Remove Tabs From Adobe Photoshop CS4

Posted on March 25, 2009 by Randy Jensen

Photoshop Logo CS4 I’m just going to cut to the chase: The tabs in Photoshop SUCK. This is coming from the guy who wants tabs everywhere. In explorer/file browser, my browser, my text editor…can you imagine how easy the universe would be to navigate if all the planets were simply tabs? Want to go to Mars? Just CTRL + Tab over to it. Simple right?

With all of this love for tabs, I am completely dumbfounded by the use of tabs in Photoshop. I really tried to like it, but it’s just not intuitive and it’s mind blowing that this was made the default for such an amazing product. Here’s how to turn them off, and actually start getting some work done again.

Go to ‘Edit’ –> ‘Preferences’ –> ‘Interface’
Turn Off Photoshop Tabs

Now uncheck the ‘Open Documents as Tabs’ option
Turn Off Photoshop Tabs

Update

Scott left a great comment about how you need to open files in order for the tabs to not show up.

“…you can successfully drag multiple images to CS4 and have them all open in floating windows IF you drop them on the top tool bar.”

Update 2

ridley left another great comment below on how to easily turn tabbed windows into floating windows: “you can actually just click on a tab and drag it down to the canvas and it becomes a floating window.” Brilliant!

VirtualBox VERR_VM_DRIVER_NOT_INSTALLED (rc=-1908) Error

Posted on March 16, 2009 by Randy Jensen

I recently installed the updated kernel in Ubuntu 8.10. Everything seemed to go fine until I tried to open my Windows XP Virtual Machine inside of VirtualBox. I initially got an error that said ‘Failed to open a session for the virtual machine Windows XP’. This error was immediately followed by another error dialogue box with the error:

VERR_VM_DRIVER_NOT_INSTALLED (rc=-1908)

There’s two ways to fix this. I would try the first method first, and the second only it that didn’t work.

Method 1 – Simple Command

Simply open a terminal window and type ‘sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup‘. This will take a little bit of time, but once it’s done, you should be able to open your virtual machines like normal. If for some reason this doesn’t work, try the second method below.

Method 2 – Uninstall/Reinstall

Go to ‘System’ –> ‘Administration’ –> ‘Synaptic Package Manager’ and search for ‘virtualbox’. Uninstall whatever is installed. Once it’s removed, reinstall it.

You’ll need to remember what version you installed. I prefer the one from Sun Microsystems which you can get here. You can of course, just reinstall the exact packages you just uninstalled.

Installing TrueCrypt 5.1a & 6.1a On Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10 or 9.04

Posted on August 18, 2008 by Randy Jensen

TrueCrypt was finally made available for Linux with the release of version 5.1a. Here’s how to install it.

**Update**
I have been made aware by Onopoc in the comments section that this same tutorial will work with TrueCrypt 6.1a as well. Simply change the name of the file in the respective spots where the exact file name is used

Installing TrueCrypt

Open a terminal window and type: ‘wget http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads/truecrypt-5.1a-ubuntu-x86.tar.gz’
Once that is done, type: ‘tar zxvf truecrypt-5.1a-ubuntu-x86.tar.gz’
Now go to ‘Places‘ –> ‘Home Folder‘ and look for a file called
‘truecrypt-5.1a-setup-ubuntu-x86‘ and double click on it
You should get a dialog box asking you what you want to do with it. Choose ‘Run in Terminal‘
You should now see another dialog box with the option to ‘Install TrueCrypt‘ at the bottom. Choose this.
You will now have to accept the TrupeCrypt agreement, so choose the appropriate button
You should now see the package installer. Click the ‘Install Package‘ button in the upper right
Wait for the package to install. It may hang for a bit, but just let it run. You will soon be presented with a new dialog box saying the installation was successful

Running TrueCrypt

There are a couple of fairly easly ways to run TrueCrypt now that we have it installed.

The first way is to press ‘Alt + F2‘ and enter ‘truecrypt‘ in the text area. Then press ‘Run‘.
Launching TrueCrypt

The better way to do it is to create a launcher for it to make it easier for us in the future. Here’s how.

Right click on the desktop and choose ‘Create Launcher‘
In the box that comes up, type ‘TrueCrypt‘ in the Name field and
‘truecrypt‘ in the Command field.
You should now see an icon similar to this on your desktop

That’s it. All you have to do to run TrueCrypt now is to double click your newly created launcher!
TrueCrypt Running

Encrypting Thumb Drives With TrueCrypt

Posted on May 5, 2008 by Randy Jensen

TrueCrpyt Logo Last week I wrote a post on how to encrypt entire hard drives with TrueCrypt. We all know how easy it is to have your laptop lost or stolen and how important it is to protect sensitive data. However, something that is even easier to lose and often has just as sensitive data on it is thumb drives. I know personally I’ve lost a couple of them over time.

