New laptop
I bought myself a new laptop as a graduation gift. (Did I tell you I graduated? I have a Master’s degree now).
It is a Toshiba Satellite L305-S5885 that I purchased on sale at Circuit City.
It came with Vista, and I haven’t really used Vista much so I left it on there for now. The Circuit City salesman told me removing Vista would void the warranty…I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it would be silly.
I also installed Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), which installed amazingly smoothly. There was some minor kajiggering (dual-screen quirks and Opera Flash plugin were the two main ones), but the rest of the installation was as smooth as a Windows install, and about 50 times faster. I was expecting a battle over poorly supported hardware, but I was very pleasantly surprised.
The laptop was slightly more than I wanted to pay and doesn’t have discrete video memory, but I’m okay with the tradeoff: I get a dual core with 250gb HDD and 3gb RAM. It seems to be performing very well, even before I cleaned off all the junkware. I did have an odd problem with the CD/DVD drive, but I think it was probably due to me installing some non-Vista friendly software (Virtual CloneDrive).
Secret of Mana for VC
Secret of Mana is coming to the Wii Virtual Console. You are required to get it.
Campaign promises
I’m pretty apathetic about the presidential race this year, mainly because neither candidated really appeals to me.
Arnold Kling is on the same wavelength as me, and has put together a list of 7 things that will not happen, no matter who is elected. And I agree with them.
Mozy on home
How often do you back up your hard drive? What if your hard drive crashed tomorrow, or your house burned to the ground as a result of a tragic blimp accident? (Goodyear? No, the worst.)
Wouldn’t it be nice to have as good of a backup policy as businesses, corporations, and hosting companies?
For about $5 a month, you can. It’s called Mozy, and this is not a paid endorsement.
You install a very nice little client program on your computer, choose the directories, files, folders, etc that you want to keep backed up, and the MozyHome client takes care of the rest. A free account gives you 2gb of space, and a paid account gets you unlimited space (for one computer). Any file you delete on your PC will be deleted after 30 days on your backup. There are about 4 different handy ways to restore your files (via web, DVD, a virtual drive that appears in “my computer”, and even a context–right click–menu).
Worried about the security of your data? Don’t want anyone at Mozy or anywhere else to see your 30 gigs of japanese porn comics? No problem. Mozy will encrypt your data with 448-bit blowfish encryption, and then send it via SSL to their servers. Yes, 448-bits. You’ll be long dead before your data could be brute forced. Still not enough? Use your own encryption key on the data. Of course, if you forget your key, that data will never be seen by anyone ever again.
Mozy’s data is stored in a fireproof, earthquake-proof location, with redundant power systems. For anyone to physically get to it, they need two different types of authentication (I’m assuming retina scan and DNA match, but maybe that’s just Mission Impossible). Not good enough for you? Where is your data stored now, skippy? Fort Knox?
So yeah, get the free version, give it a try. They even have a client for Mac. No Linux, though.
This service has already saved my bacon a couple of times. You may think $5 a month is a lot (you can get a discount for buying 1 or 3 years in advance), but when you are scrambling to find that one super-important file, (you know the one), you may just thank your lucky stars that you Mozied on home.
Aggreget update
If you’ve been following Aggreget for the last week or so, you might have noticed that the links are pretty scanty.
There’s a reason for that.
First, delicious changed the URL for their RSS feed. Easy fix.
Second, TwitBuzz is all kajiggered. I don’t know what’s going on.
Third: normally I remove the “www.” from each link in order to get more matches. I noticed that it wasn’t happening for certain sites, so I put in some code to take care of it. However, I didn’t test very well, because it was making things more kajiggered than before. So that’s fixed.
Finally, I didn’t notice this until just recently for some reason, but my Reddit code was all kajiggered. (Not that I’m too upset: Reddit is more liberal than a union hall built entirely out of Ted Kennedys). So that’s fixed now.
Additionally, I added another site to the Aggreget mix: Mixx, which is some sort of play of the name and concept of Digg.
mgroves.com is now on new hosting
Another excuse for my lack of activity: I’ve been moving the site over to new hosting. There was nothing wrong with the old hosting, I’m just consolidating sites (I’m getting quite a network of sites going here).
So, if you see anything wrong, point it out to me, and I’ll get it fixed as soon as possible.
As for the lack of content: I’ve got a couple of good ideas brewing. The creativity drought might be at an end. My apathy for this election season isn’t helping, but I know the reader of mgroves.com demands results, not excuses. I shall double my efforts.
Buy my book!
