Hamarana

After the StupidUser thing a couple of weeks ago, I had determined that I would seek out suitable desktop storage as well as online stuff. (I might add that I am very pleased with both Mozy and iDrive, both of which just do the backup at the interval you have specified, with no further interference from yourself. This is essential if its to be a true backup system.)

Anyway, had brekkie with a friend this morning and could feel a fit of “the buys” coming over me. I was going to go take some pix across the river, there was supposed to be some people flying kites, but the wind was almost dead and I couldn’t see anyone there, from the city side of the river so I headed down the highway to Hardly Normals, where I had seen a WD “MyBook” Essential Edition 1TB for $199 a couple of weeks back. Intended to buy it… except now the price read $299. Oops. Noticed a few other 1TB drives in the same range and decided to think smaller. I noticed the WD MYBook 500G Home Edition drive… and also noticed that it, unlike everything else on the shelf at HNs, could be daisychained to an existing drive, and more drives could be added. So, for $179, I now have a 500G WD MyBook daisychained to my existing Maxtor 200G OneTouch II. Both are using firewire to connect to each other and the computer, I may switch to USB soon as I believe USB2 is faster than Firewire400.

Anyway… I ramble, as usual. The short version is: Time Machine now has heaps of room to do its backup thing and I am happy with 700G of external storage, added to my existing 320G internal.

FYI For those who don’t have the joys of OSX to help them out. This is what the Time Machine looks like.

I arbitrarily chose to go back to 10th September and can access any file I want from that day, just as if I was accessing the Finder normally. Maybe Microsoft will produce something similar for Windows users in its next incarnation.

I seem to have lost my old Imation 256mb drive, which is a bloody pest because it has on it everything I was working on for my job, and that cannot be replaced, I will have to start over…

I had already decided to u/g anyway, as the 256mb was no longer adequate to hold my stuff, and had decided on a 2G drive, as it was a nice balance between cost and capacity.

The Sandisk Cruzer Micro 2G caught my eye for one reason alone and that was its size (its tiny, though not as tiny as the Imation). The other feature I liked was that it has no cap, its retractable instead. I did not know that it has this thing called U3 which is Windows only and is like a little apps area of the drive, complete with its own launchbar. I was impressed with the notion of having an on-board virus scanner… its all very well having virus scanners on host machines, but you don’t know if they are updated often enough and if you can have some control over it, well and good for the protection of your own files. I paid $99 for it at Officeworks yesterday. I believe RRP is around $179.

Further exploration of the notion of apps on a flashdrive revealed PortableApps.com and of course the U3.com site. These apps require absolutely no installation of anything on the host machine and there is a veritable truckload of them (relatively speaking). The apps listed at portableapps don’t seem to require U3 which is an app in itself… its a fascinating concept… I suppose its not long before we have Operating Systems (mac OS7 is already available) as portables and we will be able to run whatever we want on whichever host machine we are working at.

Tech moves fast. When I think of how when I was a kid, I did not even have TV, let alone the stuff we have today… I keep getting blown away…

I saw something about this site on one of those “current affairs” shows the other night (I’m using quotes there because theres not a lot of current affairs in them, IMO).

Auction-Australia has been set up by a young man as a direct competitor to eBay. The rationale for having done so is as follows:

Why list on Auction-Australia???
There are three very important reasons why you would benefit by using Auction-Australia over other auction web sites.

1. Cheaper
* Auction-Australia has cheaper listings than eBay and most other sites.
* Auction-Australia does not charge commissions on the sale of your item.
2. Fairer
* Auction-Australia has a fairer system for bidding. Instead of the auction artificially ending at a set time, our auctions are extended by one minute every time another bid is placed. This feature means that programs such as “Auction Sniper” will not work on Auction-Australia. This is the way auctions naturally work in the marketplace.
* Auction-Australia does not operate proxy bidding, eliminating a lot of the problems associated with this feature.
3. Australian
* With the majority of listings being Australian, it is easier for Auction-Australia to prosecute fraudulent sellers and buyers who operate on this site. Auction-Australia has a zero policy to fraudulent activities and will not only suspend the account immediately, it will also report all offences to the Australian Federal Police.
* Auction-Australia is a wholly owned and operated Australian auction site. With our main competitor turning over in excess of $200 million per year in Australian listing fees, this translates to a lot of money leaving our country every year. All Auction-Australia’s profits stay in Australia.

And with all the scamming going on at eBay (and set to increase as more spammers and scammers hit the market) I rather think that supporting this site is the best thing any Aussie can do.

I’m joining as soon as I finish typing this post

Check out Auction-Australia now

I never thought I would see a map of all Australian public toilets. But there it is.

The Australian Government Toilet Map

I’m still chortling.

“What???” I hear you ask… Well, those of you who have so far not heard of the latest thing in high capacity portable disk storage. If it works as well as claimed, its going to replace CDs and DVDs as the current storage medium of choice.

From the Blu-Ray website:

Blu-ray, also known as Blu-ray Disc (BD) is the name of a next-generation optical disc format jointly developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), a group of the world’s leading consumer electronics, personal computer and media manufacturers (including Apple, Dell, Hitachi, HP, JVC, LG, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, TDK and Thomson). The format was developed to enable recording, rewriting and playback of high-definition video (HD), as well as storing large amounts of data. A single-layer Blu-ray Disc can hold 25GB, which can be used to record over 2 hours of HDTV or more than 13 hours of standard-definition TV. There are also dual-layer versions of the discs that can hold 50GB.

I currently have an external drive which is a Maxtor Onetouch 200G Firewire… but to be able to have high capacity disks of a theoretically infinite number (think massive floppies) and the drive to read them… well… its all good!

I have mentioned Simply Budgets before and have a page devoted entirely to it, because I have an affiliate account with them. This is because I have been using Simply Budgets for about 3 years now, and love it.

However, I do find it a pain in the ass not to have an OSX version of it available to me, because it means I have to run Virtual PC, which I would not otherwise bother with, because its as slow as a wet week on my eMac.

David Wright is now asking for people who are interested in a Mac version to submit their details on the website and says that if there is sufficient interest, he will contract a Mac programmer right away.

I’d love to have a native MacOSX version, there is NOTHING like this program in OSX-land and I really want it.

So how about it, OSX users… go submit your details to David and lets get a Mac version on the horizon.

FLOCK!  Its a new browser based on the gecko engine (Mozilla, Firefox, Camino et al) and it includes some pretty neat features, and almost none that you are used to.

I’m typing this in the builtin blog tool.  You can set up your blog really easily, and once your entry window is open, you can axctually drag stuff straight into a little box, to blog it.  The tool also retrieves your previous post titles. There’s also a builtin flickr client, and the bookmarks manager is like nothing I have ever seen. 

You no longer need to submit your name to a list and wait to be invited to join.  I got my dev copy this past week on invitation and have been enjoying the exploration, but I note now that the latest version is available for all to download.

Versions available for Windows, MacOSX and Linux.

Technorati Tags: flock, developer, blog tool, windows, osx, linux