Today we’re going to learn how to encrypt these drives to keep them from prying eyes.

Setting Up

Just a few things to get you prepared for the encryption process.

Grab TrueCrypt if you don’t already have it.
Make sure your thumb drive is plugged in and move everything on it to your desktop. This is important because TrueCrypt is going to format the drive during the encryption process.
Open the main TrueCrypt window

Beginning the Encryption Process

During this phase, we will be getting the settings together so we can actually encrypt the drive.

Click the ‘Create Volume‘ button on the main TrueCrypt window
Choose the second radio button: Create a volume with a non-system partition/device
At the next screen, leave the radio button on ‘Standard TrueCrypt Volume‘ (unless you know what you’re doing and want to get fancy:)
Now click the button that says ‘Select Device‘
Find your thumb drive in the list (you can tell by what drive letter it is mounted in Windows). For this tutorial, we are going to choose the ‘partition’ not the actual device (so in my case ‘\Device\Harddisc6\Partition1′)

If you get a warning after clicking ‘ok’, you can ignore it. It’s simply stating that you could also create an encrypted file on the device rather than encrypting the entire drive. Click Next
I like to leave the Encrpytion and the Hash algorithms at their defaults, AES and RIPEMD-160 respectively. Feel free to play around if you know what you are doing.
On the Volume Size screen, you won’t be able to do anything because we chose to encrypt the entire drive. Click ‘Next‘
Create a passphrase on the next screen. Depending on how secure you want it to be, 20 characters is recommended. If nothing else, try to use symbols, caps, lowercase and numbers.

Starting the Encryption

Now, we will actually start the encryption process itself.

Now you will need to move your mouse around the TrueCrypt window to create a unique pool of characters. This is important to the strength of the encryption keys TC will use.
Once you are satisfied, click the ‘Format’ button. You will be presented with a box saying that all data will be lost NOT encrypted. If you followed along from the start, you’ve already moved all your data off the drive and this won’t be a problem and you can click ‘Yes‘
TrueCrypt will now begin to encrypt the drive. Mine was only 128MB so it only took a few minutes. Your time will vary
If everything went well, you should see a box saying the encryption was successful!

Mounting the Drive

The first thing you will probably notice is that Windows doesn’t recognize the drive like it normally did. You can click on the drive letter it assigns it, but it’s just going to ask you if you want to format it. Don’t! Here’s what you do.

Make sure the drive is still plugged in and the main TrueCrypt window is open. Also, select a drive letter in the list, I highlighted ‘Y’
Click the ‘Auto-Mount Devices‘ button. It’s going to ask you for the passphrase you created earlier, so enter that.
Your drive should now be mounted as whatever letter you choose (in my case ‘Y’)
Your drive will now be able to be accessed just like any other drive on your system!

Final Thoughts

There really isn’t much to encrypting your data with TrueCrypt, but that doesn’t diminish the need for strong encryption on all of our portable (and non-portable) devices. A couple of final notes:

Make sure you ‘Dismount’ the thumb drive before pulling it out by selecting the volume in the main TrueCrypt window and clicking on the ‘Dismount’ button.
Also remember that you need TrueCrypt installed on every computer you will be using your thumb drive one. Sounds like a no-brainer, but be aware if your IT department won’t allow you to install extra software on your work machines.

Using Truecrypt to Encrypt Your Entire Hard Drive

Posted on April 29, 2008 by Randy Jensen

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If you’re as paranoid as I am, you more than likely appreciate the advancements that the TrueCrypt team has made with version 5.0. For me, the greatest thing they did was making whole disk encryption dead simple. Here’s how you do it.

Getting Started

First you will need to visit the TrueCrypt site and download and install it on your system. I’m going to be using Windows XP for my demonstration, but they have since released very good and stable version for Mac OSX and Linux.
Next, go ahead and open the main window by clicking on the TrueCrypt logo in the system tray. The window should look like this

Setting Up the Encryption Settings

Click the the ‘Create Volume ‘ button
On the next window, choose the radio button next to ‘Encrypt the system partition or entire system drive ‘
You now have the option to ‘Encrypt the Windows system partition’ or ‘Encrypt the whole drive ‘. We will be choosing the latter for this example.
For the next screen you can choose ‘Single Boot ‘ or ‘Multi-Boot’. More than likely you are only running one OS on your computer, so we will choose Single Boot.
Now you can choose the encryption settings. Unless you really know what you are doing, the default settings are fine. AES is an incredibly powerful encryption algorithm and should be all you need. I would also leave the Hash Algorithm at RIPEMD-160
Next you will need to create a password. Depending on how paranoid you are, you should choose a passphrase close to 20 characters in length. I would also recommend using Steve Gibson’s Perfect Passwords Generator to make sure you create a completely unique phrase.
Next you will need to move your mouse around the TrueCrypt window to create randomized data. This is fairly important, so spend a minute or two moving your mouse to make sure you really randomize things.
The next window should simply be showing you the keys that were generated for you. You can simply click next here.

