Out of the Woods

The Backup Blues

2008-07-08T19:52:10Z

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.

U-verse in Tolland

2008-05-12T02:23:58Z

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.

The Memristor Has Arrived

2008-05-01T19:09:36Z

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.

Windows Live Photo Gallery

2008-04-29T15:50:27Z

I continue to be blown away by the free software available from Microsoft as part of their Windows Live suite. One of the things I like to do when I'm somewhere that offers a stunning view is to take a series of photos that, when stitched together, makes a very nice panorama. It results in a photo that is much more striking than you could take with a single exposure.

After I took several such photo series at the Atlanta FRC championship a few weeks ago, I started looking around for current photo stitching software. "Free" was my goal, and after looking at a few hosted on SourceForge, I was starting to get disappointed. That's when I saw someone mention a feature of Windows Live Photo Gallery that does photo stitching.

I quickly downloaded and installed it and started poking around. With most stitching software, you have to manually assign some common points in two adjacent photos to give the software something to work with. With Photo Gallery, all you do is give it a list of photos and, bam, out pops a nearly perfect panorama. If you know where the edges are, you can find a few artifacts, but the results are better than I've ever seen, especially for software that requires no user tweaking. I haven't even looked at the other features of the program. Go download it and take a took. You may also find my photo set from the championship here.

Hamas puppet slaughters Bush in White House mosque

2008-04-01T21:12:40Z

In-freakin-credible. A Hamas television station on Monday broadcast a children's show featuring a puppet show where a Muslim boy breaks into the White House, berates President Bush, and then stabs him. And what happens when the children who are brainwashed like this from a young age become teenagers? They beat up elderly Jewish women and younger kids. And Islam is a religion of peace...

RAGE173 2008 Season

2008-03-17T19:36:22Z

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!

Satanic Bush Part 2?

2008-03-09T05:13:38Z

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?

Israeli man builds missile to fire back at Gaza

2008-03-06T18:18:41Z

Read here and here. After the police stopped him at the last minute, he remarked that he "wished there were more 'crazies' like me in Israel." Me, too.

Google Calendar Sync

2008-03-06T17:57:20Z

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...

Phun Fun

2008-03-05T18:24:51Z

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.

7-Zip Archiver

2008-03-05T04:33:52Z

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.

Windows Live SkyDrive

2008-02-22T14:57:05Z

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....

Windows Live Writer

2007-12-31T18:45:11Z

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.

U-Verse Back on Track in Connecticut

2007-11-09T13:05:58Z

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.

Space Station Computer Crash

2007-10-16T14:52:27Z

Anyone following the most recent Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station (ISS) will recall the crash of all of the station's Russian-made computers shortly after shuttle docking. The astronauts were able to use the shuttle's engines to help keep the station oriented properly, and replacement parts arrived soon after the shuttle's departure on-board a Russian supply ship. The initial blame for the crash was placed squarely on the Americans and some new solar panels that had been installed. However, here is an excellent article that details exactly what happened and where the blame clearly rests.