Archive for February, 2009
What’s Your Cloud Backup Strategy?
Posted by David Andrzejewski in Computing on February 20, 2009
I wanted to follow up a previous post with some additional comments. This past week, a popular social bookmarking service called Ma.gnolia went down and lost all of their users’ data. Their users were understandably angry and frustrated. Citizen Garden did an interview with the guy who created Ma.gnolia and he brings up a question that I alluded to – we have a lot of content – a lot of data – stored all over the place online – what’s our backup strategy?
Online Safety – For Your Parents?
Posted by David Andrzejewski in Security on February 9, 2009
There are lots of articles with tips for parents on how to keep their kids safe online. But what about those of us who are the resident computer geeks in the family – how do we keep our parents and other family members safe from getting viruses and falling prey to phishing attacks?
We’ve all been through this – a member of our family somehow manages to get a virus or fill their computer with adware, and then we have to fix it. Of course, nobody did anything wrong or visited any bad sites – it just “happened.” We spend hours trying to fix it, and when we finally do, we realize that we want those hours of our life back. Or worse yet – it’s so bad that we can’t fix it, and need to reinstall everything for them.
I’m not implying that our parents are in any way unintelligent; I think the problem is that they don’t take these threats seriously enough.
So how do you – the geek in the family – prevent this from happening? One answer that you’ll hear from the geek community is “install Linux.” If you can get away with that without the guilt trip, go for it, but here are some tips for Windows users – read on.
Why TiVo Is Better
Posted by David Andrzejewski in Entertainment on February 4, 2009
You’ve heard of TiVo – Everyone’s heard of TiVo. The problem is, most average people haven’t actually seen a TiVo in action and don’t really understand what makes a TiVo better than their cable or satellite DVR. I think TiVo’s got a PR issue – people use the word DVR and TiVo interchangeably – and while a TiVo is a DVR, that doesn’t make a DVR a TiVo – there are a whole host of features that put the TiVo miles ahead of the other DVRs on the market.
I don’t work for TiVo, and they haven’t paid me for this or anything (although that would be nice in this economy 
). I’m just a long-time TiVo user who’s maybe a little too obsessed with the box… but if you actually own a TiVo, you’d understand.
And here’s another disclaimer: I am not a professional reviewer, there are DVRs out there that I’ve never seen, and there are probably newer software versions for some of the DVRs I have seen. These are just my personal thoughts on TiVo, and while there are good competitors out there that may excel in some areas, there are few that can match TiVo in terms of the sheer breadth of featuers it offers.
I’m going to avoid discussing the features that are common to all DVRs have and focus on what makes TiVo the best DVR available.
JungleDisk on FreeBSD
Posted by David Andrzejewski in Computing, Software on February 3, 2009
For those of you who don’t know, JungleDisk is a utility that allows you to back up data to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). Soon, it will also allow you to use Mosso’s Cloud Files service, which is similar to S3 but hosted by RackSpace. I recently won a free subscription to JungleDisk, thanks to Mosso.
I’ve got JungleDisk set up on my Windows machine and it’s working really well. I was looking around the JungleDisk website, and I noticed that you’re allowed to install the desktop edition on as many computers as you want. I’ve got two machines here at home – my laptop with Windows, and my file server running FreeBSD. JungleDisk doesn’t have a native FreeBSD version, but they do offer a Linux version. Seeing as FreeBSD does have a Linux compatibility layer, I figured I’d at least try to get it to work. So far, I’ve been moderately successful.
Do You Trust Your Data Online?
Posted by David Andrzejewski in Computing, Software on February 3, 2009
Over the past few years, a major paradigm shift has occurred in how (and where) our data is stored. We’ve had data online for quite a while – ever since the first “guestbook” applications appeared on peoples’ GeoCities home pages (usually right next to the animated “Under Construction” GIF).
I’m not going to discuss identity theft here – there are already enough posts about that topic. I’d like to discuss the social and professional aspects of our personal data that’s stored online, and the risks involved.
A Simple Backup Strategy
Posted by David Andrzejewski in Software on February 1, 2009
I am a strong believer that most non-IT people don’t take seriously the need to have a reliable method of backup for their important data. Just ask yourself: What happens when you can no longer access the data on your computer? It doesn’t matter what happens – you could or lose your laptop or have it stolen, or the hard drive in your computer could fail. Any way you look at it, your data is toast. What, then, would you do to recover it? It’s always a good time to think about backups, and to help, I’ll show you what I do.
I actually use two backup strategies: Image-based backups (on-site), and online backups (off-site) – and everything is completely automated.