Out of the Woods

Ever since I started taking digital photos seven years ago, I've been absolutely paranoid about losing them. As the old adage goes when dealing with a hard disk drive, it's not if it will fail but when it will fail. I started making backups to CDs, then to DVDs, but there is always that time between backups that has me nervous. I'm also bad about remembering to make new discs.

I started making continuous backups to my server machine in the basement, but that drive was getting full. Besides, there is also the threat of a fire taking out all the physical copies stored in the house. With bandwidth to spare and on-line storage costs coming down, I started looking around at on-line backup solutions.

Most of the services have free trials and make perhaps 1 or 2 gig available at no cost, but the cheapest plans that included at least 10 gig run $15 or more per month. When you start adding up the costs, you'll find that you can buy a lot of large hard drives for that kind of money. That's when I came across Jungle Disk.

Jungle Disk uses Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3), which is an API that developers can use to create applications that use storage on Amazon's servers. The best part is the Jungle Disk program that lives on your PC costs $20 and the monthly cost of Amazon's storage is dirt cheap. I'm able to back up 10 gig of photos, financial, and genealogy data for about $1.50 per month, and the backup store is updated automatically and continuously in the background. It took a few days to upload everything initially, but now it takes just a few minutes a day for the changes to be sent.

If you're looking for good, reliable, cheap on-line backups, Jungle Disk is it.

Posted by Ken at 2:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Woo hoo! We're getting closer. A week or two ago, this box was installed at the AT&T pad down the road. I've been able to confirm that it's a U-verse VRAD. I pass it every day, so I'm now watching for signs that it's being brought to life. Unfortunately, this pad doesn't directly serve our house, but things are looking promising. Now I'm watching the pad that does serve our house with eagle eyes. I can't wait to get rid of Comcast.

Posted by Ken at 9:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This has to be one of the most exciting developments in electronics since the creation of the transistor back in the ’60s. The memristor was first conceived in theory back in 1971 to sit alongside the other mainstay passive components: the resistor, the capacitor, and the inductor. It took until now for scientists at HP to figure out how to build one. This opens the door for even smaller and higher-density nonvolatile memory, but even more importantly, analog computing that works much the same way the brain operates. Check out this article for more details.

Posted by Ken at 2:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The 2008 FIRST FRC competition season has begun. Our team, RAGE 173, competed in Hartford this past weekend in a field of 62 teams and made it into the semifinals. The Hartford Courant had a nice writeup about it. Note that the team referenced in the first three paragraphs of the article is ours. Next is Boston in two weeks followed by the international championship in Atlanta in April. As all the FIRST e-mails end, Go Teams!

Posted by Ken at 2:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Good old Reuters. I found this first photo a little over a year ago, but it was the AP that passed it through. Here's another one with the presidential seal perfectly behind George's head. Does anybody even look at these things before publishing them?

Posted by Ken at 12:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As most people with busy families, I rely on my calendar to try to make sense of all of our daily activities. I used to keep everything in a single Outlook calendar on my work laptop, but if I wanted to quickly check a date while at home and the computer was off, it was most inconvenient, to say the least.

Then I changed jobs and the laptop went away. That's when I started using Google Calendar in a big way. Now I use it for everything, and create separate calendars for different types of activities. For example, I've created public calendars for the UConn men's and women's basketball schedules, the upcoming Stafford Motor Speedway racing season, and even my son's Boy Scout troop and daughter's Venturing crew. Since they are public, others can benefit by including them in their own calendar display.

So it was with mixed feelings that I saw the announcement that Google Calendar could finally be synced with Outlook. It's something I would have killed for about six months ago, but now that I've weaned off Outlook, it's something I'm not particularly excited about. I toyed around with using Plaxo to sync Google Calendar, Outlook, and Thunderbird, but as the various pieces have evolved over the past few months, Plaxo has been getting more and more broken.

