I got my new mobile phone yesterday. A (unlocked) Samsung i780. Not the LG KS20 which was my previous favourite, but thanks to the nice people at clicksalg.dk (I mailed them and asked if they really had it and when it would ship. The reply was “yes. Is today fast enough?”. Cool.), this one became available to me first. It was down to that for me. Which one will become available to me first… 🙂
I’ve about 120GB of photo’s that I backup on DVDs and an external harddrive.
What I’m really bad at, is taking these backups off-site (a.k.a. somewhere else that will not be affected if the house burns down).
I used to copy it all to my own server (it was in a hosting facility), but as I’ve moved everything to a hosting service, that doesn’t make sense any more as they have limited storage.
I looked around a bit and mozy.com, seems to have a good reputation. 5us$ a month for unlimited space, is very cheap for that kind of peace of mind.
I can’t help but thinking that it’s to cheap. But doing the math, it’s rather easy to see that, even with 120GB they will be making money of me within the year:
Back of envelope math: a one TeraByte hard drive is about 300us$, (120/1000)*300=36$. In a raid5 array, every fifth drive (depending on implementation) is for error checking so you need to multiply with 1.25 = 45us$, plus admin and network traffics costs. Probablty still less than 60us$.
The software seems quite okay, and is available for windows and OS X. No linux versions seems to be available, but as I do most of my photo work in LightRoom (and windows), this really is a non-issue for now.
The software has been running for a couple of hours now and is a 0.6% of the total 120GB, it’s not maxing out my upload speed, but it’s doing a good enough job, and it will be done in a week or so…
I’ll let you know what I think of it when I’ve used it a bit more…
p.s. one week later: It’s still uploading. It’s uploaded about a fifth of the 120Gb. I’m not sure how I could mis-calculate that badly, as it’s has been running 15 hours a day all week. As I have 2048Kbit upload the max is closer to 1.5-1.7Mb/s, but I’m unsure if the limit is at Mozy or somewhere between me and Mozy. Actually my theoretical daily upload is 22GB, so my first estimate isn’t that bad and my actual throughput is just really, really bad. My guess is that it’s a lot worse during the work hours, where the nets are a lot more busy.
p.s. One month later: nearly done uploading :-).
p.s.: May 2010: I’ve uploaded a total of 337Gb (uploading is a lot faster now)
While hunting for a way to access the service menu on my Casio Exilim EX-S500 pocket camera, I found a wheel of fortune function.
With the camera turned off, hold down [left], and press [Play] (the little arrow in a square), and the camera will randomly flip through all the images on the screen going bip, bip, biiip, biiiip, slower and slower until it stops, displays a random photo and goes “swuuuush”. I’m not sure how drunk you have to be for that to be useful…
I never found the service menu.
I held one of these things in my hand the other day. Very beautiful device. A bit heavy, but very sleak and thin. The keyboard seems a lot more usable then I expected.
Didn’t play much with the software but it seems nice.
If it did GSM I would buy one on the spot. As it is now, I’m tempted to get one and a really small G3 phone to pair it with. I wonder what the smalles G3 phone is…
Edit: I’ve read a bit more about and apparently the ever important ability to sync with MS-Outlook is currently missing, making it a non-contender. I guess that the same could be said aboit the FIC Freerunner (previouly FIC1973). Sigh.
I stumpled upon this page, which has the SGH-i780 as expected in stock on january 11th and at us$688 (unlocked, no plan).
It’s still in the running as my next mobile, but I’m not sure that I wont wait a bit and see what the reviews are saying. The fic1973/OpenMoko should be out soon, and at us$450, it’s quite a bit cheaper, and the vga screen really is a big plus for me. And with my new Eee PC, I don’t really need a keyboard that much on my mobile phone. Then again, the fic1973 date could easily get moved further into the future…
And my Moto V3’s battery is failing fast, and I would rather spend money on a new phone than money on a new battery for a phone that will soon be dumped.
p.s.: Found a Danish dealer that expect to have the i780 in stock on January 30th, febuary 29th, at 4628.- Danish kroner (910 us$, but that includes 25% sales tax).
P.P.S.: With the i780 release date slipping and the OpenMoko (dev edition) date on track, it could be come interesting…
(bookmarks = Favorites, for those of you, using Internet Explorer)
I’ve transfered my book marks with me from computer to computer for a long time. I’m unsure how far back, but there where bookmarks for site like DejaNews in there, and they got eaten by google (groups) around 2001.
Before I began the clean up it had about 650 book marks and the bookmarks.html file was about 150Kb.
