Secure Notes on your Mac

I’ve been storing some information in my Entourage notes which should really be kept secured behind a password; I had tried out some of the shareware apps that let you keep passwords/records/notes in a secure fashion — but they always seems clunky/slow and not 100% trustworthy.

I recently found out that my mac already has an excellent app built into do just this; KeyChain Access (/Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.app/)

It allows you to create Secure notes (File > New Secure Note) that are protected via your main keychain password.

Do you have some information that you want to keep for your eyes only? You can add secure notes into your keychain and you can decrypt on an ‘as needed’ basis…

Read more about how to do this here

Mac Book Pro display wake-up issues

My desk

Second Update: The latest MBP firmware seems to have solved my problems completely. Ars Technica ‘officially’ details the problem — too bad Apple won’t give more details on what this latest update fixes. Let me know if this update solves your issues also.

Update: The work around below did not work. Further reading and investigation leads me to believe is has to do with Leopard Graphics Update 1.0 that was released a couple months back. Supposedly Apple is aware and working on a fix.

For work I use a Mac Book Pro plugged into a second monitor.

Something had gotten messed up when not plugged into my ACD, eventually almost all the time when opening the lid the laptop display would not wake-up. I could hear the finder working/beeping/the hard drive spinning but nothing would get the screen back from black.

This had led to some forced restarts which is never a good thing.

It hadn’t seemed to be happening at work. The clue came when I was at home where I have a DVI to VGA adaptor for sending movies to my TV as a second output.

The screen had gone black again on wake; this time I happened to try plugging in the DVI adaptor to see if there was any video signal and voila; my desktop popped up on my TV. I unplugged the DVI connector and my laptop screen came back on just fine. (seems obvious after the fact)

I searched around and found someone who had seen this, and discovered a potential solution.

“I’ve had this problem too; when I first got my new MacBook Pro it worked fine. Then recently, this problem began to crop up, especially after I had connected an external monitor, put the machine to sleep and restarted — the MacBook Pro screen came up black (sometimes just showing the cursor, sometimes not).

The following seems to have cured the problem for me (at present!). Quit all running applications. Go to /System/Library and find Extensions.mkext. Delete it (password needed). Restart.

I’d like to know if this works for other people.” — http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6854528

I followed through with his recommendation. My mac took a couple extra minutes to boot up the next time; checking the /System/Library/Extensions.mkext file — it was newly created and seemed to be the same size (10.1 meg).

Seems to have solved my problem for now. I’m almost positive this is something that will be addresses in a 10.5.x to come.

Canadian Tibet action items

Tibet kids

Some action items Canadians can follow to help support Tibet;

“An important message from the Canada Tibet Committee:

As the world has witnessed the atrocities and repression being systematically carried out by Chinese military authorities against peaceful demonstrations in Tibet, more and more of you have asked how you can help and what you can do.”

Read the full post for instructions on petitioning the government, local events, and more.

http://tibet.ca/en/newsroom/news_releases/102

Safari 3.1 offers development tools

safari dev

(click here for large version of screenshot above)

Finally Safari 3.1 (released on 08/03/18) is offering some built in web developer tools that are accessible through a checkbox in the advanced prefs.

I’m not a huge active developer like I used to be, but I still know my way around HTML/CSS and some JS and this will get me through the process quicker when I’m occasionally thrown back in. Also these tools will also hopefully help me give more accurate bug reports to everyone I work with.

  • Adds option in Safari preferences to turn on the new Develop menu which contains various web development features
  • Allows access to Web Inspector
  • Allows access to Network Timeline
  • Allows editing CSS in the Web Inspector
  • Allows custom user agent string
  • Improves snippet editor
  • full notes here

    Another small part of the update which I love having back is “Includes URL metadata when images are dragged or saved from browser” in a “Where from:” item in finder info.

    Huge timesaver when ‘comping’ images together for a design before buying them. Some reference is better than none.

    Kudo’s to Apple; Good move.

    Elbert McLaughlin

    Elbert McLaughlin

    Elbert McLaughlin has started blogging.

    He’s one of the smartest guys I know, and after spending a couple days with him in Texas, I’m convinced he’s destined for great stuff.

    A bit about Elbert…

    “I’m the Technical Director at PeopleLikeUs, a small web agency. I’m also acting CTO and a cofounder of WEBCARGO. I’m jazzed by innovation, especially online in areas such as social networking and content sharing, digital rights management, large scale systems and elegant user experiences. On a personal level, I’m a classical pianist, world traveler (when I have time), red wine and sushi lover. No kids yet, but we do have a lovely cat.”

    Grab his RSS feed.

    http://elbertmclaughlin.blogspot.com/

    Twitter

    twit

    You can find me on Twitter here. If you don’t know what twitter is…

    “Twitter is a free social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time.”

    It’s something I might use much more if I had an iphone, which I will have once they’re available here; @ ver 2.1 and the plan isn’t $$$. But we’ll see how it goes from the desktop for now.

    Stevey @ Twitter

    SXSW Day 5


    can you hear it –?
    (last poached Nancy photo – sorry Nancy!)

    Last day; everyone’s heading out for dinner (a MTL meet-up to make some new friends) and parties (MT and whatever others we stumble into).

    I’ll post more of a recap over the next couple days.

    SXSW 08 rocked.