I'll probably give it a shot, because I'm now using Outlook 2007 on my new laptop, but I'm not straying far from the basic Google Calendar interface. What I really want is two-way syncing between Thunderbird and Gmail contacts. Oh well...

Posted by Ken at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You have to check out this video. Lots of fun when you have nothing better to do. Down the program (it's free) from here.

Posted by Ken at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I love finding free tools that work better than commercial versions. I have always tried to keep a pair of file archiving utilities on all my PCs: WinZip and WinRAR. However, I was reading some comments where people were talking about WinRAR, and someone mentioned 7-Zip. I quickly discovered that it's a SourceForge-hosted open-source project that handles more file formats than WinZip and WinRAR put together, integrates into the Explorer shell, and is just as easy to use. I've already deleted WinRAR and plan to use this one almost exclusively.

Posted by Ken at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hmm. This whole Windows Live thing looks promising. I last wrote about how much I like Windows Live Writer. I now find a news item that SkyDrive provides 5 GB of free on-line storage. I've been looking into on-line backup storage for a while now, and I've not found any free ones that I like. SkyDrive looks promising, but in my quick look at it, I don't see any nice synchronization utility that would make regular backups happen automatically in the background. I did find a few forum posts saying that kind of functionality would be nice to have. It looks like Microsoft is actively working on SkyDrive, and it's in its infancy, so we may see something yet. Here's hoping....

Posted by Ken at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been bouncing around a bit trying to find a good, free off-line blog editor. I liked BlogJet, but didn't like the price. I've been trying to use ScribeFire from within Firefox, but it doesn't do embedded graphics very well. I just saw a recommendation for Windows Live Writer, and thought I'd give it a try. This is my first post using it, and I like it so far. The price is certainly right. Maybe with the right editor, I'll actually start posting more often.

Wow. This is sweet. It not only formats the post as it would probably look on the blog, it actually learns the blog formatting automatically and shows you exactly what it will look like as you compose it. You can even preview it in the context of the entire blog layout. Very slick indeed.

Posted by Ken at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hurray! A Hartford Superior Court judge sided with AT&T last week, overturning a DPUC ruling that U-Verse is a cable service and therefore needs a cable franchise license. This is good news for those of us who want an alternative to Comcast that doesn't involved putting up a satellite dish. I wrote last December that I was looking forward to having service in our area, and I'm still waiting anxiously. VRADs are popping up all over Manchester, and I'm hoping they continue to move eastward toward Tolland. Fortunately, it doesn't look like our attorney general is going to appeal the ruling, so we may be out of the woods.

Posted by Ken at 8:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Several months ago, I noticed that a new version of Movable Type was available, and it took advantage of new support for Apache's mod_fastcgi. However, when I updated my Apache installation, everything broke. I couldn't run CGI scripts nor could I even run PHP programs. Every so often I tried to fix the configuration, but nothing seemed to work. I finally figured it out, though, so now we're back in business.

Now the question is, do I install the new version 4 beta?

Posted by Ken at 1:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

AT&T announced today the availability of their U-verse IPTV in three areas of Connecticut (Hartford, New Haven, and Stamford). We were the first in our neighborhood to have DSL (I know because SBC was still installing the hardware when they hooked us up), and I’m super anxious to try out U-verse. I’m sure it will be a few months before they get around to installing a VRAD (video-ready access device) down the street from us, but I’ll be closely watching for its appearance. I heard from a tech inside AT&T that they plan to deploy 3000 VRADs just in Connecticut during 2007.

Posted by Ken at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Why is it that private industry can accomplish in less time and for less money things that Big Government could never dream of? Slate has a great article on the FBI’s archaic technology and their failures at trying to join the 20^th century (never mind the 21^st century!).

Posted by Ken at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here is an excellent and well-documented piece written about some of politics and incompetence that went on in the months before 9/11. Granted, hindsight is 20/20, but come on.

