TSA and batteries... an update

It turns out that DC based photographer Greg Mathieson has been working behind the scenes to get this mess sorted out. Here is an email he sent out this morning (Dec 31) regarding the progress he has made towards this fix:

I just got off a conference call with TSA,DOT and DOE and all the powers that be and they are currently going to rewrite the regulation in that there will be no limit on how many batteries can be carried aboard an aircraft. It seems that the PAO putting out the release and notice did not get the facts right in that the issue is the Watt hours, per each individual battery and not that of the combined amount of power or lithium content. What they are trying to prohibit or restrict is that of a single size battery exceeding a set about of lithium, such as a 130WH battery or greater. Only the larger space power batteries that stand alone next to a laptop provide that type of power and some camera crew batteries do as well.

It's recommended though that once the new press release and notice is put out by TSA and DOT that members carry a copy if they are carrying large quantities of batteries onboard an aircraft. Just in the event some TSA guy never got the word or is reading the old notice.

All the best for a happy new year,

Greg E. Mathieson
MAI Photo News Agency, Inc.

So hopefully a new memo will be out soon that will get this straightened out. When it is released, I will post it here.

One lingering concern... it still remains to be seen what this means for photographers that travel with portable light kits that rely on heavy-duty batteries for power....

Airline travel is about to become even more fun!

So the TSA has dropped their latest bombshell on all of us that travel frequently. A new ban on too many rechargeable batteries. Apparently the new rule (effective Jan. 1, 2008) says you can bring two rechargeable batteries other than those actually attached to the devices they were intended for in your carry-on bags. Batteries are now forbidden in checked luggage.

They also need to be in individual baggies to keep them from shorting out or catching fire. But if putting them in a baggie renders them safe, who cares how many you bring on the plane???

I guess I'll be using Fedex to send all my batteries ahead of me on shoots from now on.

Read the release here.

Securing Your Laptop - software and firmware

How easy would it be exploit the contents of your laptop if it was taken? What kind of information is stored on your laptop that you wouldn't want to fall into the hands of criminals? Passwords, banking records, serial numbers, images, contacts and access to any online account that you have "remember me" set up for. Think about all the times people say "I have my entire life on my laptop."

Which means if your laptop gets stolen, and it isn't secure, the person that swipes it suddenly gets to be you... with access to your email, banking and whatever else they can find on it until you can change all your passwords... unless the bad guy beats you to the punch and changes them all for you, effectively locking you out of your own online life.

Here are some things you can do to help prevent this from happening.

1. In System Preferences go to "Security" and check the boxes that say "Require password to wake this computer from sleep or screen saver" and "Disable automatic login."
   
   By doing this, your computer will require you to input your password every time you start your computer and to wake it up from sleep or the screen saver. So if someone steals your laptop, they won't be able to start your computer or use it because they won't know your password.
   
   
2. Use a real password that is at least 6 characters long that uses both letters and numbers and a capital letter or two for good measure. pswd, 0000, 1234, abcd, qwerty, admin, and guest are really not secure passwords... those are all things that crooks are going to try if they are attempting to get into your computer. Avoid your name, your kids names, Canon and/or Nikon for that matter as well... those are all easy to guess.
   
   After you've crafted your password, make sure you remember what it is. Don't write it down on a piece of gaffers tape and stick it to your laptop. That defeats the purpose of having a password. Keep in mind that if you have a password written down, someone could potentially log into your machine over a wireless network you share and access your data that way as well... keep your password a secret.
   
   
3. Enable the firmware password for your laptop. Here are Apple's instructions on how to do it. By turning this feature on, it prevents someone from being able to boot up your laptop from an external device (like a hard drive) or boot it up in any of the diagnostic modes that exist under OS X. The only option for someone would be to do a clean install of the entire machine with an OS X DVD.
   
   This means that your computer is pretty much a brick to anyone that swipes it and doesn't have your user password or the firmware password. If they want to use your computer, they would have to start all over. This means that your data potentially stays safer and is much, much more difficult to access than if you laptop was wide open.
   
   
4. Protect critical data with encryption. Use File Vault (built in) or use Knox to create secure folders on your hard drive to protect critical data. That adds yet another layer of security to your Mac laptop. Password protecting Word, Excel, or other documents is not really any protection at all. There are a ton of ways to quickly crack password protected files.
   
   
5. Protect serial numbers, passwords, and banking info on your laptop. Laptops allow us to run our business from where ever we happen to be. That means that we also have to carry around all the logins and passwords to be able to do that. Securing this data is critical.
   I have recently found 1Password which I am totally taken with because of its ability to autofill passwords on websites, sync between my different computers using my .Mac account and the fact that it is locked tight when not in use. It is the best $25 you could spend to secure and synchronize your password data.
   
