BatFlattery

I’ve been trying to find a decent theme for my LED lighting site for awhile now: I wanted something that’s easy to use from an affiliate perspective, and also easy to customise, so that it doesn’t look like a themed or template site! In the end I decided to go with the Thesis theme, as it’s very customisable just from the control panel, with additional customisations available with a bit of coding (such as the header graphic). I’ve ended up with quite a minimalist site, which I think goes well with the ultra-modern design of some of my lights.

I’ve also switched to using Skimlinks to find products for the site: using their Skimkit app it’s very easy to find products, and pictures and links are just a click away. Much easier than hunting through different affiliate programmes, getting the links right, etc, plus Skimlinks are just straight links to the merchant, so no weird-looking codes and stuff.

The only issue I have, and it’s not the fault of either Thesis or Skimlinks, is the way Thesis uses Wordpress’s thumbnail system to show thumbs on category and tag pages, and post previews. This only works if you actually upload the image to Wordpress. Since it’s much easier to just paste the link to the product image that Skimlinks provides, that’s what I do, but unfortunately this means no thumbnails. Anyway, it’s a small price to pay; image uploads are just too much hassle, and I don’t really like the idea of having any of my Wordpress directories writeable, I think Wordpress is insecure enough as it is! (I’ve found a brilliant solution to updating Wordpress easily, but that’s the subject of another post.)

So overall I’m quite happy with the site now; there’s still a bit of tweaking to do, but I think it’s coming along quite nicely!

John Gruber’s recent hard disk failure, combined with some travel plans that I have, made me realise that I need to improve my backup strategy. I currently have a 500Gb Iomega FireWire external hard drive permanently connected to my iMac, so that Time Machine can do its backups. But as Gruber points out, you can’t just boot from your Time Machine drive in the case of catastrophic disk failure: you need a bootable backup disk. I was also worried that if something happened to my iMac while I was away, such as theft or destruction by fire, the Iomega might be lost as well.

So I decided to buy a new external drive and back it up with SuperDuper, which I have used before. The great thing about SuperDuper is that it comes in a free version that you can use to create complete, bootable backups of your main drive (the paid version lets you do incremental backups, whereas the free version erases the backup drive each time, so it takes much longer to do regular backups).

I looked on Amazon for a nice external drive. All of my external drives to date have been the large, powered ones, because they are generally cheaper, and also faster; but finding yet another socket on the power strip for one more wasn’t something I relished. Since I only intended to use it for periodic backups, relying on Time Machine for my day-to-day backups, and since prices seem to have declined, I decided on a Seagate 500Gb portable drive, the Seagate 500gb Expansion External Portable Usb 2.0 Hard Drive. It is a portable drive, entirely powered by the USB cable, and costs about £70.

It arrived from Amazon this morning, and I was somewhat alarmed to see all the Windows compatibility stickers all over it, with no mention of Macs. On opening the box I found a really small and light drive, not much bigger than an iPhone. Plugged into the iMac, it was attached in the Finder, and showed a few files, including an Autorun file, and a Seagate folder containing some junk.

First problem came when trying to delete these files; the Finder couldn’t do it. I fired up Disk Utility and saw that it was formatted as an NTFS drive, not a total surprise as that is the latest Windows file system! So I just reformatted the drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and proceeded to do the backup on SuperDuper.

The tradeoff with the external power supply soon became apparent; the drive is not very fast, and backing up 136Gb took a couple of hours. The next annoying thing happened when I tried to set the drive as the boot volume, to test the backup by actually booting from it. The drive did not appear in the selection window.

A quick scan of the SuperDuper help site revealed a possible problem: OS X under Intel can boot from USB drives (unlike PowerPC Macs) but not if the disk is partitioned using Master Boot Record (MBR). A quick check with Disk Utility showed that the disk was indeed so partitioned (and why wouldn’t it be?). Aaargh!

