hidden partition now.

What other software do you use to encrypt your USB drive?

How to Password Protect Your USB Drive Without Administrator Privilege originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Easily Encrypt Your USB Drive in Windows 7

Damien — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:24:56 +0000

USB drive is a great tool for you to bring your data anywhere you go without having to lull the whole computer along. The bad thing is, it is small in size and can easily be misplaced or stolen by others. When such incident occurs, the last thing that you want to happen is to let others view your confidential data, and probably do something bad with them.

In Windows 7, there is this new Bitlocker To-Go function that allows you to encrypt your USB drive. In the event that your drive is stolen, there is no way that others can access your data, unless he/she has your password.

If you have not installed Windows 7 on your computer, we do have a great tutorial that teaches you how to do so.

In your computer (the one running Windows 7), plug in your USB drive.

Go to Control Panel -> System and Security -> Bitlocker Drive Encryption. Click Turn On Bitlocker for the removable drive option

You will be asked the method you want to use to unlock the drive (after encryption). There are two methods available: Password or Smart Card. Password is the easier one, but less powerful. In this case, I picked Password.

It will then prompt you to save/print your recovery key. This will come in useful if you have forgotten the password in the future.

Once you are done with the setting, click Next to start encrypting your USB drive. The whole process will take quite some time, depending on the size of your device.

You should see the following message when the encryption is done.

To check if your USB drive is really encrypted, unmount and remount the the USB drive. If the encryption is intact, it will prompt you to enter your password.

Note: If you are using a Windows version other than Windows 7 Ultimate, the Bitlocker To-Go encryption only allows you to read and copy files from the USB drive. You won’t be able to edit or add new files to the drive.

To decrypt the USB drive, simply follow the same procedure as above, but select Turn Off Bitlocker in the control panel.

How to Easily Encrypt Your USB Drive in Windows 7 originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

10 Useful Portable Applications to Run On Your USB Drive

Trevor Dobrygoski — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:15:03 +0000

Portable applications are modified versions of a desktop application that can be run on a USB drive. iPods, USB flash drives, external hard drives or any other portable device can be used. When the applications are stored on said device, the application can be used on any computer running the proper operating system by being plugged into the USB port on a computer. Most of the portable applications are still operating system dependent, but many have cross platform versions. Many open source and a few OEM applications have a portable counterparts. Numerous utility programs are available in a portable version as well.

Choose Wisely

When choosing a portable drive to use, there are a couple things to think about. Not every portable drive will work well for running an application. The write and read speed is crucial here. If the flash drive has a low speed, it will not work for running Firefox portable for example. Too much data is going back and forth so the program will freeze up or crash. I’m not saying you need to spend a lot of money on a drive, just take a look at the specifications before you buy. Something to take into consideration if you are using a SD card, there may be speed limitations imposed by the device the card is in.

1. PStart

PStart is essentially a start menu for information on your USB drive. This handy little application hangs out in the tool bar and runs in the background. When right clicked, a screen pops up and shows all of the programs you have added shortcuts for. Believe me, when I found this amazing little piece of software, it made using my USB drive A LOT easier.

2. Pidgin

Pidgin is an on open source instant messaging client. There are plug-ins which allow it to work with almost all the protocols available including Facebook, twitter and Myspace. Some other plug-ins allow people on your buddy list to see what your listening to on Last.fm or various other media players while you type to them.

3. VLC

VLC is known to most as a simplistic media player that plays any kind of audio or video format you can throw at it. That being said, there is no reason not to have this in your portable arsenal.

4. Firefox

Firefox is another no brainer. It offers all the functionality of the web version, except it fits in your pocket. All of the add-ons and special feature you may use when you are at home are now travel sized. The beauty of using Firefox from the USB drive is, none of your information is left on the computer you are using; Everything is saved on the portable drive. Other Mozilla applications such as Thunderbird and Sunbird are available in a portable version too.

5. uTorrent

uTorrent is a very popular and very light weight BitTorrent client. It uses a very low amount of system resources making it a great addition to any portable drive.

6. GIMP

Gimp is a great free replacement for Photoshop. The main difference between GIMP and Photoshop are the menus.

7. KeePass Password Safe

KeePass Password Safe saves you from having to remember all of your passwords. You choose one master password, that’s it. Isn’t that a lot easier than remembering the log in for all of your email accounts, network password and log in info for all those websites? I thought so.

8. Filezilla

Filezilla is a FTP uploader. If you have a website or blog and need to upload files while on the go, this is your go to application. With its drag and drop support and straight forward set up, it is a great cross platform FTP uploader.

9. 7Zip

7Zip is a great file decompression software that works with 18 different file types. It can also compress files into 5 different file types. The compression rate is greater than Winzip (according to the 7Zip site).

10. Sudoku

Sudoku is a very addictive game that I would have a hard time leaving out. It is always a good idea to have a way to let your mind wander; With a game that makes you think in a strategic way, your exercising your brain as you play. How can anyone say exercising your mind is a waste of time? If you aren’t into games like this, other games are out there like poker, minesweeper knockoffs and others.

What other applications do you take with you on the road?

Image credit :R-evolution Photography

10 Useful Portable Applications to Run On Your USB Drive originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)