Back that ass up

Tonight I got my mitts on a nice shiny new LaCie 500GB external drive to use on this workstation solely as a backup drive. Unlike the array on the server which is always online (and vulnerable in some ways) this will be used only for regular backups. I am guilty of not making hard backups of critical stuff like the music and digital photos onto DVD nearly as often as I should. Yeah, I am lazy and sometimes I forget or put it off. I've paid the price for that laziness a few times. Luckily I only lost a small amount of fairly recent stuff that still can be gotten off of the CF cards and thumb drives or re-ripped, the last backups were only a month or so behind.

I wish there was a simpler means of dealing with the miles and miles of files (pretty files) that exist over here and will only get worse. DVD backups are a pain, and wholesale backups are tough to do economically. It's cheaper to buy large hard drives, make backups to them and put them in a safe place. I should upgrade to dual layer DVD for the hard backups to make things a bit easier. I used to think my 8 gig Exabyte tape drive from way back was da shit. Now it's just shit.

I know a lot of people in similar situations as me. A ton of data, but no backups. A disaster waiting to happen.

Almost as fun as burning billboards

If I could have long, sweaty, passionate love with a Firefox extension, it would be Adblock, hands down. This little gem is so effective that it has made surfing enjoyable again. In addition to blocking ad images, you can block flash, scripts, iframes, embedded text ads, you name it. Unlike Firefox's built-in 'block images from' feature, which blocks all images coming from a particular server, Adblock can be very specific. Consider the makeup of a Yahoo page. The ads are served in most cases from the same server that hosts benign images that make up a page. Block the server, and the page can become mangled. You can exorcise one particular graphic, to an entire server, to an entire range of servers on a domain. With some fine tuning, you can kill scripts that manage to get a pop-under through the Firefox popup blocker. Tired of seeing the same silly graphic or background on a particular page? Surgically remove it with Adblock. Even in-text advertising hotlinks that pollute more and more pages these days can be eliminated without wrecking the original text.

Head to the Mozilla home page and get yourself some Adblock godness. Then go visit some of the most ad-filled pages you can think of. It almost becomes a game. Spend some time setting up the filters, and soon you are surfing without distraction.