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I recently decided that I could no longer live with only 40 GB worth of storage on my laptop. So I decided that I would buy a larger hard drive and use the original drive as a backup drive. And I would buy a little USB enclosure to house the backup drive. You can buy these 2 items together (and maybe get backup software too)…. but it will probably cost you double.
I looked at Tiger Direct, where I have happily shopped before, but saved $10 by shopping around and trying a new vendor,Directron. E-commerce is business “Darwinism on steroids”… indeed.
I found a great deal on a new Toshiba Travelstar 100GB – 5400RPM – 8MB cache. As of this writing, I have had it for a week. So far, so good. But only the paranoid survive, so please, regularly defragment your hard drive, run an occasional check disk (for errors) and back up your data weekly.
Hard drives are moving parts… they fail. Its worth the money and time. So, I also bought a cheap little external drive enclosure for $10. Good enough to use for the purposes of backups and archiving. If I was going to use it every day, I would have spent more money on the enclosure. But enough about the hardware.
If you want to backup your data, you could just drag the files from one drive to another. But why copy files that haven’t changed? That is the beauty of backup software. Even a simple little product like Microsoft’s Sync Toyknows whether a file has changed and thus, if it needs to be copied over to the backup set.
However, simple little tools like Sync Toy, are not slick enough to copy the Operating System files. So, while you may have a safe copy of that important document, you will have to spend days re-installing Windows XP or whatever your OS. Unless of course, you use a product like Norton Ghost, which I will discuss further in another post.
I will write more about Backup software and its principles in another posting but for now be forewarned. One day it will happen to you, either prepare yourself to be up and running quickly or prepare yourself to be greatly distressed. It is your choice!
To enable cookies, follow the instructions below for the browser version you are using.
Mozilla Firefox (1.0 final release and earlier)
* Go to the “Tools” menu.
* Select “Options”.
* Select the “Privacy” icon in the left panel.
* Check the box corresponding to “Allow sites to set cookies”.
* Click “OK” to save changes.
Netscape 7.1/Mozilla 5.0
* Select “Preferences” from the Edit menu.
* Click on the arrow next to “Privacy & Security” in the scrolling window to expand.
* Under “Privacy & Security”, select “Cookies.”
* Select “Enable all cookies”.
* Click “OK”.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0+
* Select “Internet Options” from the Tools menu.
* Click on the “Privacy” tab.
* Click the “Default” button (or manually slide the bar down to “Medium”) under “Settings”.
* Click “OK”.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x
* Select “Internet Options” from the Tools menu.
* Click on the “Security” tab.
* Click the “Custom Level” button.
* Scroll down to the “Cookies” section.
* To enable:
o Set “Allow cookies that are stored on your computer” to “Enable”.
o Set “Allow per-session cookies” to “Enable”.
* Click “OK”.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.x
* Select “Internet Options” from the View menu.
* Click on the “Advanced” tab.
* Scroll down to find “Cookies” within the “Security” section.
* To enable:
o Select “Always accept cookies”.
* Click “OK”.
Netscape Communicator 4.x
* Select “Preferences” from the Edit menu.
* Find the “Cookies” section in the “Advanced” category.
* To enable:
o Select “Accept all cookies” (or “Enable all cookies”).
* Click “OK”.
If you need a pdf document, then you need Cute PDF! This program is so valuable, you will be wondering how it can be free! Cute PDF is a free pdf writer program that is installed as a “printer” on your Windows XP computer. Thus, when you are in a word processor, web page, spreadsheet or any other program, you can “print” the page into the pdf format.
To get Cute PDF, you need to download the installer program and also a PostScript to PDF converter utility. Both of these are available from the Cute PDF website.
Installation Requirements
* Supports Microsoft Windows 98/ME/2000/XP (x64)/2003 (x64).
* Requires PS2PDF converter such as Ghostscript (recommended).
Installation Process
* Double click, read the box, click next, repeat
I cannot count how many times I’ve been saved by this program. It has helped me so much… I should probably make a donation. Well, maybe this article will help some…
Construction work has begun in southern Portugal on what is set to be the world’s largest solar power station. The plant near Serpa, 200km (125 miles) south of Lisbon, will produce enough electricity for 8,000 homes when it starts next January. Read more at BBC.
The 11-megawatt solar power plant will cover a 60-hectare (150-acre) southern-facing hillside. The project in the sunny Alentejo region has been developed by Portuguese renewable energy company Catavento, in conjunction with solar polar provider Powerlight and funded by General Electric Energy Financial Services. The project’s initial budget is 58m euro (£40m).
