A Safe, Easy Way to Encrypt Files

How do I encrypt files, and which ones should I encrypt?

Any system that encrypts your entire hard drive is overkill for most PC users. I prefer encrypted safes, which are files that contain encrypted folders and files. To the outside world, a safe looks like a big file filled with gobbledygook. Open a safe with its password, and you reveal a virtual drive holding your sensitive data. When you're done and you close the safe, the data reverts to gobbledygook.

Safes are easy to use, transportable from one PC to another, and a breeze to back up. I recommend the free open-source safe program TrueCrypt, which supports AES-256, Blowfish, Triple DES, and other heavy-duty encryption algorithms. TrueCrypt hides your safe well--if you're in the belt-and-suspenders crowd, it can even place your safe inside another safe.

Remember: No encryption is secure with an easy-to-guess password. Safest is a string of 20 or more apparently random letters and numbers. But how do you remember such a password?

Make up an easy-to-remember but impossible-to-figure-out formula of family names, birthdays, and memorable words. For instance, use your kids' names spelled backward, with every third letter capitalized, followed by your birthday squared.

Write the password or the formula on a business card and carry it in your wallet. It's unlikely that someone will steal your wallet and your PC, and even less likely that they'll figure the card out.

What files should you put in the safe? Any that you don't want crooks, competitors, coworkers, or even your own children to see. One top priority is financial information, especially if it involves credit card, bank, or Social Security numbers. Passwords to retail Web sites should also be stored in the safe. You might put some sensitive work-related files there as well (although your IS department likely has an encryption policy). Your résumé , family photos, private e-mail, and other files that you want to keep secure and confidential are candidates for the safe, too.

Speed up Firefox up to 500% !!

1. Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll
down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time.
When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really
speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This
means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer.
Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0".
This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on
information it receives.

If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages 2-30 times faster
now.

DVD Burning Tips: How to Avoid the Top Five Disc-Burning Mistakes

CD/DVD recorders and media are pretty mature and stable products at this point. But if you aren't careful, a bad burn could still happen--and leave you with only a bicycle reflector for your effort. Here are the five most common disc-burning errors, and how to avoid them.

1. You didn't verify: If there's a golden rule for burning discs, it's "Thou shalt verify." Using your burning software's verify (or validate) function to compare what has been written with what was read is your best hedge against nasty surprises down the road . The verify function won't increase your chances of burning a disc successfully, but it will let you know of a problem in time to burn another disc. Many a seemingly successful burn will bug out when you play it--not because the disc has gone bad, but because the burn was bad to begin with.

2. It's the wrong media: In a perfect world, choosing the right media wouldn't be an issue. But nothing is more frustrating or embarrassing than sitting down in front of Grandma's TV at the family reunion only to watch her DVD player choke miserably on the photo album you labored over so dutifully. The moral of the story? Select media that you know your player (or Grandma's) will support. In the case of DVDs, that means choosing from DVD±/RW or DVD-RAM.

If you buy bare, no-name blank media (CD or DVD), follow the golden rule above (verify!)--and prepare to run into the occasional bad disc. In my experience, DVD media tends to be a lot more reliable than CD media; but generally speaking, the lower a disc's cost, the better its chances of heading straight to the scrap heap.

3. You're going too fast: Nobody likes waiting around for a disc to burn. Unfortunately, going as fast as you can isn't always the best strategy. While I've rarely had problems burning rewritable CDs and DVDs, their recordable counterparts are a different story. Some CD-R and DVD-R discs burn at top speed correctly, but I've experienced blowouts with many others. Once you factor in the time you spend trying to determine what the problem is, you might be better off stepping your burn speed down a notch. And unless you're using a stopwatch, you'll never notice the difference between, say, 18X and 16X anyway.

4. The firmware's gone soft: With the intense pressure to get products out the door in a competitive market, your burner's firmware or software bundle may not have been exactly perfect when you bought it. Shocking, I know, but the point is that the firmware or software has almost certainly been updated (or soon will be), and if you're not happy with your burner's performance, you should avail yourself of those updates, which you'll find on the vendor's Web site. Still, there's a heap of truth to the old saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Updates all too often cause problems of their own. If your discs are burning fine, let your burner be. (Even drive vendors will tell you that.) But if your drive habitually stutters when you switch to a new brand of disc, for example, a firmware or software update will likely help.

5. You're cruisin' for a bruisin': Today's PCs are more than fast enough to juggle other tasks while burning discs. But as I hinted above, programmers sometimes have bad days, and software does crash--taking your nearly completed burn with it. You'll increase your chances for success if you minimize the number of apps running while you burn your discs. I'm not saying that you should avoid multitasking or burning in the background altogether, but I am saying that you ought to be careful. If you're down to your last disc and you have time for only one go, shut down all your other apps, set the disc to burning, get a cup of your favorite beverage, contemplate the universe for a few minutes--and don't mess with your computer until the job is finished.