Backup and Storage

This rough note concerns two problems:

1. keeping a coherent view of documents across machines
2. cost effective storage for people with many or large files.

Some alternatives

iCloud is quite expensive and frankly, its workflow baffles me. I don't trust any of the synchronization steps Apple takes with iCloud, iTunes, etc. I know a few people who are quite comfortable with these aspects of the Apple offering however. Best case: the cost is about 4x Google Drive and search is much less powerful.

Most companies I've worked with recently make a lot of use of DropBox. I don't use it because its pricing policy combined with its work flow make it very easy to run up  big bills. Best case: the cost is 2x Google Drive and search is less powerful.

Google Drive provides 15 gig of combined Gmail and Drive storage. Jumping up to 100 gig is $5/month. 

Mix and match

Anyone with piles of raw photos or similar volume has a tough choice: A cloud based system like Google Drive with the problems presented by remote storage or a local high density drive at about $70 per TB. If I needed that kind of volume (100g+) I'd use both for redundancy. (I think 18 mp images require about 24.5 mp each. So, Google Drive offers about 612244 images for free.) My guess is that is enough for a journalist or programmer but not for a photographer.

For writers to store their work, 15 gigs is probably enough for a lifetime. For writers who want to keep access to massive amounts of text,  then Evernote may solve the problem. My personal hope is to stay within 15 gigs on Google Drive until prices drop. 

At the moment I have...

• Google services for email and documents I create.
• Amazon cloud for MP3s. [Play may be better.]
• Local hard drive for MP4s. Expanding Google Drive would probably be wise, even at $5/month.
• Local hard drive for photos; I don't take a lot, but I really should move them all from cameras to one place and since most of my photos are from a phone with 4-5 mp, Google Drive is probably fine. But, I need to consolidate. Until I do obsessing about the technology used for storage is a waste of time.
• GitHub for code

Security

I don't take photos of anything I want to keep secret from NSA, like my favorite place to catch large, wild trout.

Picking up...

Injuries in the 2010 Dipsea...

...caused me to almost stop kitesurfing -- and everything else.  However, things are picking up so I'm looking at gear, destinations, and more.

kitesurfing plans 2011

Don't yet know when I'll have time, but I'm looking at late winter in the Philippines or early summer at the Black Sea.

Finding  the KitesurfingAtlas helped with both locations in the Black Sea and the Philippines.

Philippines: Boracay is the popular place & it looks good, but Puerto Princesa looks less crowded and has a kite school, Kite Club Palawan. Looks like the best place to stay is Microtel which has OK looking rooms with internet access. At least one review is favorable.

Jonas Galvez: Living Efficiently

Jonas Galvez: Living Efficiently: "Every once in a while, someone posts an article on getting things done and managing your time on Hacker News. I know because I keep track of them. I immediately think, 'recovering procrastinator'.

The reason why I think this happens is that one of first things an IT geek does when he puts order to his life and starts getting things done is... getting his personal website done and writing about how he did it. That is true for me also. I am just recovering from an insanely unproductive year, following a painful job loss coincidentally amidst but not really related to the housing bubble.

Solar System Scale Model

Solar System Scale Model: "This page shows a scale model of the solar system, shrunken down to the point where the Sun, normally more than eight hundred thousand miles

Bike-Powered Mobile Coffee Shop

Kickstand Coffee 
It not only rocks, it rolls

 

Why can't we do this in Nor*Cal? Don't the foodies out here know how to peddle a bike?

Its not what you eat, its what you do with what you eat

It seems clear that thoughtful people are faced with nearly impossible choices on food. As I indicated, I think the organic/non-organic dichotomy is interesting, but far from the most important.

For me a more interesting idea is: “You are not what you eat; you are what you do with what you eat.", a notion Lustig at UCSF expands upon in video and text.  [Here is a quick summary. Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology]

 I'm always telling myself: "It should be possible to eat  great food cheaply." This chart suggests why I'm wrong.

