OS X Hacker

Quicksilver + iTunes for easy song navigation

This one’s probably obvious to most Quicksilver users, but one of the things I hate is when I’m deep into writing some code and a song comes on iTunes that I want to skip. Most of the time when I’m working, I have iTunes running some playlist on random, and when a song comes on that I don’t want to listen to, I have to switch over to iTunes from whatever application I’m using to click “next.” it’s a pain in the ass and can easily distract me from my workflow. So, today I set up a couple of Quicksilver triggers to give myself easy access to the next and previous songs in my iTunes playlist. I set up CMD-ArrowRight for next song and CMD-ArrowLeft for previous. It’s simple, but a lifesaver when the need arises. Just go into Quicksilver, type CMD-’ to go to the triggers section, click on the iTunes icon for the iTunes triggers and activate the triggers for next song and previous song.

Click the picture for a larger view

Flicksilvr a great plugin that allows you to tag and upload one or many picture files from anywhere on your system, with the use of Quicksilver. Simply select the pictures you want to upload to flickr, invoke QS, load the selected files into QS (cmd g), and then select the ‘upload to flickr’ action. A tab into the third pane lets you type in space separated tags for your photo(s). -appleblog (0) # 04/27/07

Quicksilver + YubNub: Rapid web searches and more | Great post over at LifeClever on using QuickSilver to search the web. (0) # 04/20/07

Encrypt Files in OS X

Much to my wife’s chagrin, I’ve decided to put my credit card number on my Mac. She, of course, isn’t worried about security, she’s worried about me having easy access to my credit card, thus making it easier for me to buy software online. Sorry honey. I, however, AM worried about security. The last thing I need is for my laptop to get stolen and for my credit card number to be found. Lots of bad things would happen, not the least of which would be my wife kicking my ass. So I decided to look for a solution that would allow me to encrypt my data. Quite naturally I found FileVault and Disk Utility, but both of those options seemed like overkill for encrypting one file. So I went with MacGPG instead.

Installing MacGPG isn’t straight forward, because the encryption engine is a software package by itself and the tools for using it are separate. So here’s how I did it, perhaps this solution will work for you.

Step 1
Download the GNU Privacy Guard from the link above. It will take you through the basic installation of MacGPG.

Step 2
Create a folder in your applications folder called gpg or macgpg (the choice is yours). Then download the following four packages from the link above: GPG Keychain Access, GPGFileTool, GPGDropThing, and GPGPreferences.

Step 3
Install GPGPreferences first. This will install a preference pane in System Preferences that you can use to configure GPG later on if you need to. Then install the remaining three applications, GPG Keychain Access, GPGFileTool and GPGDropThing by placing them in the folder you created.

Step 4
Open the GPG Keychain Access program, it will prompt you to create your public/private key pair (you only need to do this once). Just follow the prompts. If you have more questions about this step, see the documentation.

Step 5
Create or find a file that you’d like to encrypt, then open the GPGFileTool. From the GPGFileTool file menu, open the file you want to encrypt, choose encrypt from the dropdown menu, then click “do it.” It will ask you to save the file, when you choose save, it will give you the option of saving it as a .gpge file, choose that options.

That’s it, you’ve encrypted your file. To decrypt it, simply double click the file and it will open the GPGFileTool automagically. Click the “do it” button and it will prompt your for the passphrase you chose when you initially created your public/private key pair. As an added bonus, you can now install the FireGPG Firefox plugin to encrypt email messages from Gmail! Lastly, if you want to quickly encrypt a file, you can use Quicksilver like so:

Another option is to use the freeware application iCrypt, however the encryption is only 128bit as opposed to GPG which supports 2048bit and higher.