Luckily I changed the way I use bookmarks a couple of years a go – when Firefox got the bookmarks toolbar – making it fairly easy to search out the old bookmarks, that hadn’t been used since I switched (I started putting all bookmarks in the “bar”, and never used the bookmarks menu item).
I looked through the old bookmarks and nearly non of them worked! Most of them gave 404’s (server working but page not found) but quite a few of them gave a Server Not Found error. I didn’t count but I think that about one in 10 worked, but half of these didn’t give the expected results. I fund ONE bookmark that I found useful (PhotoZone.de), which I hadn’t already added to the bar. So delete, delete.
The web is a lot more dynamic that I thought! Not that I though that all site would live forever, but I didn’t think that it would be as “bad” as that. Is it bad? I don’t really know – manually keeping a bookmark file up to date, would be a chore, but I really don’t use my bookmarks that much any more. I often find myself typing the url of my most used sites, even though I know exactly where in my bookmarks to find them, or I’ll even search for just as much as needed on google.
Now, I’ve 220 bookmarks in a 70Kb file (the reason the file isn’t that much smaller is that Firefox now stores the site logo in the bookmarks file, so any site that I’ve browsed since they started doing that will fill a lot more in the file)
Firstly, I’m writing this on the Eee and I’ll tell you what I thought about the keyboard when I get to the end.
I forgot to mention in the first impression blog that the screen wasn’t as small as I feared. It’s small, but it fits the machine and doesn’t look small on it.
Well, the first impression is that it’s small. Really small.
And cute! Holding in my hands, I get the feeling that it’s my best new friend and I’ll never let it go again. The only reason that I’m not writing this using it, is that it’s charging. I can clearly understand why this it the new hot sell. Once you had it in your hands you want to own it. Turning it on only makes it better – the screen is just beautiful.
I went by the office today to pick it up, and turned it on (it booted in 16seconds) and walked down the hall to find somebody to show it to. Handing to our (female) secretary, she exclaimed “wow, that’s cute. And it will fit right into a ladies handbag. How much is it?”. Handing it to my wife when I came home, the first thing she says, is “wow – it will fit right in a ladies handbag”. Any gadget that has that kind of instant lady appeal has to be a winner. I can’t wait until I can bring it to a café and see what kind of effect it will have :-).
The “simple” user interface is nice, but I’m not sure I understand the idea behind it – starting any application will reveal a normal, not the easy GUI. But I guess that it’s better then the usual “Start” menu. All the needed applications are there, as expected. Inserting my wife’s 2GB usb key had the desired effect of giving my a choice to open a file explorer, and it was easy to find a document, and a double click opened it in OpenOffice.org (started in seconds).
I haven’t tried to change the keyboard to a Danish one yet and I haven’t tried to install any software, but everything seems to work.
Things to do:
(hey! Merry Christmas!)
The on-board soundcard on my wifes old machine stopped working and I used it as an excuse to make a new box for her.
Her needs are rather limited. Work processing, mail and web-browsing. She does have an IPod, but detests iTunes.
Currently she’s running Word 97 on Windows 2000.
So she gets the retired web-server. A bit noisy, but I can switch the low-noise PSU from the old one when I get the time.
I’ve moved her domain to google apps, and I simply setup a IMAP account and copy all her old mail to googles server.
Copy all her documents to a usb stick, where she will keep them, as she also needs to edit them on the labtop and office PC.
Ask if she wants to keep bookmarks. Answer is no.
Install Ubuntu 7.10, on the old one. No problems.
Add the essentials like flash and stuff (so that the kid can play online games on it)
Insert USB stick to check that it works. Works and auto-mounts.
Add IMAP account to thunderbird.
Show her around, explain about the lag of drive-letters, give short OpenOffice.org demo.
Wait….
Two weeks later her only complaints are about the clipboard. You have to middle click on the mouse when copy/pasting from firefox to OpenOffice. If you open a document in OOo, copy something, close the document, create new document and … the content on the clipboard is gone.
There simply isn’t an excuse good enough, that this hasn’t been fixed years ago. Add a unified clipboard to X or something.
I’ve a home server. It’s running windows 2000, it’s that old. I just checked – it’s 153 days since it was re-booted last. And the reason I rebooted was to move some hard drive around, not because it crashed.
Not bad.
It will be replaced through. It can only take 384MB of ram and it’s a 566Mhz Celeron processer and it’s starting to run a bit short. It’s mostly feeding my music collection to a SqueezeBox, but as the collection grows it’s getting a bit slow.
I’ll probably install server Ubuntu on one the retired desktop machines.
But that’s for another day. For now I’ll just reboot the old one, just to clean it up a little…