Creating the Rescue Disk

The next step is to create what TrueCrypt calls the ‘Rescue Disk’. This disk will be used in case the boot loader or Windows become corrupt or infected with malware, yu will always have a way to decrypt the system. This step is extremely important, and TC will not let you proceed until it is satisfied that you did everything correctly. Begin by clicking the ‘Browse ‘ button. This will bring up a dialog box. Browse to your desktop and name the file something like rescueDisk.iso. IMPORTANT: remember to append the .iso or your file will not work correctly.
You should now see a window telling you the file was created successfully. It’s now time to burn the newly created .iso file to a cd. I strongly recommend using ImgBurn . If for some reason that doesn’t work, you can use something like CD Burner XP Pro . Click next
Make sure you have a blank CD in your drive and open ImgBurn. Click on ‘Write image file to disc’
Next click on the ‘Browse for a file’ button
Finally click the giant ‘Write’ button towards the bottom
After you have the disc burned, leave it in the drive and click ‘Next’ in the TrueCrypt window
If all went well you will be notified that the Rescue Disk was successfully verified

Pretest and Installing the Bootloader

You can choose to wipe the drive to really give you an incredibly secure hard drive, or just choose none if you aren’t storing government secrets on your computer (not that the government is intelligent enough to encrypt hard drives).
Next TC will begin the pretest to make sure everything is in working order before it begins the encryption process. This will also install the TrueCrypt boot loader on the boot sector of your hard drive. This is a major reason why this encryption is so great. There is virtually no way to boot into the Windows file system without having the decryption key. Click ‘Test ‘

A friendly warning:)
After TC runs a few things you will be presented with a window to restart. Click ‘Yes ‘
After the computer boots back up, you should see a black and white screen. Enter your passphrase you created earlier.
If all went well you will now see a new dialog box saying the pretest was completed successfully.
Click ‘OK’ on the Rescue Disk information window

Finally! Encrypting the Drive

Whew! If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! We are now ready to encrypt the drive. You should see a window similar to the one below. Simply click the ‘Encrypt’ button and depending on your wipe mode and your encryption algorithms, go have a cup of coffee or go to sleep and let it run overnight.
When everything is done, you should see this

In Closing

If you were able to get through this tutorial, you should now feel much safer with your data knowing it’s now gone from incredibly insecure, to even the DOD or NSA would have trouble getting in (unless of course there was water boarding involved).

This is really helpful if you travel a lot and carry a laptop all the time. If something were to happen and it gets lost or stolen, yes, you lose the data but at least whoever has it can’t get it either. Of course this means we need some training in the art of backing up;)

Creating the Ultimate Productivity Workstation

Posted on October 8, 2007 by Randy Jensen

So you want to build a workstation that rivals Bill Gates’ without spending your entire technology budget for the year, in one day. Here’s how I did it.

What you’ll End Up With

9 Desktops
3 Monitors
1 Obscenely Productive Workstation

Hardware Used

1 Dell Optiplex (with Windows XP)
2 Dell 19″ Flat Panel Monitors
1 Dell Latitude Laptop (with Windows XP)
1 Logitech Revolution Wireless Mouse
1 Worn out wrist rest

Software Used

Dexpot
Synergy
Firefox
Groupwise (insert your email client)
Dreamweaver
Photoshop
Pandora’s Box (for entertainment:)
Pownce (with all this productivity, I need something anti-productive)
Snitter (see above)
Pidgin
Yahoo! Widgets
ObjectDock

Let’s Get Started

First thing you are going to want to do is setup your dual monitors on your desktop. I’m going to be using Windows XP for everything I do today.

Shut your machine down and plug both monitors in
Restart the machine, right click the desktop and choose Properties
Go to the Settings tab
Click on the box with a “2″ in it
Check the box that says “extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor”
Click Apply and then OK

You should now have both monitors being used as one long desktop. Try to move your mouse off the screen and see if the second screen pics it up. So far so good? Next step: We need more desktops!

