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One thing that I’m missing in Snow Leopard is the “add as email attachment” option in the Finder context menu as I find myself constantly right-clicking a file when I want to send it to someone. The functionality exists but not in the context menu. You need to go all the way to Finder->Services->New Email With Attachment.

Some may argue well, that’s the way it is, Apple decided this is the best way of doing things, you need to accept it and move on. Why do that, when fixing it the way you want it is a couple of seconds away?

If you want to be able to right-click a file in Finder in order to add it as an attachment, this is what you need to do:

1. Start Automator
2. Choose the Service template
3. In the dropdown boxes that appear choose “files or folders” and “Finder”
4. Click the Mail application in the Library tree
5. Drag the “New Mail Message” to the workflow area
6. Save the new service (the name of the workflow will appear in the context-menu)

That’s it! The new action should appear at the bottom when you right-click a file in Finder.

Posted by patrik in Snow Leopard | No Comments

Truecrypt 6.3 has finally been released and now fully supports Snow Leopard. No need to patch and compile anymore, simply grab your copy from here: http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads

Posted by patrik in Snow Leopard | No Comments

I have written about my Bubba|Two NAS before and I am still very happy with it. It’s not a performance beast but so quiet that it’s not noticeable in our living room which has always been the most important for me. Even though it runs RAID-1 and mirrors the 1TB internal disk to an external eSata disk I wanted to add some additional security by moving some of the most important files off-site. This article will describe some of the challenges and my final solution. The setup can be used on any Debian or Ubuntu based distribution.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by patrik in Howto | 7 Comments

A part from my Mac running OS X I am running quite a few Ubuntu and Debian servers and workstations. One thing that has been bugging me for quite a while is the fact that the backspace key has not been working properly in the nano editor on these systems when accessed over ssh from my OS X laptop. Instead of deleting the character immediately to the left of the cursor, it deletes the character to the right as if I was hitting the delete key.

I got some creative suggestions such as: “Well, don’t use nano use vi/emacs/pico instead”. Those are all great suggestions but I still wanted to solve the problem with nano as it’s installed on all of my systems, and I find myself using it a lot.

Doing some Googling I came up with one solution, which I wasn’t entirely happy with as it involved changing the TERM settings on the remote computer. This isn’t all bad but I wanted to try to find a solution that actually just affects  nano rather than every other program that uses the TERM environment variable. For those of you that don’t consider this to be a problem you can simply place the following in your .bash_profile or equivalent file.

export TERM=xterm

By studying the /etc/nanorc I immediately found something interesting which turned out to be a better solution:

## Fix Backspace/Delete confusion problem.

set rebinddelete

In order to set this option for everyone on the system it needs to go in /etc/nanorc, however for me it’s sufficient to fix it for my own accounts. This can be done by issuing the following command:

echo "set rebinddelete" >> $HOME/.nanorc

Now, the next time you start nano the backspace should behave as backspace rather than delete. Delete still works by pressing fn+backspace as usual.

Posted by patrik in Snow Leopard | No Comments

Well, it finally bit me in the … Storing sensitive information, such as passwords for encrypted volumes, in the system keychain is a *REALLY* *REALY* bad idea! Why? Well, in contrast to the login keychain that is unlocked by a user’s password (transparently, if the same as the login password) the system keychain is accessible by any administrator on the system. So basically anyone with root access can dump all passwords from the system keychain.

If this wasn’t bad enough you can simply boot the system using the installation DVD and reset any administrator password, login and have instant access to the system keychain. So, well, using the system keychain for passwords to encrypted disks is not a great idea.

I therefore removed the articles referring to how to setup TrueCrypt with the keychain.

Posted by patrik in Security | No Comments