Backup

Posted on by

hero_2xThis was always a challenge during my Windows days. In part because there were no now high capacity external hard drives, but mostly because it was a tedious chore. And maybe I just wasn’t smart enough of disciplined enough. Best I could manage was to copy some documents and photos to some floppies and pray I didn’t the computer HD didn’t die.

That really changed for me when I switched to Mac and started using Time Machine. When I got to the office each morning I’d plug an external hard drive in and forget about. It did incremental back-ups in the background.

While I never had a hard drive failure, I frequently needed a file that I had mistakenly deleted. I don’t recall how we addressed this in the old Windows days but seems like you had to do a full restore (a major deal) to get that one file back. With Time Machine I just flip back through the backups until I find one where the missing file existed. Just drag the file to my desktop and it’s back.

[Allow me to stipulate that smarter folks than I probably had no trouble managing backups on Windows.]

Barb has less time for this kind of routine (but critical chore) so she doesn’t do backups as often as she should but I think we’ve solved that problem.

The AirPort Time Capsule is “a superfast Wi‑Fi base station and an easy-to-use backup device all in one.” No more plugging in external hard drives. When we fire up one of our MacBooks it periodically does the incremental backup. With two terabytes of storage, the Time Capsule manages backups for both Barb and me.

Because I’m a little paranoid about backups, I also run Carbon Copy Cloner once a week. And I’m going to start keeping a copy off site.

No other nation makes war its business

Posted on by

“What’s more, war is obsolete.  Most nations don’t make war anymore, except when coerced by the United States to join some spurious ‘coalition.’  The earth is so small, and our time here so short.  No other nation on the planet makes war as often, as long, as forcefully, as expensively, as destructively, as wastefully, as senselessly, or as unsuccessfully as the United States.  No other nation makes war its business.”

— Excerpt from Ann Jones’ new book, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars — The Untold Story

Changing listening habits

Posted on by

“A new Edison research study warns that among the six most common places where listeners consume audio media, broadcast radio dominates in just two of them (in car, at home); is tied with Internet radio for two (at work, on public transportation); and is defeated by Internet radio in two (while working out, while walking around). Another red flag in the study for broadcasters is that 50 percent of at-work listeners who listen to Internet-radio-only stations/services (that is, stations/services that don’t broadcast on FM/AM) have replaced their FM/AM listening time with Internet-radio-only stations/services.”

“According to Triton Digital, at any given moment among online listeners (M-F 6am-8pm), Pandora has more than twice the audience of all of the radio stations owned by Clear Channel, CBS, Cumulus, Entercom and the next seven broadcasting companies combined.”

— All Things Digital