So if you’re going to use this little drive as a SuperDuper bootable backup, remember to repartition the drive itself, and don’t just reformat the volume.

Finally, some wise words from Gruber:

Hard drives are fragile. Read as much as you can bear to about how they work, how incredibly precisely they must operate in order to cram so many bits onto such small disks. It’s a miracle to me that they work at all. Every hard drive in the world will eventually fail. Assume that yours are all on the cusp of failure at all times. It’s good to be spooked about how long your hard drives will last.

Make sure you are prepared for when yours goes phut. Not if. When.

One of the tools I use every day, without thinking usually, is Dropbox. It’s an incredibly well-designed answer to the problem many of us have: if you use more than one computer, how do you transfer files between them, or work on a file using different computers?

If you always use the same computer, no problem. But if you have both a desktop and a laptop, or sometimes do a bit of personal stuff on the work computer during your lunch break, your options are pretty much email it to yourself (which doesn’t help if you forget, and the latest version is on the home computer when you’re at work or on the laptop) or save it on a USB stick, which is a bit of a pain, needs to be taken with you, and is a worry if lost.

What Dropbox does is create a directory, called your Dropbox, on every computer that you install it on. Any file you put in the Dropbox is immediately copied up to the Dropbox server, and then synchronised with your other computers as soon as you log on. This happens automatically and seamlessly, and it doesn’t matter what platform you use (I have a Mac desktop and a Linux netbook, and Dropbox synchronises both instantly and effortlessly). There’s even an iPhone client!

You can also access your Dropbox on the server, via a web interface, from any computer. So if you’re on a friend’s computer, or at an Internet cafe, you still have access to all your Dropbox files.

You can get Dropbox here: there’s a free plan, with a usable amount of space, and if you need more, there are paid plans with various levels of storage.

So the Obamacare proposals guarantee, among other things, that companies will be forced to offer “affordable” cover to individuals. The thinking being, these greedy companies are pricing cover too high, they need to be forced to offer cover at a proper level.

Of course, the reality is that the market is already forcing these companies to offer cover at the proper level, since if some of them really did overcharge, their competitors would come in and take all their customers by offering cheaper coverage. What BHusseinO is really saying is that he doesn’t like the answer that the market is giving, and is insistent that he, rather than the market, is right.

A few years ago, the government got it into its head that a lot of banks were unfairly discriminating against home buyers with poor credit histories when deciding whom to lend to. Never mind that any bank that did this would see its profitability suffer compared with banks that lent on purely commercial terms: the government knew better than the markets, OK? And passed laws to force the banks to lend, even when commercial lending criteria would suggest the borrowers were a poor credit risk.

But the government didn’t know better: the borrowers were a poor credit risk, and they defaulted in such record numbers that the entire banking system tottered. (Of course this was the fault of greedy bankers, not incompetent government!)

So are the seeds of the next disaster lurking in the heart of Obamacare? The history of government intervention suggests that is a strong possibility.

Just found this handy, crib-note style post on Seomoz that summarises all the bits you need to remember to rank well in the search engines:

Perfecting keyword targeting on-page optimisation

My girlfriend thinks that girls are better at games than boys. I’d like to disagree with this but she currently holds the top score on Frenzic on my iPhone, and I can’t seem to dislodge her. I also struggle to maintain my early lead on the Wii: I seem to do well right off the bat, but can’t seem to improve much, whereas she seems to improve dramatically in a relatively short period of time.

So, based on this very objective and scientific study with a very valid sample size, I’m forced to conclude that girls are better at games than boys.

So the Government PR machine is working overtime to lay the groundwork for action on the terrible state that alcohol has left Scotland in. The problem is, it seems, cheap alcohol, abused by a small minority of drinkers. The solution is to make all users pay more. Will it work?

Comparison with the drug industry suggests not. Prohibition has increased the cost of drugs far beyond that of alcohol, yet they remain popular, suggesting that demand is unlikely to be affected. Also, many of the most problematic users of drugs resort to crime to fund their habit. So we can look forward to, in addition to the usual public disorder and assault offences that attend on alcohol abuse, an increase in muggings, burglary and robbery. Nice thinking there.

