Google Apps Hacks Slashdotted today!

Yay! Philipp Lenssen’s Google Apps Hacks just got reviewed on Slashdot by JR Peck, who had some kind words for the book:

Well, this book is an excellent introduction to Google’s many on-line applications. I use many already and still learned of a couple new ones when I read this book. It also does bring all that instruction into one place, and provides a very user-friendly style of instruction. There is also a very nice feature, 8 sections that take the reader “Beyond Google…”. Each of these sections informs the reader about alternative software that provides similar functionality to the Google software described in the preceding chapter. This is really a great resource and an unexpected bonus for anyone who reads the book.

Citizen Engineer 01 – SIM card and payphone hacks

Lihat Video Kat Sini

Ladyada and PT have kicked off the first episode of their Citizen Engineer video series in style. This episode explores GSM SIM card technology and the more retro tech found inside a retired Bell payphone. Ladyada shows how to create a SIM reader which you can use to do things like read deleted SMS messages or brute-force the card’s secret key. In the second part, the team dismantles an old Bell payphone and hacks it to function as a home telephone, require quarters for use, and make Skype calls.

Citizen Engineer

PocketMod and Mapufacture: the anti-iPhone

Here’s a clever way to fold an 8.5×11 sheet of paper into a small book. The way it’s folded, all of the book’s 8 outward-facing pages are from the same side of the sheet of paper. This allows you to easily construct a handy little daily planner by printing a single sheet of paper. When you’re done folding, the first and third leaf will have a little pouch that you can shove a business card or two inside.

The PocketMod website has a flash application that lets you quickly build a layout for your planner. You can drag calendars, todo-lists, grids, conversion tables, and even RSS feed articles to the page and print it directly from your browser.

NTFS Alternate Data Streams – hide files inside other files

The NTFS file system has support for additional data, called Alternate Data Streams (ADS), to be attached to any file. Normally this is used by the operating system and file explorer to bind extra data to a file, such as the file’s access control information, searchable file meta-data like keywords, comments and revision history, and even information that can mark a file as having been downloaded from the internet. Because this extra information is bound to the file at the filesystem level, you can move the file from one folder to another and all of the various meta-information and permission data stays with the file.

The interesting thing is that a file can have 0 to many ADS forks attached to any file or directory. While some of the ADS identifiers are use by the OS, there’s nothing stopping you from adding other ADS forks to a file. You can do this directly from the command line, using a simple colon “:” notation.

Let’s say you have a file called test.txt. You can store a secret message in the file like this:
echo "This is a secret" > test.txt:secretdata