Installing Dexpot

Dexpot is a free virtual desktop switcher for Windows (if you’ve used Linux this should be nothing new). Here’s how to get it up and running

Download Dexpot here
Run the installer and follow the prompts
Once it’s installed, let’s go into the Settings
Here are my settings

I didn’t modify any other settings. However, there are a ton of things you can do with Dexpot, so if you have the time, have fun! You should see four blue boxes in your systray. You can click on these to switch desktops, or simply hit “Alt” + “Desktop # you want” (eg. Alt + 2 = Virtual Desktop 2)

Next: Connect the desktop to the laptop with magic…

Installing Synergy

Synergy is possibly one of the coolest programs I’ve ever used. I’ve been using it with my home system for about 3 years now and couldn’t live without it. Here’s how to get it setup.

Download and Install Synergy on the desktop and the laptop

Now we need to configure the Synergy server computer (the desktop in this example)

Open Synergy
Check the radio button for “Share this computer’s keyboard and mouse (server)”
Click the “Info” button below
Copy the “Hostname” field (we’ll use this later)
Click the “Configure” button above
Click the “+” sign under the “Screens” section
Paste the Hostname into the “Screen Name” field and hit OK
We’re done for now, but we’ll be coming back to this dialog box, so don’t close it

Now to configure Synergy on the laptop

Open Synergy
Check the radio button “Use another computer’s shared keyboard and mouse (client)”
Click the “Info” button
Leave this window open because we’ll be coming back to it

Back to the desktop…

If you closed out of the Configure dialog box, click the “Configure” button again
Click the “+” button under “Screens” again
Look at the Hostname in the Info box on the laptop and type it into “Screen Name” field and hit OK
You should now have two screens in the “Screens” dialog box (your server and your client)

Connecting the screens together

Look towards the bottom at the “Links” section. This is how we are going to tell Synergy how the screens are arranged
Don’t worry about touching the % boxes for this example. If you ever get hardcore into Synergy you can come back to this
Choose “right” of “server computer here” goes to “client computer here” and hit the “+” sign. MAKE sure to hit the “+” or it won’t record what you just did
Next do “left” of “client computer here” goes to “server computer here” and hit the “+” sign again.

Now we need to start the Synergy program on both computers

In the main Synergy dialog box on both computers (I do the server first) hit the “Start” button
The Synergy icon in the Taskbar should be the Logo with a lightening bolt in it if the two computers were connected properly

Make Synergy startup with Windows

If you’re like me, you are going to want to have Synergy startup when you boot your machine in the morning…or whenever you get out of bed:) Here’s how.

Open the main Synergy dialog box
Click “Autostart”
I chose the option “When Computer Starts” –> “Install”
Do this on both the desktop and the laptop and you’re done…finally!

So now you should have the base to an amazingly productive workstation. You should be able to move your mouse from your first monitor, to your second monitor, and finally to your laptop screen with ease.

Installing ObjectDock

If there is one thing that Mac got right, it’s the dock. I can’t stand having to open the Start menu, then All Programs, then look for the program, which may be in a folder which is another click…ughh. Enter: ObjectDock. Here’s how to install it.

Download and Install ObjectDock
Once it’s done, you can play around with the settings until you get something you like. Here are a few notable changes I made
- Load ObjectDock at Startup
- “Miscellaneous Options” –> “Attention” Effect –> “Bounce”
- “Performance Options” –> “Very Fast”, “Optimize for Performance”
- Appearance –> Icon Size 30px; Magnified Size 80px; Background Standard Tabs 50% Transparent
- Positioning –> Hide off-screen when not in use; Delay Short

Installing Yahoo! Widgets

I installed the Yahoo! Widgets on my laptop so it didn’t take away any more system resources on my main workstation. You can get Yahoo! Widgets here and installation is pretty straightforward.

Well, that’s about it. You should now have a system that has 9 desktops across 3 monitors. Want to know how my software is setup? Here ya go…

My Software Setup

Since I’m a web designer, this setup is tweaked to suit me perfectly. Find out what works best for you through a little experimentation.

Laptop Screen:

Pownce
Snitter (new Adobe AIR Twitter client)
Pidgin
Yahoo! Widgets with Sticky Memo and Yahoo! Stocks widget open at all times

Desktop Screens

Desktop 1
1. Screen 1
  - Firefox (with Gmail and Google Reader open at all times)
2. Screen 2
  - Groupwise (Damn you Novell!!)
Desktop 2
1. Screen 1
  - Dreamweaver
2. Screen 2
  - Shortcut to the server I’m currently working in
Desktop 3
1. Screen 1
  - Photoshop
2. Screen 2
  - Working folder for easy drag and drop access
Desktop 4
1. Screen 1
  - UltraVNC
2. Screen 2
  - Empty (I mainly use the 4th desktop for misc. programs)

Have a system that’s more productive that this one? Let me hear about it! Leave a comment below…now get to work!!

Randy Jensen Online

Category Archives: How-To’s