The system, to be made up of 52,000 photovoltaic modules, will use PowerLight’s PowerTracker technology which follows the sun as it moves across the sky throughout the day. The firm say this generates more electricity than conventional fixed-mount systems. The panels will be raised around two metres off the grass which, Catavento’s Piero Dal Maso says, the sheep will take care of.
“The Serpa solar power project, along with other renewable energy initiatives, helps lay the foundation for Portugal’s energy future,” he said. “It should provide energy enough for 8,000 homes. It will save 30 tonnes of CO2 emissions, so that is probably around 1% of domestic consumption of Portugal.
Portugal plans other solar plants to counter a rise in carbon emissions.
I’ve been noticing these little links around blog posts to social bookmarks or bookmark managers like del.ico.us and furl and wondering what the heck? I mean, we have categories, we have search engines, we have tags and technorati… and I’m OLD! What is all this socal bookmark stuff?
Well, it seems first of all, that you have to have an account at one of these places. But! then you can save all of your bookmarks and they will be available to you from ANY computer and you let your friends and family SEE your bookmarks! Oh my god, are we all just a bunch of wandering nomadic backpackers and our only purpose in life is to visit a web page and boost its importance but bookmarking it or linking to it from our blog? Perhaps some things are better left unsaid and some things are better left dead!
But perhaps I’m just a selfish bastard and don’t like to share! OR my friends are not a bunch of pathetic geeks who spend their whole day surfing the web and sharing photos on flickr, stuff on myspace and writing in their blogs…
But I am! So please visit our sponsors… so that I can get paid!
Add to One or All of these Social Bookmark Sites
Wordpress has a few different types of content:
- Posts – dynamic, chronologically presented, the original daily blog item
- Pages – rarely changing, essentially a static Post
- Links – web addresses and descriptions of sites that relate to your content
Each item of these types of content may also have one or more Categories associated with it. Categories are less important, in my opinion, for Pages than they are for Posts and Links.
Note: There are two different sets of data for Categories. Pages and Posts share the same tables in the WordPress database and have their own Category table. Links use a separate and different Category table – its a Link, not a Post! Read more about Links in this article.
Remember, Pages are simply “static” Posts.
To start adding content to your blog, login to the Admin (yourblog/wp-admin) page and click on the Write Panel. It will default to writing a Post but this is also where you would write a new Page. Just fill in the blanks, type “My Test” in the Title field and then type “This is my first test post.” in the post window (also known as the body of your Post). Now click on Publish and wait a few seconds while WordPress stores this in the database (and makes it available to the world!)
Now click on the “View site” link which always lives at the top of the Admin page next to the name of your blog. Tip: Use tabbed browsing from Firefox. It rocks! You can right click on “View site” and choose Open in New Tab and easily switch back and forth between managing and previewing your content.
Now return to the Admin site and choose the Manage panel. Using the tabs under the Manage menu, you can manage the posts and Pages in your site. That is, you can Edit them, change the title, text and Categories assigned to the Page or Post. Heck, you may even occasionally want to delete something!
You can read more about using WordPress at the very helpful WordPress Codex. Of particular importance is the section on Planning.
In their own words… “WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.”
Read this article for more information on WordPress
WordPress themes come in many different styles and flavors. Some are simple and clean and built for posting and reading text.
Still others take advantage of the WordPress CMS features to offer navigation and customizable sidebars.
It may be useful for you to read the extensive WordPress documentation on using themes.
Below is a short list of websites which allow you to browse and download WordPress themes. I have ranked them in order of their usefulness to me:
- WordPress Theme Viewer
- AlexKing WordPress ThemeBrowser
- WordPress Site Featured Themes
- WordPress Theme Park
To install a WordPress theme, you must first copy (or ftp) the theme’s files (images and code files) up to your website to the wp-content/themes folder. Please read this article for more information on using File Transfer Protocol software (ftp). To activate a WordPress theme:
- Log in to the WordPress admin panel.
- Select the Presentation menu option.
- From the Select column in the table, click on “Select” for the theme you wish to activate.
- To view the new look, click View Site at the top of the Panel’s screen.
Many websites consist of web pages with code and text all created manually using HTML editing and web design techniques and/or site building software like Frontpage or Dreamweaver. And while this model may still be appropriate for some purposes, it is awkward, technical and tends to foster websites that never change.
Blog software was created to make it easy to produce a daily “web log”. WordPress is one of the most popular packages for creating blogs and has been extended so that it is an excellent tool for small websites – what I call “blogsitesâ€.
In a “blogsiteâ€, the website’s look and content are “controlled” by a blog software package such as WordPress. This allows you to create a website which is:
• Visually interesting and easy to navigate for the user
• Easy to update and add content to for the site owner
Continue reading ‘What is a blogsite?’