Wall Street's Bailout Hustle : Rolling Stone

Wall Street's Bailout Hustle : Rolling Stone

Wall Street's Bailout Hustle

Goldman Sachs and other big banks aren't just pocketing the trillions we gave them to rescue the economy - they're re-creating the conditions for another crash

MATT TAIBBI

Posted Feb 17, 2010 5:57 AM

On January 21st, Lloyd Blankfein left a peculiar voicemail message on the work phones of his employees at Goldman Sachs. Fast becoming America's pre-eminent Marvel Comics supervillain, the CEO used the call to deploy his secret weapon: a pair of giant, nuclear-powered testicles. In his message, Blankfein addressed his plan to pay out gigantic year-end bonuses amid widespread controversy over Goldman's role in precipitating the global financial...

Guardian Launches Search Engine for Government Data

Guardian Launches Search Engine for Government Data

The UK Guardian, ostensibly a newspaper but a major proponent for opening data held by governments to use by outside software developers, has launched some software of its own: a search engine that unearths datasets and pathways to data sets provided by governments around the world. World Government Data Search is now live.

Yesterday the UK government released its new data site, data.gov.uk, to rave reviews (including ours). The new Guardian search engine searches across the UK, US, New Zealand and Australian governments' data sites. The company also offered up a gallery of the 10 best visualizations and mash-ups built on top of government data like this.

Tibetan Technology Center

AirJaldi Mesh Router | Tibetan Technology Center

The router for their wireless mesh network...

Air Jaldi Mesh Router (AJMR) Technical Description

The AJMR is built around a SBCs (Single Board Computers) which we extract from low-cost popular WiFi devices such as Linksys’s WRT54G.
While most of the SBCs we use, utilizes a 200mhz MIPS CPU with 4Mb of Flash memory and 16Mb of RAM, we also use much lower-scale units and recently also more powerful units. We find the Netgear WGT634U, to be most suitable for our application and we are happy to see a constant decrease in it’s price. This small SBC draws less power then its bulkier cousins, features a MiniPCI slot for radio card, hosting a great Atheros b/g radio, double the flash and ram of the WRT54G and maybe the greatest feature of all is a USB2.0 port.
Most of our current development is based around this unit....

Google the location of a plugin in Eclipse cvs » Eclipse Papercuts

Google the location of a plugin in Eclipse cvs » Eclipse PapercutsNo Comments

by Lars Vogel / January 19th, 2010

If you want to find the cvs location of a certain Eclipse plugin you can use Google site search using site:”dev.eclipse.org/viewsvn”.

For example if you are looking for the cvs location of the plugin “org.eclipse.e4.tools.ui” you can run the following Google search:

“org.eclipse.e4.tools.ui” site:dev.eclipse.org/viewsvn

Thanks to Tom Seidel for sharing this tip via twitter.

Redis in Practice: Who’s Online?

Luke Melia » Redis in Practice: Who’s Online?

Redis is one of the most interesting of the NOSQL solutions. It goes beyond a simple key-value store in that keys’ values can be simple strings, but can also be data structures. Redis currently supports lists, sets and sorted sets. This post provides an example of using Redis’ Set data type in a recent feature I implemented for Weplay.

Catch of the Freezer

Op-Ed Contributors - Catch of the Freezer - NYTimes.com

By ASTRID SCHOLZ, ULF SONESSON and PETER TYEDMERS

Published: December 8, 2009

GO local. Eat organic. Buy fresh. Those food mantras continue to make waves among environmentally conscious consumers. But — as is often the case in these climate-conscious times — if the motivation is to truly make our diets more earth-friendly, then perhaps we need a new mantra: Buy frozen.

Please say it is not so!

aziza | san francisco : food

Great food and even great desserts by melissa chou

aziza | san francisco : food: "aziza showcases the abundance of organic produce & free-range meat, game & poultry from local farms & ranches that practice ecologically sound, slow & sustainable agriculture"

PineappleLuv: Bodysurfing

PineappleLuv: Bodysurfing: "Bodysurfing
The other day I was thinking a lot about bodysurfing and how pure that is. I think it was in the film Archy that a surfer in San Clemente was saying that a few generations ago, kids started out learning how to bodysurf before learning to surf. That sounded kind of cool to me. My dad grew up bodysurfing in Long Beach and taught my brother and I how to do it when we were kids. It's a fond memory."