   
6. GET REVENGE. A really cool app that has been released for the Mac (and specifically for the MacBook and MacBook Pro with their built-in cameras) is called Undercover. What it does is installs software in the background of your computer that does nothing except check in with their server every so often when it is online. If your laptop gets lifted, you alert Orbicule (the folks that make Undercover) and the next time your laptop goes online and checks in with their server it will start sending photos of the user taken with the built in camera, logging the websites that the user goes to and what he types while he is there, logs their IP addressand send all that stuff to Orbicule in the background so the bad guy has no idea that his every move is being recorded. You then forward all that to the cops and they can get your laptop back and a free trip to the gray bar hotel for the jerk who took it.
   

Securing Your Laptop - Hardware and Paranoia

In January 2004, I was shooting the Michael Jackson arraignment in Santa Barbara for Reuters and the courthouse was an absolute zoo with photographers, fans, protesters, and tv crews everywhere. I was sitting next to another photographer in an outside area at the courthouse where we transmitting photos after Jackson had left. People were walking back and forth all around us. I had my cameras at my feet. He had his cameras at his side on the bench we were sitting on while we were both working away, completely focused on our laptops.

After we both finished and started packing up, he looked over at me and asked if I knew what happened to one of his camera bodies and his 16-35mm lens. He has set it down next to his other body with a 70-200 zoomer on it and his camera bag which were still sitting right next to him, but the one body and wide zoom were gone. It appears that while we were working, someone just walked up and picked up his camera and walked away. Neither of us the wiser until much later when the poor victim started looking for it. But where it was siting next to him, he couldn't actually see it when he was looking at the laptop. By luck, I had my gear by my feet where I could see it, because there was no more room on the bench.

This is one of quite a few stories I know of first hand where laptops, 400mm lenses, camera bodies, hard drives, entire camera bags and lighting kits have seemingly disappeared without a trace.

All of these stories made it clear that the easier something of value is to steal (and the more inattentive the owner is,) the more likely that someone will steal it. So make sure that you keep things secured so that they are not easy to walk away with... this goes for laptops, cameras, gps units and all that type of stuff that is easy to swipe and put on ebay. Unfortunately, if you are a photographer, you are a constant target carrying all of this type of equipment around.

I travel just about everywhere with one of my laptops. I am a photographer who is shooting 95% of my work digitally, so the laptop is a critical piece of getting the images off the compact flash card and to the paying client in a timely manner.

One of the challenges I face with dragging a laptop around all the time is how to keep it secure... especially in the times when I need it up and running so the client has remote access to the images, but I'm not right there next to it.

First thing I do is use a laptop cable lock... even when I am nearby. Keyed cable locks are not the greatest solution for security. In fact, they are pretty easy to defeat with a ball-point pen or cardboard toilet paper tube (this link is to a 8mb .wmv file that shows how easy it is to do.) Combination locks are a little better, but are not terribly hard to defeat if the criminal really wants your laptop.

Most of the time, thieves strike where they can take something and get away quickly. The fact that your laptop is secured to something, even if it is just a combo cable lock makes it harder for someone to make off with your computer without increasing the risk of being caught because they have to fiddle with defeating the lock, increasing their chance of being noticed.

If you are in a situation where there are other laptops present (like a photographer media room at a football game) it means that a thief who is looking for an easy target, will pass on your laptop if it is locked to the table and go for one that is unsecured. I also try to set up as far from the doorway as possible so that the thief will have to travel the longest distance away from their potential escape route (the door) to try to take my stuff. If there are going to be other people (editors) working in the room the whole time, I also try to set up near them (or at the same table) so that no one will mess with my stuff because someone would be right there if they tried to take it.

I also secure my laptop bag through the cable lock. Since most photographer carry card readers, extra batteries, backup hard drives and all the other expensive bits and pieces with their laptop, most laptop bags, without the laptop, still have $100-$500 worth of goodies inside and the bag with or without the computer is another common target of thieves.

I also use a zipper lock (like in the photo) on the zipper of my laptop bags. These locks are not super secure, but again, it deters the thief who is just looking for a easy target. It isn't going to be worth it to try to break into the lock to see what's inside the bag that is attached to the computer's cable lock... the thief will look elsewhere for easy pickings.

Protecting your thumb drive

How many thumb drives (jump drives, usb drives) do you have? Where are they? What is on them?

