Let’s keep it a secret!

Marco Garcês — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 15:02:09 +0000

Rememer that crazy project, where I transformed a Moleskine into a fully USB hard drive? In that post, i pointed out, that, to give that final “spy” touch, I’ve created a encrypted image, which I dropped inside the hard drive, for security of my data. Theres is a very simple way to do this in Mac OS X, and it’s a good way to keep your data safe, for example, inside a USB pen drive. So let’s get started!

Follow this easy steps, and you will have a safe container, which will be very hard to open, if you take attention to some details.
So, head up to Disk Utility, that came with your Mac OS X; this nifty piece of software, let’s you do a lot of stuff, from recording those ISO’s you download with your favorite distro, to fixing errors in your hard drives. For this project, we will create the encrypted image.

Once inside Disk Utility, just press the “New Image” button.

After this, put the settings that you see in the picture. Here I choose the image’s name secure, the syze 100mb (choose more if you want) and the important thing, in “Encryption“, choose AES-128. If you want to know more about this encryption, read some stuff.

Now, it’s important to choose a strong password, this can be tested by pressing the little key in the next window. This will show you a green bar, that grows, when password gets stronger. If you prefer, let the utility pick a strong password for you. One final thing to take in account: do not remember password in the Keychain, for improved security! So just uncheck that… Click OK, and you are all done!

Now eject the image, and move the secure.dmg inside your pen drive, or anywhere you want! Anytime you want to put new files, just mount the image (double click secure.dmg).

Very easy right? Enjoy simple encryption!

My Moleskine secrets

Marco Garcês — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 16:11:58 +0000

It’s been a while, since I had this in mind: to put a 2.5″ hard drive inside a Moleskine. I did imagine it, but to be honest, it was just the other day, when I stumbled upon a website, that I saw that someone just had the same idea, so I decided to finally do it myself!
I have a 40 GB 2.5″ IDE hard drive, that had no direct use, so I decided to use this for the project… I thought, if this thing burns, well, it’s a small disk, not to worry.
I picked up a Moleskine at a local store, for €9, the sketchbook ones, which are made with a thicker paper, and give more support to the all thing. Then I grabbed a really sharp object, a surgical scalpel, and got started.

First I drew with a pencil, the outline for the disk adapter, which I had at home, then I started cutting, one by one, the sheets of thick paper (they were 60 of them). When I reached the end, I had to make a few adjustments so the blue LED and the USB plug could fit OK, and started to glue each page to each other… unfortunately, my glue was really bad, so I decided to do this later, I just wanted to see the end!

Things went well, and now I have a really cool external hard drive. I even have the Moleskine icon when the disk is connected to my Mac, so I couldn’t be more happy! To finish the “spy” disk, I created a encrypted 40GB image in Apple’s Disk Utility, and put this inside my hard drive. Now I have a really safe place to store sensible information (which I know its not safe, since this can burn at any moment, but I make backups, don’t worry).

There you have it… (time+moleskine+hard drive+nothing better to do = moleskine external drive)
Hope you like it, give me your opinion!

dbugs.org » security

Let’s keep it a secret!

My Moleskine secrets