Red Recondite

I’ve been having rather lucky tragedies with my hard drives lately.

1) Lost a hard drive last year (thankfully, it was RAID 1).

2) Two weeks ago, my computer decided to pretend that a hard drive no longer appeared.  I opened up the case, confirmed the cables were connected, and long-story-short my boot record on a secondary drive had vanished.  I was able to recover it, after some difficulty.

After last year’s near-miss, I had signed up for XDrive, but the upload speeds were atrocious, and it stopped working one day.  I didn’t really mind.

Now, though, I’ve signed up for an account with Mozy Home, and I’ve been pleased thus far.  It basically just runs in the background, and uploads any new documents or other files for you automatically.  And it’s fast.  You can also define which files to upload (say, ignore pdb files, but include cs files).  And its free for 2 GB, and only $5 a month for unlimited.

I expect that Mozy will stop working one day, and the cycle will repeat.

P.S. I learned some new googlefu:

<Tech Term> site:lifehacker.com

There’s so much absurd spam and crap in normal google searches, it can be really difficult to find things that actually work.  Thankfully, lifehacker seems to have documented at least some of the tools that work, and is a quick way to find gold.

Up-to-date weather information + Google Maps = Best Thing Ever.

TiVo recently announced the discontinuation of their TiVo Rewards program. I had amassed 10,000 of these mystical TiVo Rewards points while participating in some odd rituals that I do not understand and cannot adequately explain. Clearly, I had some spending to do. (more…)

1. WhoLockMe – Have you ever tried to delete a file or directory, and Windows tells you that it cannot allow you to do that, Dave? Dr. Hoiby created WhoLockMe to tell you which process has placed a lock on that file. Once the process is dead, you can delete the file.
2. TrayIt! – Some commonly used applications will insist on consuming an entry in the Windows taskbar, and do not have the ability to be minimized to the system tray. With TrayIt!, simply hold Ctrl or Shift down while minimizing a window, and it appears in the tray next to the clock. Hooray.
3. TeraCopy – Windows hates your freedom… to copy a large number of files from place-to-place. Sometimes, a file will be locked, and the file copy process will be aborted. TeraCopy replaces the standard Windows copy function, and displays error messages for each file that failed to copy, and it will actually continue to copy the rest of the files. Amazing!