Thumb drives are a great tool for dragging stuff back and forth between different computers, but since they are so easy to use, most people end up putting all sorts of stuff on them that could be trouble if it fell into the wrong hands. I can't tell you how many times someone has handed me one of these usb drives with something on it I need and when I open it up, this person's entire life is on this little device.... files like creditcard_numb.doc, passwords.doc, adobe_serial_numbers.doc, banking.doc, and clientlist.doc are all sitting right on the top level of the drive.

Fortunately for these trusting souls, I am honest, but if they ever left the drive sitting in a Starbucks somewhere, how much damage could someone do to your life with all that info you carry around on there? It's a pretty scary thought.

And while many people take advantage of password protecting files like these, that is only good to deter the causal snooper... it will do nothing to prevent a committed crook from accessing your data.

Here is a video that shows how to break a Microsoft Word password in less than two minutes.

Here are the results of a Google search for "break ms password" Page after page of hacks and software to break into any MS document. Feeling concerned?

I've even met people who take pride in not having any personal info in their laptop, "In case it gets stolen," but keep all this data on a little jump drive. To me, this makes little sense since it is much easier to keep track of your laptop (I bet you know excactly where it is right now) vs. one or more little usb thumb drives (as you pat your pockets and look in your laptop bag.)

Here is what I would suggest...

A. Keep only what you need on your jump drive. After you have moved something from one machine to the other, delete the files. Just because you purchased a 2GB jump drive doesn't mean you have to keep 2GB of stuff on it.

B. Encrypt the drive so that is unreadable. I really like Knox which allows you create "vaults" on your jump drive or on portions of your hard drive. It uses Apple's File Vault for the encryption so it is Mac native, very secure (and works on both 10.4 and 10.5.)

Since it is a Mac-only program, if someone sticks it in their PC and tries to get anything off of it, they are not going to have any luck, but when you use Knox, it also installs the app on the jump drive its self so that when you plug it into another Mac that doesn't have Knox installed, it will automatically run the program so you can unlock the vault with the password.

You can turn the entire drive into a vault or you can just set it up so part of the drive is in the open for transferring files to other people's computer, or getting files from them (but see the next section below about doing that.)

C. Since thumb drives have become incredibly cheap, have one with your data on it, and have a second throw-away one that you only use for moving files back and forth with other computer users. That way, if you forget to get it back, you haven't lost access to your data, you are just out the $10 drive until the next time you see the person.

I find that having a few extras is always a good idea since my son like to pretend they are phones, guns, missles, walkie-talkies or any number of other imaginary items. I have also found a couple of them in odd places like in the sand box in the back yard and in the shower... but no one has come forward to take responsibility for putting them there.

Here are some other options for encryption programs (this is on the Apple website under software downloads in the network and security section.) Make sure anything that you download is compatible with your OS and the hardware you plan to use it with.

Avoid the malls! Stay home and download freeware!

May this blog be your solace in the flood of "After Christmas Sales."

No claims of best deals ever. These offers do not expire at midnight, nor do they require you to line up in a parking lot outside a store at 3am because this offer is not limited to stock on hand.

Here is a short list of free apps for your Mac. They are all things that I use and like (and all of them should work under Tiger or Leopard.. but don't take my word for it, please read release notes and I always suggest you have good backups before installing anything on your computer.)

Happy Holidays!

(The photos are of Nick opening some last minute Christmas presents this morning. )

1. EXIF Viewer - When you just want to look at the exif data from an image you shot. It works with jpegs, and doesn't seem to work with RAW files too well (at least not Canon CR2 files.) I use it a lot when someone asks how did you shoot that, what ISO were you using, etc.

It is also handy when you are getting ready to sell a camera and buyers always want to know how many actuations there are on the camera. It will share how many frames have been shot at the time you took the photo (for most cameras) (10.4 and 10.5 friendly)


2. Chax - A freebie that allows you to make some helpful modifications to iChat. It can switch you to "away" when your screen saver turns on, it allows you to modify the size and style of the font in the contacts window (really handy on laptops - my favorite feature) and you can set it up to auto-accept text, file, AV chats and screen sharing. It does even more, but there are the highlights. (10.4 and 10.5 require different versions of Chax. Both are located at the link above.)

3. MenuMeters 1.3 - A series of menu extras that will show you hard drive activity, the load on your CPU(s), a breakdown of how your RAM is being used, and a meter that shows network activity (how fast you are sending or receiving data.) The meters show up on the menu bar at the top of your Mac (on the right side, just to the left of the date & time, airport icon, etc.)

