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.

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.

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...

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.

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.