m2cw – my 2 cents worth

here is a story, why backing up your data makes A LOT OF SENSE:

not only did this entry remind me of it, but also the following episode: by mistake (stupid, stupid, stupid!), i deleted one of my mailboxes in the mail.app which resulted in the loss of all sent emails of the past year(s?), all in all 52mb.

now, why do i know how much (52mb) i lost, you will ask yourself? well, because i made a backup just prior to erasing it (well, actually two days ago) and i therefore was able to recover all of this loss without a problem! due to the nature of my setup, found here (don’t click, it’s not there yet!), i was even able to recover this within the hour!

thus my recommendation: backup, backup, backup! you don’t have to do it daily but every other day or at least once a week is the absolute minimum!

and it hasn’t been the first time, i’m glad i’m using a good backup system and setup!

as always john gruber gives an excellent opinion on Software Update Tips and Voodoo

his main steps and points:

1. wait at least one business day after the release of the update
2. run a full backup (if you don’t have an automated update process anyway)

personal note: when finished with the backup remove all external hard drives (if those are used for automated update processes you might want to keep them removed until your system is up and ok for a couple of days… – see step 6.)

3. log out. then log back in holding the “Shift” key
4. run the software update
5. restart
6. after working with your mac for a while without experiencing problems, run another full backup (or get your automated backup running again)

running Cocktail’s pilot (repair permissions, run cron scripts, prebind system and clean system, user and caches) is actually nothing but voodoo (it doesn’t really help, but it doesn’t really hurt either – in most cases)

excellent advice!

i have been doing most of this (including cocktail’s pilot step) anyway, but i have now a reference to go back to for every major update!

interesting piece of advice:Seth’s Blog: The top 1,000 things to know (the first entry has the first 20 things).

i will keep them in my mind when “teaching” jacob…

some useful knowledge about the mac from Tom Yager

the more i use an “all-in-one” pda-type mobile phone, the more i’m convinced: it just sucks! this article hits the nail on the head!

now it happened to our website as well: we have been officially “comment spammed”! yesterday evening some weirdo (probably some bot) left around 20 comments. nothing bad (weird quotes) but annoying! the links to the website didn’t even work!

why would anyone want to do that?

this is really stupid!

a couple of days ago, i sent an email to elgato’s support. as always, they have been very quick in responding to it.

my email was a holiday wish list for their eyetv and their eyehome products both of which i’m using at home.

i really like the “eye-system” but there are a couple of quirks that need some update or revamping. so here goes my list:

1. true timeshifted viewing (i.e. start viewing a program even when it’s still recording – that’s principally possible but it doesn’t work very well)
2. start recordings via eyehome (currently it’s only possible to record via eyetv – if your server is far away from your tv this is not very convenient)
3. a jump button (for 30sec, 1, 2 and 5 minutes) for eyehome (available for eyetv but not for eyehome)
4. using the VPS signal for eyetv recordings
5. “eyetv to go”, i.e. i could transfer some shows to a laptop in order to watch the recording time- and locationshifted (it’s possible to do that but it’s awkward)

here is elgato’s response:

Joerg,

Thank you for contacting Elgato Systems.

We will try to integrate EyeTV with EyeHome more in the future, so that the features you and other users have requested will be possible. The points you have brought up are already on our “to do” list.

Sharing recordings from one location to another (like from desktop to laptop) will be made easier in future versions of the EyeTV software.

U-M’s entire library to be put on Google

wow! 7 million volumes digitized by 2010! amazing!

Linux News: Commentary: You Know You Might Be a Mac User If…

this is the first one: ten commandments for entrepreneurs