I've found this to be handy to see what's going on with your computer and if you suddenly see big spikes in CPU usage that don't match what you are doing on the machine, it can alert you to potential trouble or an app that has crashed and is using up lots of CPU resources. The network meter is nice when you are sending photos, to be able to see the quality of your connection in real time. (It definitely works in 10.4 and all indications are that it works in 10.5 just fine. I haven't had any Leopard related issues with it. I would recommend reading the latest notes before installing it in 10.5, just to be safe.)

4. Adium - Adium is an instant messaging app that works with just about every chat format under the sun. It will log you in simultaneously to all the different chat formats that you subscribe to and is very customizable. There are quite a few sound and icon sets and "styles" that you can use to change the look of Adium. It does not offer any video or audio conferencing so it is not a complete replacement for iChat, but offers quite a lot for free. (10.4 and 10.5 friendly)

5. Enemy Territory - Return to Castle Wolfenstein - having fun on your Mac is important. I love games and this is a great one... and free at that! It is a network version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. One of the original OS X games that showed what the OS could do. It is a first-person-shooter, so it you aren't fond of shooters, I'd skip the 250mb download (broadband connection advised) (10.4 and 10.5 friendy.)

6. Carbon Copy Cloner - Make bootbable backups of your mac, synchronize folders or drives, and even back up to networked drives. This is a pro level app that is given away for free. The only thing that Mike Bombich (the guy who wrote it) asks is that you consider making a PayPal donation to him. It's well worth it.

Expect another similar list here in the near future as more of my favorite freebies are updated for Leopard.

Securing your Mac -- A good read

The good folks over at TUAW (The Unauthorized Apple Weblog) have a whole series on securing your Mac.

This was published a while ago but since it is still something good to take a look at and bookmark-worthy. While Macs are still less troubled by security issues than PC's, there are still some things you can do (and things to look out for) to keep safe.

While you are there, don't miss the link to increasing your safety while surfing on unsecured wifi networks. I personally avoid "free" wifi networks because of privacy concerns... you never know who is watching as your check email and do your online banking and keeping track of your info...

I hope you have a great Christmas... it' time to go unwrap presents with the kids... woohoo!

Installing Leopard... a tale of two installs

One really important thing I forgot to mention about Leopard: DO A CLEAN INSTALL.

But before you do anything... do a complete bootable backup of your hard drive. Please! I beg you! Doing OS upgrades on a computer is the way to guarantee something will go horribly wrong if you aren't backed up. So go to your local computer store, Apple Store, or your favorite online retailer (my favorite for Mac stuff is Other World Computing) and buy yourself an external drive to back everything up first. You will be glad you did.

The first machine I installed it on, my MacBook, didn't take to it too well when I did the install as an update. In fact, my poor little MacBook didn't do well at all. It got slow, buggy, things crashed, it had problems booting, problems shutting down and was not much fun to use. You would be in the middle of doing something and all of a sudden the fans would come on and the Activity Monitor would show all of these strange (meaning not the normal processor intensive things going on behind the scenes) processes running at nearly 100% of the laptop's capacity.

So after a couple of hours of trying to track down what caused all these issues (although deep down I knew it was because I tried running the update) I then heeded the advice of Apple and did a clean install... and it worked great.

At times, I don't learn lessons easily, however. So my next Leopard target was the Mac Mini in our family room that is used by my wife for surfing, my son for playing Lego Star Wars and Wingnuts and my inlaws for watching Korean soap operas while they are hanging out with the twins. So what did I do, why I tried running the upgrade again on the Mini.

How did it work?

Horribly! I had everyone mad at me because it actually seemed (to me) to work pretty well after it had finished. Now I don't use the Mini much, unless it requires some sort of fix, so I guess I didn't spend that much time checking everything out, but I probably should have. Safari started crashing, Nick (my Lego Star Wars loving son) was unhappy because the games wouldn't load and my inlaws couldn't get any of the online videos to play. Lets just say my family was not seeing the value of upgrading to Leopard.

So again, I got the various install disks out and did a clean install and it worked great. No problems whatsoever.

Now I have to confess, in the past, I have gotten away with doing upgrades (I did 10.3 to 10.4 upgrade on my 15" Powerbook in a hotel room in Ohio somewhere after a shoot) and then came home and did the same for all my other Macs and it worked fine... that time. But Leopard seems to introduce enough new stuff that upgrading can cause more problems than just spending an hour or two and starting fresh.

The other good reason to do clean installs is because it gives you a chance to do some spring cleaning on your computer. You actually look at how much junk you have installed on your computer vs. what you actually use all the time.

