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Showing posts from July, 2014

gmusicbrowser: An Acrobat Among Music Players

I have got to talk about gmusicbrowser , my current music player. This is an extensively customizable player. It comes with several layout configuration by default and then there's user created layouts available from third parties. The 1st screenshot shows the shimmer desktop layout with the song tree pane. The 2nd screenshot has the shimmer desktop with browser configuration. If you're the kind of music player aficionado who likes to change the user interface every time you start a music player then you're in heaven. And I was just trying to find a player with a decent equalizer! gmusicbrowser has that and MORE. I could filter my library based on metadata. Metadata includes artist, album, genre(s), year, label and more. I could customize the filter and save it. I could control how random play goes in gmusicbrowser. I could play music based on its metadata of course. But when it comes to random play, gmusicbrowser allows me to combine several

Encrypting Files Via Nautilus File Browser

I wrote a blog post a few days ago about using Evolution Mail client and GPG and I partly talked about how to encrypt files. If say I already opened the compose window and partly proceeded to type off my email and then remember I want to send an attachment with it, that's how I would do it. It turns out that nautilus, the default file browser in Ubuntu can help me if i want to encrypt a file. Put the focus on the file you want to encrypt. You can either right-click and choose encrypt from the pull-down menu or hit the pull-down key (right side of the keyboard, next to the control key) in my pc. I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 lts Unity desktop. If you're using a different desktop environment, you might try exploring your file browser. GPG is standard in any Linux distro. Also, if it's the first time you're doing this, it might prompt you to download needed nautilus add-ons, so just answer yes. In my case, I downloaded seahorse-daemon, libcryptui, and seaho

GPG For Windows Users

Most of the people I exchange emails about half use Windows. The other half mostly use their smartphones which means they're using android. This is a rough approximation of my personal communication environment today. I occasionally use Windows 7 in a laptop at work. So for us who wish to keep our emails private, this is important. Windows users can use GPG by downloading GPG for Windows. It is called Gpg4win and it is a package that incorporates Gnu Privacy Guard cryptography, extension for Outlook, extension for Explorer and documentation. This enables Windows users to encrypt and sign their emails and files. It is Free Software. Generate Your Key Pair For Windows users, it is important to be able to encrypt your files and email messages. The first thing to do is to generate your key pair. This is a very nice wiki for Gpg4win. Let us start fighting for our privacy and stop mass surveillance.

Evolution And GPG

I sent a GPG encrypted message with attachment (also encrypted beforehand) to myself. This is it using Evolution Mail client. You need to know that Evolution Mail makes encryption in email much less cumbersome. First Things First In order to use GPG (the open source implementation of Pretty Good Privacy PGP) generate your key-pair. Your public key is uploaded to a public server accessible to the public and can be downloaded by anyone interested to send you an encrypted message. Your private key is stored locally, encrypted and secured by a passphrase. Your passphrase should be good enough to protect from attackers trying to break the encryption. I use Seahorse to manage my passwords and keys. It's a GUI for the GPG program. Nevertheless, I still use the Terminal to encrypt files that I wish to attach to the email message. How To Encrypt Files There are many programs that you can use to encrypt files or an entire directory (or even an entire partition). I am j