I switched to Alfred from the once great Quicksilver not too long ago and instantly bought the Alfred Power Pack solely to have access to the system-wide hotkeys it provides.

One trick I found helpful was to hotkey a folder for quick access to my most used directories on my computer. If you have the power pack, it’s quite simple. Open up your Alfred preferences and go to the Global Hotkeys panel. Add a new hotkey and instead of selecting an app or a file, just select a folder for the “action” and set your hotkey.

Now, using that hotkey will open a finder window for that directory; it’s that simple. I currently use CMD + ` to open my Dropbox folder and CMD + ALT + ` to open my mounted file server.

Last night I discovered that my RSS feed was down for the count. After a ton of debugging, some gnashing of teeth, and googling how to properly write a 301 redirect in an htaccess file, I think I’ve cracked it.

The original feed http://markupboy.com/rss should continue to work and all of the old urls for that feed should be redirecting to it. There is also an new alternate feed at feeds.feedburner.com/markupboy that will be the new canonical feed going forward.

Since moving back to Boulder, I’ve been using Viget’s VPN more and more often to grab stuff off of our shared fileserver. I take a fairly minimalist approach to my menu-bar (going so far as to remove the clock from it) so I wasn’t thrilled about having the VPN icon up there but having to open up network preferences to connect and disconnect from the VPN wasn’t terribly fun either.

Enter AppleScript. After a bit of digging, I found that you can script the connecting and disconnecting of a given VPN. Grab the name of the VPN service you’d like to easily toggle and open up AppleScript editor and paste in this script:

tell application "System Events"
    tell current location of network preferences
        set VPNservice to service "VPN SERVICE" -- name of the VPN service
        set isConnected to connected of current configuration of VPNservice
        if isConnected then
            disconnect VPNservice
        else
            connect VPNservice
        end if
    end tell
end tell

You’ll want to change “VPN SERVICE” to the name of your VPN connection from network preferences (retaining the quotes). Running this will switch the states of your VPN from connect to not. That in and of itself isn’t terribly interesting but if you have a app that can handle system-wide hotkeys (like Quicksilver, Alfred, or Keyboard Maestro) you can bind this script to run at the press of a button (for me, it’s just Cmd + F12).

This Friday, March 25th, 2011, some of my great friends at Viget and I are hosting the first annual Dots for Tots Ms. Pac-Man marathon. Starting Friday morning at 8:00 am EST we’ll fire up our original Ms. Pac-Man cocktail table and won’t quit until donations stop coming in and we’ll be broadcasting the whole thing live on our site at dotsfortots.org.

Every cent donated goes directly to Child’s Play Charity so come check us out, enjoy the show, and help out a really great cause.

Dots For Tots harnesses the power of Ms. Pac-man, and our irrational love for her, for good.

The first annual Dots For Tots is a gaming marathon of nostalgic proportions. The Falls Church, VA office of Viget Labs proudly boasts a cocktail model of Ms. Pac-Man - and a handful of Viget’s web nerds play the classic arcade game a bit too much. So on March 25, starting at 8am EST they’ll hold a Ms. Pac-Man marathon to raise funds for Child’s Play, a charity that gives games to children’s hospitals worldwide.

Donations are taken on the site and 100% of the proceeds go straight to Child’s Play. As the donation total rises, so does the length of time that the team will continue to play Ms. Pac-Man. The initial goal is to play for eight hours and raise $1,200 but the game will extend as long as donations allow. The marathon will be broadcast live at www.dotsfortots.org where viewers can watch the action, see the scores, donate money, tweet at the players, and chat with them via UStream. The players will chart their scores over the day and battle it out to make the Top 10 list. As the day progresses, the competitive spirit might turn the players against each other, or at the very least make them loopy after several consecutive hours of Ms. Pac-Man. Either way it promises to be entertaining and for a worthy cause.

For more information, check out www.dotsfortots.org, www.twitter.com/dotsfortots or email dotsfortotscharity@gmail.com

I’m kind of a nut about keeping personal data safe online. I use 1Password to generate and store all of my login credentials and I get irritated when websites don’t let me use 40 character passwords.

Just as important, though, is keeping files safe and secure. For that, I have [Knox], a wonderful piece of software that has an incredibly important job that happens to now be maintained by the amazing developers at Agile Web Solutions

A little background info - Mac OS X, right out of the box, has the ability to create and secure disk images. Just like a virtual hard drive, disk images can store files and folders and can even be encrypted. When unmounted, they just appear as a single, compact file. Unfortunately, creating, managing and maintaining encrypted disk images in OS X can be somewhat of a chore.

This is where Knox comes in. It lives in your menubar when in use (and honestly, I only keep it open when needed but it hardly uses any resources) and allows you to easily create, open and backup encrypted disk images.

Creating and opening images are as easy as two clicks and backing up images can be handled manually or on a schedule with a pre-set backup location. And for piece of mind, should you ever decide to stop using Knox or need to get to a file locked away in an encrypted image, since Knox uses OS X’s built-in disk creation process, any images created can be opened on any Mac, with or without Knox.

Syncing encrypted images between computers is a breeze, too. In Knox’s general preference panel, just set the “Create new vaults in:” setting to a folder inside Dropbox (you are using Dropbox, right?). Repeat this procedure on every machine you have with Knox installed and they’ll all have access to you secure files.

So that’s it. Knox, once again proving that the best kind of a app is on that does exactly one thing extremely well.