Dictation.IO

You have to use Chrome for this, but this site will dictate your speech and does a pretty good job.

https://dictation.io/

Phonetic Alphabet

When vocalizing serial numbers, hex characters or other alpha-numeric strings, it's sometimes difficult to articulate Bs and Vs without them sounding the same.  Using the phonetic alphabet helps to eliminate miscommunication.

Alpha	Hotel	Oscar	Victor
Bravo	India	Papa	Whiskey
Charlie	Juliet	Quebec	X-ray
Delta	Kilo	Romeo	Yankee
Echo	Lima	Sierra	Zulu
Foxtrot	Mike	Tango
Golf	November	Uniform

File Signatures Table

I have used this site a number of times when looking for file headers:

http://www.garykessler.net/library/file_sigs.html

Recovering Unallocated Space, Free Space, and Slack Space

This information came from the following website:

http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/networking/forensic-analysis/9780072226966/data-analysis-techniques/ch11lev1sec7

After you perform a forensic duplication of media, and you have recovered as many files as you can, there is still data left on the evidence media that you will want to review. The remaining data is stored in slack space, unallocated space, and free space.

In order to understand slack space and unallocated space, we must first review what an allocation unit or cluster is. Operating systems arrange all data stored on a hard drive into segments called allocation units (also called clusters). For example, an operating system that uses 32K clusters reads and writes data from a hard drive 32K at a time. It cannot read less than 32K of data from a hard drive, and it cannot write less than 32K at a time to the hard drive. However, very few files have the exact amount of data to occupy an entire cluster or set of clusters. Therefore, when an operating system that writes 32K clusters to a hard drive is being asked to save a 20K Microsoft Word document, there is 12K of unused space called file slack. In our example, there may be remnants of previous files in this 12K of file slack.

Unallocated space is the area of the hard drive not currently allocated to a file. Fragments of deleted files are often strewn across unallocated space on a hard drive.

Free space is the portion of the hard drive media that is not within any currently active partitions.

Adding the Today Smart Folder to a Newer Mac OS Sidebar

After updating to Maverick from Snow Leopard, I noticed there was no Today smart folder.  This proved to be a big problem because I relied on it when attaching, copying and moving files.  Here is a link with instructions on adding the folder back:

http://macs.about.com/od/LionTipsNtricks/qt/Restore-Smart-Searches-To-Os-X-Lions-Finder-Sidebar.htm