Today I discovered a wonderful OSX control panel called GeekTool, which lets you put all kinds of stuff on your desktop. I wish I had known about this long ago, but better late than never =)

My goal was to tail a logfile on a remote server and display it on my desktop. GeekTool supports three types of “Geeklet”: File, Image, and Shell. File displays the content of a file, Image displays an image, and Shell displays the output of a shell command (good thing I’m here to clarify!) Each of them has various options, which the GeekTool website documents in further detail.

The shell geeklet is implemented as a (probably recurring) shell command that gets run, with the output being shown on completion. Unfortunately, this rules out the simple approach of `ssh user@server “tail -f /var/log/yourlog”`. By running an ssh process to tail the log and piping the output into a local file, we can happily have our “log tail” without continuous ssh connects and disconnects: `ssh -f user@server “tail -f /var/log/yourlog” > /tmp/server_log_yourlog`.

Throw in a file geeklet, and you’re done. I happened to want the newest text on top, so I used a shell geeklet of `tail -r -100 /tmp/server_log_yourlog`. Enjoy your upside-down live server logs on your desktop!

I today had the unfortunate experience of having to deal with PrintRoom, which is pathetic. Not only do all pictures (in my case, anyway) get stamped with a low-rent watermark, but they’re shown through a flash-based interface, and scaled to 1.2x original size by a low-quality algorithm!

Needless to say, I took personal exception. So I wrote a script to download all the photos out of a PrintRoom album. It required a perl interpreter, the LWP::Simple module, and wget installed on your system. If you don’t know what this means, the script is not for you. If you have a compatible system and are stuck with printroom, then download the script.

So I’ve been playing with OSXCrypt and TrueCrypt for a few days now, and found out some things that aren’t so obvious from the websites.

• Both can only format in the FAT filesystem. Since their primary virtue over encrypted DMGs is cross-platform portability, this probably isn’t too big of a deal.
• You can use the disk utility to reformat a mounted encrypted volume if you want another filesystem.
• With TrueCrypt volumes, you can’t eject from finder, with OSXCrypt you can eject from finder but need to complete from command-line anyway.
• OSXCrypt is MUCH faster than the official TrueCrypt release. I didn’t do benchmarking, but the difference is easily noticeable.
• You can’t copy large files into a TrueCrypt volume unless you use Disk Utility to reformat to another filesystem.
• OSXCrypt doesn’t yet do full-disk encryption, and seems to be unable to create an encrypted disk larger than 1GB.
• TrueCrypt has a GUI, but it doesn’t really feel like it was designed for mac. OSXCrypt has no GUI, but it’s pretty self-explanitory usage (I had an easier time figuring out OSXCrypt than TrueCrypt).
• It seems that OSXCrypt won’t mount images that don’t have a .img suffix (due to their usage of hdiutil).
• From what I’ve seen around the internet, OSXCrypt is currently more reliable than TrueCrypt.

While it seems neither is quite ready for day-to-day use, I’ll be sticking with OSXCrypt and/or sparseimage files for now. I’m certainly looking forward to support of full-disk encryption, however.

TrueCrypt 5.0 was released today, adding support for Mac OSX among other things. As a OSX user, I’ve been awaiting full-disk encryption for some time. However, as of January 27th, the OSXCrypt project has also been completed.

Now, to keep the record straight, TrueCrypt and OSXCrypt have different goals. TrueCrypt allows for steganography, encrypted disk images (something OSX has not been lacking), and full disk encryption. OSXCrypt, on the other hand, is not an encryption solution in and of itself. Instead, they provide a framework for various encryption solutions.

Personally, I don’t see anything lacking in TrueCrypt‘s feature list, and a 5.0 tag is a little more reassuring to me than 6.2A. I’m going to be installing TrueCrypt shortly, but I’m wondering if anyone has had experience with OSXCrypt and recommend it.

Some quick updates that may be of interest to those considering installing one or the other:

• TrueCrypt‘s OSX implementation is based on MacFUSE.
• MacFUSE comes bundled with other filesystems (NTFS, WebDav, ZFS, FTP, etc)
• OSXCrypt is probably a lighter-weight install.
• OSXCrypt has no GUI, whereas TrueCrypt does.

Due to low-rent DSL, I needed some way to confirm many parts of a file transfer. After a few google searches, I found a great app called MacSFV… which is practically impossible to find a working download for. So now that I’ve found a working download, I’m playing host to MacSFV_2.0.1.dmg. Enjoy!