Long Silence Ended, Random Train of Thoughts

Oh dear - no new posts for ages. Well, really, really busy, kinda...

Anyway, I've sort've fallen out with Mozy online storage, but I'm even more hugely into JungleDisk, which really rocks! Now out of beta, but incredibly reasonable licensing terms, lively user forums, responsive developers, cross-platform (Mac and Linux as well as Windows), truly great product (as is Amazon S3 on which it is built, and which now has an SLA to boot! )

Oh, and I got me a 500GB Buffalo LinkStation Live too! Can't recommend it too highly, saved me once already... And it runs Linux - who needs WHS!?

Digital storage, I can't get enough...

Or enough digital gadgets: In the summer I bunged one of these Pioneer DEH-P7900UB USB MP3 player gizmos into my car. Sound quality is maybe not quite up the the old OEM kit, but with a 40GB hdd in the dash, I carry all my music everywhere, and I love it. Led Zep and Nursery Rhymes all in one convenient package.

The car is Nobuaki Katayama's copy of the classic E30, back in their old "Global 10" days. I Still love it. Shame I don't like the new one at all, cos the brand experience is something else. Can't imagine what on earth I'll replace it with.

Oh, and coffee... What I really need now is one of these Bialetti electric jobs, for taking on holiday.

Enough already.

Anna Visits the Farm

Anna makes friends with a lamb for the first time...

Easter Walk Photos

This Picasa web album has a short sequence of piccies I took on a walk this afternoon (one example show below).

From Queen Square

Fun with Online Storage, P2P etc

I've been playing with a few cool tools/services of late: foldershare (free) to sync files between computers over the net (sort've private p2p file sharing), mydatabus for free web-based online storage/backup (free up to 5GB!) - allows public file serving as well. And finally jungledisk, which uses Amazon's totally cool S3 service for online storage (pretty cheap at $0.15 per GB / mo) and appears like a mounted drive on all/any of your computers. And these all work on OSs other than Windows as well, which has gotta be good... Jungle disk is currently free but eventually going to cost a few dollars. All of this is great for saving off-site backups of those precious family photos, videos, documents etc. Oh, and you can encrypt them all for security with axcrypt, so nobody else can pry into your stuff! (Which is free, and open source!)

There are just tons of these kinds of services around, but these ones look like the cream of the crop to me. Although... I wonder if/when Google will come out with the much-rumoured "gdrive" (Project Platypus) which might do all this kind of thing in one package?

Update, April 07 - you can also interact more directly with S3 using free tools like jets3t or s3fox. Which can be very useful. And then with a bit of cunning with a new DNS CNAME you can use S3 to host public files for your website etc.

VOIP Phones

I have been using a VOIP telephone service now for a month or so, and have to report it's great! I bought a cheap (under 20 quid, plus the usual million quid postage...) router/firewall/analogue telephone adapter off ebay, and it allows me to plug the base station of my normal home cordless phone into it and make calls via the Internet, whilst still being able to make and receive calls from my landline. Using one of the many, many VOIP providers you can call UK and foreign landlines and mobiles extremely cheaply. I have been using Babble and they have a PAYG set up, min top-up £5.00, (which only expires after 3 months). For that you get 30 minutes free to most of UK, Europe, USA etc per day, then calls at 1p/min thereafter, or 10p/min for calls to mobiles. No contract, starter costs etc etc. You can buy an incoming phone number (why?) for about a tenner. Obviously you can also talk to other voip users for free for as long as you want, but we don't really use that facility.

Call quality is just fine, and service availability has been pretty good (a couple of periods when it failed for an hour or two, in the first month).

But overall, our phone costs have plummeted to almost zero. I am a convert.

Secure Email

I have recently acquired an X.509 S/MIME email digital certificate (free, natch...) from the Thawte freemail program, which allows me to digitally sign emails, and also allows other people to send me encrypted email (assuming they have a certificate too.) If you ever want to instigate properly secure email with me, just request a signed email from me and then you can install my public key in your mail client. Woo hoo.

I don't have any use for all this crypto stuff, but I just find it irresistibly geeky...