Simple screenshots or screencasts with Preview and Jing

I get a lot of computer-related questions from friends and family, and it makes you innovative because few things are more tedious than trying to explain where a certain feature is hidden in the menus or explaining a configuration over the phone or typing in instant messaging. I've already written about how I provide remote support from wherever I am, but sometime what you need is just a little picture, some comments or maybe a tiny video.

The last couple of months I've been enjoying the very simple but functional free software Jing. It makes both screenshots and records screencasts (with or without commentary), can insert basic annotations into screenshots but most importantly it provides a simple connection to online storage service, it's only a matter of clicking "upload" and you'll have the link in clipboard. However, Jing is a bit too basic, and a friend showed me that the regular Mac OS X Preview application is already very capable to make annotated screenshots.

I decided to make a simple screencast (using Jing) of how you use Preview to grab a screenshot (in this case say that I want to bug report that I've got a strange file which shouldn't be there) and add the annotation tools to the toolbar (click here to go to the screencast):

So you thought your OS was secure?

When looking for information about the IDA disassembler (anyone who knows it and can give me a few hints?) I found an interesting video at Google Videos. Alex Sotirov discussed how he found a very applicable "ANI" exploit in WinXP and Vista, including showing his best IDA tricks. Quite academic and extremely technical. As food for thought he ends the lectures with this diagrams about what OS provides what security measures:


We Mac users sometimes brag about how secure OS X is, while in reality it probably has a pretty solid base in Darwin and provides a reliable development environment with Cocoa... but when bugs and exploits are found, OS X is standing there almost absolutely naked and defenseless.

Of course, Windows drags a larger pile of legacy code behind itself, but it also is a lot more under fire, it makes a lot more sense to produce exploits and viruses for Windows.

My advice (which I hope will soon be published at mjukvara.se are still simple: 1) use good, secure software which throws away popups and spam 2) install system updates as they become available 3) run some sort of firewall and maybe free antivirus software . You, or if someone does it for you, need to keep your computer reasonably clean and well-oiled. Don't blame a virus if it's you who's filled up your disk. By these simple principles, my systems have been essentially perfectly free from virus trouble for at least five years. Knock on wood :-)

A little PS about that dangerous Internet hole which recently was "discovered" by Anton Kapela and Alex Pilosov. Experts are saying that indeed the "hole" is there, but everyone concerned were already aware of it and will not have much problems with it. If anything it is a small reminder that whenever you transmit passwords or any sensitive data over the Internet, you should not make any assumptions that the network is not wiretapped.