You may know that Spotify comes in a free, ad-supported guise, as well as a premium, ad-free one that costs £10 a month. I’ve been listening to the free version, and I’ve discovered a fairly annoying (and pretty slimey) tactic on the part of the software.

One of the ads that keeps coming on is the awful DEC appeal for the “crisis” in Gaza. Since I don’t like hearing people bleat on about giving money that will likely go to the terrorists rather than the innocent collateral damage of the terrorists, I hit the Mute button on the Mac. After awhile, thinking the ad must be over, I hit unmute. Nope, still playing. After a couple of minutes of this, it dawns: Spotify is monitoring the state of the mute button and pausing the ad!

And lest you think this is a feature for the music, that just happens to have the effect of forcing you to listen to the ads: hitting mute during music play does NOT pause the playback.

Absolute bastards.

I’ve been using Spotify for a few weeks now, and I’m starting to get that “car-crash in slow motion” feeling: the record labels still don’t seem to get it, and the service is degrading before my eyes. And it’s still in beta!

First there was a massive withdrawal of tracks days after I signed on. But OK, there was still a decent amount of music. On the home page, there were a number of cool tracks in the top ten, including Infinity 2008, Poker Face by Lady Gaga, and Viva la Vida by Coldplay. Today I went back to the home page for the first time in awhile, and the top 5 tracks are all in red, including the tracks just mentioned. An attempt to play them gives a “This track is currently not available in United Kingdom” message. WTF??

Even more bizarre: many of these artists have albums in the top ten, which are listed just to the right. Clicking on the album allows you to play the track! Is this a Spotify screw-up, or intentional? Who knows?

Just unbelievable.

BTW if you want to get in on Spotify before it completely collapses, I have ten invites to give away.

UPDATE:

According to a commenter on the Spotify blog, the problem is caused by restriction of the particular versions of the songs that went into the top list, but that other versions are still available in the UK, and thus the ability to play from the album is not an oversight. So the problem should disappear as the top list is updated. Still seems a bit of a silly error, and a chilling reminder of the way the record labels want to keep the world divided up.

As a longtime user of Amazon’s DVD rental by post service, I was a little annoyed when they sold it to LoveFilm. But after some initial teething problems relating to the transfer of my account, I have to admit that LoveFilm is pretty good. The website has some great features, like categorisation of your list into high, medium and low priority movies, and multiple lists if you and your partner each want their own list. And if you search for movies by eg genre they are sorted intelligently, so that more recent and more popular movies feature first, making it more likely you’ll find what you want, rather than having to plough through every weird film ever released in the genre. (Of course if you want to find that obscure cult film, you can easily do it by searching directly.) The service is fast, so you get a new movie a couple of days after posting an old one back, and of course you can keep a movie as long as you like.

This is in strong contrast to the BlockBuster rental by post service which I did a free trial on. The website was awful. Searches produce lists sorted alphabetically, so you have to wade through dreck released fifty years ago to get to the movie you want. The whole experience was very un-user-friendly. You cannot return the movies to a BlockBuster store, so there is no integration between the online and the physical store network. The whole thing just reeks of poor execution. Which makes sense, I suppose: LoveFilm do this as their main business, while BlockBuster were forced into rental by post to deal with the decline of their core business model. BlockBuster’s heart isn’t in it.

These days I use LoveFilm more for TV than movies: you can rent series on DVD, usually getting three episodes per disk, so it’s quite a nice way to catch up on all of a series that you might have missed some episodes of, or stopped watching because you lost the thread of the plot. You can even plough through a series of 24 in near-real-time: a three-disk rental scheme would give you enough disks for 12 hours of 24, giving you a bit of a break and some sleep before the next three disks arrive!

LoveFilm is definitely worth checking out if you love movies and TV.