Quite a while ago (I was surprised when I looked it up: 2008) I subscribed to a backup app called Jungle Disk. The interesting thing about it was (a) it used Amazon S3 (then relatively new) as a backup store, and (b) you subscribed to it at a rate of a mere $1 per month. So, in essence, it’s an online backup program and it allowed me to keep documents and photos – about 6 folder trees in all – somewhere else than a local backup drive. It was the “house burns down” option: in the event of a catastrophe (like, say, if the Black Forest fire last year had been a little more ferocious and the wind from the north-east a little stronger) I’d have our decade’s worth of photos still around once we’d rebuilt. […]
READ MORESo, in the previous installment in this upgrade game I was crowing about how I knew how to boot from a USB drive on the Dell XPS 12 and therefore upgrading the SSD in it was going to be a piece of cake. Well, it turned out to be a piece of the heaviest, densest, fruit cake you’ve ever seen. Dropping it onto a wood floor would have dented the floor. […]
READ MOREThere are several possible reasons for wanting to boot from a USB drive, I suppose, but mine came from this thought experiment: I’ve been diligently making regular system backups of my Dell XPS 12 for a while and today I wondered if I would be able to recover from, say, a crashed hard drive or – a much better scenario – from upgrading the hard drive to a higher capacity one. In fact, this latter scenario is the one that interests me: I’m contemplating a 480GB drive (currently the Crucial M500 is $280 from newegg.com) to replace the 240GB drive that I bought a year ago for my Dell XPS 12. […]
READ MOREBack in November 2012, I ordered the first series of DCI Banks on DVD from amazon.co.uk, an ITV crime drama series starring Stephen Tompkinson as, well, DCI Alan Banks and Andrea Lowe as Annie Cabbot. For one reason and another, I really enjoy the traditional British police procedural: there’s some bizarre murder, after which proceeds a nicely drawn and perhaps drawn-out investigation of the crime, with lots of character development along the way. The epitome of this type of drama was undoubtedly Inspector Morse, with Endeavour following in those footsteps. DCI Banks was possibly not quite as well done as those, but it was nevertheless interesting to me because of the setting: somewhere in Yorkshire. Never really properly positioned unlike Morse’s Oxford, just assumed to be up there somewhere. Although I’ve never lived in Yorkshire, my parents have, and I consider myself a proto-Yorkshireman, having explored pretty much all of the Dales and most of the Moors. All in all, I enjoyed the episodes a great deal. […]
READ MOREThere I was, minding my own business, when I came across this article in ArsTechnica: “Dear Asus router user: You’ve been pwned, thanks to easily exploited flaw”. I read on avidly, because, well, I have an Asus router, an RT-N66U to be precise and the subject of this article. […]
READ MOREWhen I was younger my parents used to regale me with stories of Dad’s first car, a Flying Standard Twelve saloon. It was from the late 30s, so I would guess it was 15 years old or so by the time Dad bought it. Here is the car in pre-marriage days, Dad sitting in the driver’s seat (the “suicide door” open) with Dad’s best friend Derrick Hill leaning on the front mudguard. I think they were off on a camping trip to Wales somewhere. […]
READ MOREEvery couple of weeks (on payday essentially, so I remember to do it), I go searching through my photo collection for a new Facebook cover image. There’s a couple of reasons for this I suppose: one, I like having cover images that change periodically since it allows me to show off some photos that I’m proud of; and, two, it forces me to continue to learn how to take what you might call good photos. I do not pretend to be a great photographer, but I continually try and cultivate an “eye” for a well-composed image. Some days that “eye” is there, and then some days I’m just glad I don’t use film anymore because I’d be broke. […]
READ MOREOnce upon a time, in a house not that far away, considering, there lived a cat called Aristaeus. He was nominally a brownish tabby, but he had a wonderful white bib, white paws with a signature black toe on one of them. Because of, or to live up to, that sophisticated white bib, he craved the good life and got it in spades. This cat loved roast chicken, fresh salmon, smoked salmon, fresh tuna, tinned tuna, prosciutto di Parma, and even freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. When we had pheasant for Christmas dinner, Ari wasn’t that far away asking for nibbles from the dining table. Sadly, Ari died this afternoon at about 1:40pm, leaving an enormous cat-shaped hole in our lives. […]
READ MOREFile this one under “I’m gonna need this again one day, m’kay?” […]
READ MOREMy wife (who is a Senior Deputy District Attorney) is preparing for a major homicide trial at the moment – it starts on Monday, January 6, for an estimated 8 weeks – and so spent New Year’s Day at work. I was left at home and, after having tidied up, I was at a bit of a loss as to what to do. Yes, I could write some code, but I was in more of an artsy fartsy mood. Ideal thought: since it was the first day of the year, design and make a calendar. […]
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