Posted by Ken at 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s safe to say that the Digi-Comp was my first real computer. I used to love sticking bits of straws on the “programming” pegs, cycling the “clock,” and watching the results. I first learned binary on this thing. Now, version 2 of Digi-Comp is available. Rather than delicate plastic, this one is made from laser-cut paperboard. The reviews I’ve seen are glowing. I may just have to get one so my kids (who are now the same age that I was when I had one) can get a feel for what really goes on inside the box.

Posted by Ken at 2:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most tech geeks should be familiar with Slashdot, the sometimes irreverent tech news site famous for its ability to bring a site to its knees under the load of thousands of geeks clicking on a featured link. A competitor to Slashdot that I’ve been spending more time on lately is Digg. It’s a much cleaner interface, and readers determine what stories are most popular by “digging” those they like. The more a story is dugg, the higher in the ranks it rises.

There is also quite a nice set of tools growing up around Digg which make interacting with the site even easier. You can find the constantly updated list here.

Posted by Ken at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I’m coding or generating MySQL queries or using an editor like vi, I often can’t remember the exact syntax for a function that I don’t use very much. It’s a pain to crack open a book to look it up, and I have to wade through search results if I Google for the word. As a result, I have lots of cheat sheets hanging up on the walls around me. These sheets simply list all the functions or commands with single-sentence descriptions, and provide me with the hint I need to get it right. Here is a fantastic list of cheat sheets available around the net.

Posted by Ken at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just as much of the Internet has lately, I’ve started taking closer notice of AJAX. I’m a big PHP fan, which concentrates on the server side versus AJAX’s emphasis on the client side, so I’m having to learn a whole new skill set. I came across a very cool PHP library that makes adding AJAX functionality to a PHP-heavy site very easy. Check it out.

Posted by Ken at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Very cute story from Blake Ross, one of the key Firefox developers at Mozilla. I use Firefox almost exclusively on all my machines, and it’s nice to see it continue its march toward browser domination.

Posted by Ken at 12:18 AM | Permalink

Hot on the heels of the two-page Firefox ad that the Mozilla Foundation ran in a recent edition of the New York Times, the Times has an article about Firefox that handily shoots down Internet Explorer and the lame excuses Microsoft is making for it. Good read.

Posted by Ken at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

USA Today has a neat article describing an experiment they did in which they put PCs with various levels of protection on the Internet to see how quickly and how often they'd be hijacked. Within four minutes after being put online, a PC running Windows XP SP1 was attacked and taken over. Dedicated routers that act as firewalls can be purchased for as little as $30. If you have an always-on broadband connection, you're a fool if you're not using one.

Posted by Ken at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Scot Finnie has a very nice review of Firefox, so if you're still on the fence about whether to switch, give it a read. You'll come away with a good feel for what Firefox is all about compared to IE. Most of his "cons" are easily addressed using various Firefox extensions. My favorite that he doesn't mention is called Tabbrowser Extensions, and isn't listed in the normal extension list on the Mozilla site (which is probably why he doesn't know about it). It addresses pretty much every quibble he has with tabbed browsing.

As for RSS handling, skip Live Bookmarks and go straight to Sage. It makes so much sense to keep RSS support in the browser since you're going to be looking at web pages anyway. Sage has the added bonus of keeping feeds in the sidebar, out of the way but easily accessible.

A final extension you need to install is Download Manager Tweak. It adds functionality to the minimalist download manager window.

Posted by Ken at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wow. Check out this video showing the lab at Microsoft containing 64-bit PCs used to test some .NET stuff.

Posted by Ken at 8:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you're still using that abomination known as Internet Explorer, you must also enjoy helmetless motorcycle riding and skydiving in your spare time. Run, don't walk, over to getfirefox.com and switch today to Firefox 1.0. Tabbed browsing, popup blocker, ad blocker, dozens of extensions, and an overall safer Internet experience will be your reward. I've been using it for months now and cringe anytime I see someone still hanging on to IE.

Posted by Ken at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)