Secure USB Drive Logo

OS X: how-to store files password protected on a USB drive

It’s still one of the easiest ways to get someone’s data when you get your hands on a USB stick. It’s quite interesting, what you find on these portable drives – whether it’s from a friend or a business contact. There are serveral ways to protect yourself better by encrypting and password locking the drives. Sometimes there’s a preinstalled software on the USB drive available for that – but mostly not. I have a short how-to here showing how you can achieve this really easy using standard tools on your Mac!

15. September 2013
Automator Icon

Using Automator to quickly access a website – TV show episode list example

Automator itself is a really powerful tool for automating recurring tasks in OS X. Unfortunately it’s still not really something regular Mac users are using for making tasks and working in OS X more efficient. The following example will show you, how to directly open the Wikipedia page containing the List of Episodes of a given TV show. Think outside the box in order to adapt this for many other uses.

15. September 2013
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Automator-Service to add Task to Wunderlist

I started using the fantastic app “Wunderlist” for my personal Task Management on the Mac, of course with synchronisation to iPhone and the web. Thanks to a Blog post from James O’Donnell on Scribd, I got my hands quickly on the required AppleScript. However, I didn’t like the fact that he made the script ask for a new User Input which will be created as new task – rather than just taking the currently selected text. So I adjusted his AppleScript code and put it into an Automator Service workflow, which you can download here.

4. April 2012