Some people that are too scared to wipe their hard drive (or maybe they just like living dangerously and are opposed to backing up ) like the archive and install choice. That is where it moves everything on your computer into a folder called "Old System" or something like that and installs the new system in a new system folder. The reason I don't like this is because it leaves all your applications alone and there are a number of apps that put stuff in other places (that is now called "Old System" ) and so the temptation is to start using the stuff in the old system instead of reinstalling your apps, too. Take this as a fact... if you try to use your apps from the previous install, you will spend more time trying to figure out why they aren't working right than if you had just installed them cleanly in the new system.

After doing the clean install, this is when you can go to your backup of the drive to import thing like your email, preferences and other odds and ends that you are going to need on the new system after you installed all your apps.

Another thing that I would suggest before doing the upgrade is make sure you have all of your downloaded installers, installers on CD's or DVD's and most importantly, serial numbers for everything before you do the reinstall. I actually print out a copy of what is in my applications folder so that when I do the reinstall I don't forget anything important. I actually create a folder with the latest drivers and installers when I did my upgrades on all the machines so I could just work down the list in the folder installing one after another which saves time of having to hunt for disks and downloads later on.

I would also suggest doing a Google search to make sure that all your critical applications and hardware (printers, scanners, etc.) are working with Leopard. In Google just search for the name of the hardware and "leopard" or "10.5" or search for it both ways. You can also include words like "issue, "problem", or "conflict" to see if anything comes up.

If it turns out that your printer or some other hardware is not Leopard compatible, look at the bright side... you really do deserve some new peripherals, don't you???

I am liking Leopard

I am now running Leopard on all three of my work Macs. Currently, that would be a Mac Pro 2.66 quadcore, a 17" MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 2.33, and a black MacBook Core 2 Duo 2ghz. It has been quite stable and I am not experiencing any real serious issues with it.

My main pet peeves are that I can't get my HP Officejet 7310 duplexing printer to duplex any more and that I have a few little odd files in the trash that won't go away on the Mac Pro (but this problem hasn't shown up on either laptop.)

I understand that there is actually a fix for the files in the trash thing that has something to do with the windows partition... maybe (I am running Boot Camp, but I haven't taken the time to research it since the only thing that happens is that it shows that the trash is perpetually not empty. The things like holding down "Option" while emptying the trash or using SuperGetInfo to make the files go away hasn't worked. If you do a get info on them, try to rename them, or try to drag them to the desktop, they just disappear... and then magically re-appear in the trash again. (I'm writing an awful lot about a problem I haven't really tried to fix, huh?)

Another thing that I am really, really, missing is the ability to use Shirt Pocket Sofware's SuperDuper to back up my laptops. It has been my nearly perfect tool for backing up the MacBook and MacBook Pro to external portable firewire drives so that I have a bootable backup ready to go if something goes amiss in the field while on a shoot. The thing I love about SuperDuper is that it is simple and after you do the initial backup, you have the option to do smart backups so that it is only updating what has changed since the last time you backed up... it doesn't copy everything all over again. It will also make the copy bootable so that you can plug it in and boot from the external drive if necessary (it does need to be a firewire drive for this feature.) They are furiously working on a Leopard (10.5) compatible version and neither I nor my Macs can wait!

What I am liking about Leopard is that it is fast, has some cool new tweaks, and is no less reliable than Tiger (10.4).

What I'm really digging right now is Time Machine. Under Tiger, I used Apple's Backup program (which is free if you have a .Mac account - another good idea... but we'll get to that another time.) for daily archival backups to an external drive and then would do a full bootable backup of the system using SuperDuper every few weeks.

On my desktop system, I care more about my data (address books, photos, invoicing, receipts, passwords) being backed up than keeping the machine instantly re-bootable if there is a hard drive or software issue. After all, if I am sitting in the office, I have both laptops and all the install CD's to re-install everything anyways. So I can always pull the backup off the external and run things off a laptop if I need to. But Backup was always slow and I would set it to run at 2:30am so that it wouldn't choke whatever else I was doing... plus there were occasionally issues with programs like Mail if you were using them when Backup started running where the backup could fail when you went to recover it.

I have found that Time Machine is fast and seems to use disk space very efficiently (in the time I have been using it.) I have recovered files from it and found that it recovered thing much more quickly than Backup ever did. Part of this could also be attributed to the fact that I don't have weeks and weeks of backups stacked on the drive yet. I would imagine that the performance could decline some over time as there are more backups it will have to sort through to pull out the right data. From my experiments, it doesn't seem to matter to Time Machine. It seems to make good backups of things even while you are using them, or at least must have the sense to avoid backing up the things that could cause problems down the road.

More about Leopard later...