Decluttering Skype...

Like many freelancers I find myself using Skype every day to talk with friends, colleagues and clients. And, in general it's fine apart from the huge ammount of desktop space that it seems to take over.

So I quickly (very quickly) created an alternative, minimalist SkypeChatStyle which you can use to change the style of Skype on OS X to something a bit less, well chunky.

Here's some pictures to show you what I mean.

Below is the Default (only) style - Skype Modern.



And here is my new Minimal syle - WUFU Minimal.



Look, you get nearly twice as much natter for the same ammount of space. And it's brilliantly low tech. And, as far as I can tell, everything still works.

So how do you go about installing it?

Firstly download and unzip the following file.

WUFU Minimal.SkypeChatFile

Then double click on the file - WUFU Minimal.SkypeChatStyle

Skype should do the rest (at least it did for me). It will then appear in your chat preferences.

If this doesn't work, right click on the Skype application in the finder and select 'Show package contents' then navigate to /Contents/Resources/ChatStyles and drop it there. Then you'll just need to restart Skype.

I was kind of surprised that I couldn't find many other skype style files out there, if you know of any more or have made any yourself please drop me a line I'd love to hear about any others.

Until they become conscious they will never rebel..

Oh dear! they are at it again.

This time the plan is to store "a billion incidents of data exchange a day". Namely, your personal emails, SMS messages, phone call details and so on and make it available to "Local councils, health authorities and hundreds of other public bodies."

Obviously this is done with all the best intentions in the world - stopping terrorism, drugs, crime, paedophiles and all that good stuff, although what role the local health authority will play in any of those is, as yet, unclear.

However, recent history has shown that in reality it's use will likely be wider reaching and more mundane.

Now, this concerns me somewhat and I'd be pretty surprised if it didn't concern everyone, so I'm going to suggest something.

Why not encrypt as many of your communications as possible?

There is nothing illegal in doing this, as far as I can tell. Although, you are of course bound by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 to hand over any encryption keys to the legal authorities if they ask.

The upside of this is that at least it'll prevent random text searching across your data and it may annoy a few council jobsworths along the way. Plus, if they really think you're up to something they can jolly well go and get a summons for your keys (assuming you haven't, *ahem*, misplaced them or something) right?

Another free benefit of this is the verification of your email traffic - by signing and receiving signed messages you can gain some assurance of where they're coming from.

Wouldn't it be ironic (and lovely) if this move by the government actually lead to a widespread adoption of email encryption?

Here's some links to get you started....

encryptedemail.org - has tutorials for getting started in Thunderbird and Gmail

Mac GNU Privacy Guard - Set of mac utilities to deal with encryption and key management.

PGP For Apple Mail - Bundle plugin for Mail.app, I personally use this and it's fine. The latest beta is mostly functional on Leopard.

GPG Eudora - Scripts for Eudora.

EntourageGPG - some Microsoft email thing some people use :)

Oh, and my public key if you want to send encrypted stuff to me :)

I am Rich

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/08/iphone-i-am-ric.html

Genius.

Hassle free contacts.

I've just received my beta invite for Soocialand have been playing around with it a bit.

It looks so far like the perfect application for syncing contacts between your macs/gmail/phones etc. It's very slick. Of course, my crappy £5 Sagem 'pay as you go' phone isn't supported, so I could just use .mac (or me.com as they call it) and hack the Leopard Address book to sync with GMail (which was my previous setup). However, I'm interested in a couple of things;

1. Smoothness of operation - .mac had an annoying tendency to sync things at seemingly random times and was quite obtrusive when it did so. Soocial may even run alongside .mac syncing in the future, they advise turning this off for now however.

2. Cost - The beta is free and I've no idea if Soocial will start charging for their service later (I was too lazy to read all the details), but it could potentially replace my .mac account as I don't really use many of its other features.

3. Support - I know at least one person who'd love it if this synced with windows PCs as well, probably with Outlook (or wherever you store contacts on a PC). It seems to me that Soocial have the advantage here as, in theory, they can build in support for almost anything they can be bothered to. I suspect .mac will stick to iPhones and Macs for the foreseeable future.