The thing that local external hard drive backups does not solve is the times when you loose both your computer and external hard drives. Fire in your house, robbed, flood, and many other things that can happen to your prized electronics. So what do you do? You backup off-site, somewhere outside of the location where your computer lives most of its life. To help solve this problem for personal use many different services have popped up to give you an online backup. The two I have tried ate Mozy and Backblaze.

I started out with Mozy, it was great I downloaded the app to my MacBook Pro, configured it to make sure it was backing up everything I wanted and set it on its way to do the first backup. 3 weeks later it was done, which isn’t to bad for uploading 58 gigs. I used it for a few weeks and decided it was good enough to install on my wife’s Vista laptop. Hers finished the first backup and I was feeling good. It started to do regular backups. Then my I keep having to kill the Mozy process on my MacBook Pro because it was stuck processing for hours on end not backing up anything. I would have to manually track down if there was an update to install that might fix the problem. This became a weekly task. Then the same thing started to happen to my wifes laptop, I would check online to see that her laptop had not been backed up in two weeks! WAIT I though this was suppose to be a install and forget about type of thing?! That is when I decided it was time to try something different.

I installed Backblaze which has just released its final version for the Mac. Once installed I immediately enjoyed the improvement of the GUI over Mozy’s, it was much easier to understand yet with the same power. I kicked off the first backup, what I noticed this time was that it seemed to let me use my bandwidth more then when Mozy was running a backup. I could actually upload some pictures to Flickr without having to wait for hours. When the first backup finished I told it start backing up my external hard drive which holds all my Raw picture files from my camera. This was every easy and not something I ever got working correctly with Mozy. I did the same to my wife’s computer and have not had to do anything to either of the computers since. Every once and a while I will check online to make sure that things are getting backed up and every time they are.

Mozy takes the schedule backup approach, you tell Mozy when you want it to run and it backs up everything that has changed at that scheduled time. This works but it means that alot of things can get backedup and take a long time to get uploaded. Backblaze is a constant backup, once it gets a good list of things that need to be backed up it fires off. This means that its doing small backups all the time. My fear with this was that I would be always feeling my internet speeds drop during that day while it backed up. I never notice it, ever. Backblaze has truly been the install and forget about it online backup solution.

I just updated to the Iphone 3.0 OS and also the newest Things app for the iphone that was said to support iphone 3.0. When I open up the iphone app and sync it with the desktop app it opens the sync window on both the iphone and the desktop, goes through the normal process and then when the desktop sync window goes away the iphone is still sitting there syncing. I can let it sit there forever and it will never finish.

Things (Mac): 1.1.2 (941)
Things (iPhone/iPod touch): 1.3.7

I got this response about 5 min later. (very nice turn around time!)

Thanks for reporting this bug.

We are already working on a fix. You can continue to sync Things on your Mac with your iPhone or iPod touch as the sync is completed successfully. It’s just an interface bug that prevents the Sync screen from disappearing. Simply press the home button to quit Things on your iPhone, after Things on your Mac has completed syncing.

If you start Things again, the Sync screen will appear again. If that’s not what you want, you can either:
- Not have Things (Mac) and Things (iPhone/iPod touch) running at the same time.
- Before opening Things on your mobile device, wait until you are no longer on the same Wi-Fi network as your Mac.
- Temporarily disconnect your Mac from your Wi-Fi network.

Sorry for the inconvenience. An update that fixes this issue should be available soon.

Best,
Chris

There still seems to be some things that slow down your tweet reading. One of those is seeing the same tweet over and over. If you are following alot of people that are interested in the same thing chances are that they are following eachother too. So as soon as each of the see that great link that tweetmasterX sent they all will re-tweet that. Now you have the exact same information 8 times.

TweetDeck - ReTweet Overload

What I would like to see is TweetDesk Collapse all the re-tweets of the exact same text together. I don’t need that information 8 times. If the person re-tweeting added a comment or some other text show it to me but otherwise I have seen it already and moved on. Its almost like the days when everyone would forward every funny e-mail to their whole address book, you would end up with 32 e-mails with the same picture of the cat and the dog sleeping in the same basket. We don’t need to go back to those days!!

– Update
TwiTip just wrote an article regarding Retweeting and using “Via” instead,There’s a Better Way to ReTweet!.This addresses some of the problem of clutter in reading Retweets by moving some of the un-necessary information to the end but it doesn’t solve the problem of getting the same infromation multiple times.

I started using foxmarks right about the time it first came out in 2006. I wanted my bookmarks at work to match the ones on my home computer. I have since moved away from having 2 computers but I still have the firefox pluggin installed. Why? Well, for one foxmarks versions your bookmark library each time it syncs so you have a way to go back and find that bookmark you deleted because you never though you would need it again. Foxmarks has just released a new product that will allow you to sync your bookmarks between computers and browsers. They now support Firefox, IE and Safari. This is great news for those of us that don’t use Safari but have and iPhone. By setting up foxmarks to sync with Safari I now can have my uptodate Firefox bookmarks on my iPhone.

Check it out!

http://blog.foxmarks.com/?p=560

This desire to start working with sites is what spurred me to to start this blog. Soon after a friend of mine showed me the company web site for his roomates company, I offered to help clean up the design some. About 3 days later I got a call from one of the guy I did a web site for about 5 years go asking if I was interested in creating a web site for his new realestate business. Seems like all I needed to do was start the ball rolling with this blog and everything fell in to place for more freelance work.

2. You have to swim through all the links or items that they throw at you in the list to find out if you care about any of them. No you have just spent the time that the blog poster should have done.

3. They are a quick and easy way to throw content out. (See even I can do it)

4. Most of the time there is only 1 or 2 links in the list that is even worth being in the list to start with.

5. Every blog in the world does it and you find the same Top 100 links / images / ideas / software lists mulitple times on different sites.

I just keep getting the dang Top # lists in my RSS reader and most of the time they are worthless to me because I am not going to spend to sift through all of them and figure out which one is good. If the blogger had spent the time to review each link dwindle it down to the 5 they like the most and then write to us about why and the possitves and negatives of each that is worth it but get rid of these Top 100 lists please! Thank you .

The goal should be to get to a point were the code that you are righting is good enough that it just needs updating never a full re-write. But with web work and how quickly standards and the “correct” way to do things change it hard to know if you are really getting there or not. Guess I will just have to wait a few years to find out.

I started out on my quest to find a Mac Quicken replacement about 2 weeks ago. I was getting sick of all the errors Quicken kept giving me when it was downloading new transactions and was sick of having to start up the VM just so I could do my morning finances. My first thought was Quicken for Mac, after some quick google searching I found that Mac users had not been to happy with Quicken for the Mac comparied to the windows version. I then signed up for a few of the online financal managment tools, Quicken Online, Mint, Wesabe, Mvelopes, Geezeo. Most of which were ether way to basic for my needs or not emplemented that well. My next step was to find other app for the Mac. I found iBank, Cha-ching, and MoneyWell. Of those the one that seems to have the most features that I used in quicken was MoneyWell. MoneyWell is currently in beta for their next version in which they are attempting to add the ability to download Transaction automaticly rather then doing the my hand download. So far I have not had any of my banks work with the automaticly download but they seem to be making progress. It uses buckets instead of categories and work a little differently but so far I am enjoying it. We will see how it goes after another week or so.