This article adresses the following problem: Assuming you have some amount of data, let's say 20 GB, on your local machine at home, and you would like to synchronize this data with a remote server. You are a security aware person and your local hard drive is encrypted. Therefore, it would make no sense to just upload this data unencryptedy to an unencrypted remote server you eventually don't even really trust. We suggest the following solution to this problem (assuming you work in a Win7 environment or something like that): Instead of the data itself, we will upload a True Crypt file container instead. Then we use Dokan to mount the remote drive as a local drive. The file container on this ''local drive'' is then mounted via True Crypt as a drive. Now you can use any local synchronization tool of your choice and dismount everything again. Usage of all this different software can be simplified by using AutoHotkey. Do you want to know more?

In the process of doing some windows customization, Chuck shot his Windows dead. Hence, we needed a USB stick to boot Grml. It's quite easy to make a USB stick bootable in Windows, and here's the short version: I will assume that your USB stick is drive U:. Use the command-line tool diskpart and use the command list disk to find your USB stick (check the size). Then, enter:

select disk <usb stick number>
clean
create partition primary
select partition=1
active
format fs=ntfs quick label=”overdrive”
assign

and exit the diskpart utility. Finally, use

bootsect /nt60 U:
xcopy <image>:\*.* U:\*.* /S /E /F

to first make the stick bootable and then copy all data to the stick, where image is a directory where the files from your ISO reside. If you do not have the bootsect utility for some reason, grab it from a friend who has Windows 7.

TrueCrypt is the tool of choice to encrypt your computer hard drives, and under windows it offers the option to encrypt the system drive on the fly, which is very comfortable. As you might guess, this could also go terribly wrong, which is why TrueCrypt forces you to create a rescue disk ISO, which has saved me a lot of trouble in the past. However, by default, TrueCrypt does not let you encrypt your system drive before you have actually burned that image to a real CD, and that, on the other hand, is quite annoying in a day and age where many notebooks no longer have an optical drive. What few people know - this check can be turned off by executing

"TrueCrypt Format.exe" /noisocheck

If you don't believe me, try it yourself or check out their documentation.

Just a quick note to everybody that wants to copy a file from (an old) hard drive and keeps getting a "Data error (cyclic redundancy check)" (either in the explorer and in a shell using various commands to copy): Download and use PC Inspector File Recovery (execute it with admin privileges).

Since a while now, Opera features an intelligent feature to detect logos in websites to use as thumbnails in your speed dial. If you are contempt, don't bother reading. If it annoys you, type about:config, search for Thumbnail Logo Score Threshold and set that value to 1000, say.