Backing up is one of the most important maintenance jobs you need to do regularly with your blog and your computer. A backup service needs to offer sufficient space, sufficient bandwidth and an idiot proof back up tool. Back ups are too important to leave to chance or try and manage with complicated tools that need to be checked constantly. I want a set and forget tool that backs up all my files without me having to worry that it is getting on with it but that also notifies me each time and it has done something so I know it is working without having to remember to check.
Being a Virgin Media customer I have access to the free Vstuff. Unfortunately you get what you pay for with this software as it is appalling. It is slow, unreliable and takes ages to back up your files. Other users have reported that files are going missing and multiple versions of the same files are being uploaded endlessly. Vstuffed more than Vstuff.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was an easy answer that would let you back up all your blogs and all your computers, macs and pcs alike that works easily and reliably. Well funnily enough… there is.
Idrive is a back up tool from http://www.idrive.com. They have both mac and pc versions and a plug in for wordpress. There are several levels of service available – a free 2GB back up space, a paid single machine account and the the one I have – the family pack. The family pack offers 500GB of backup space for up to 5 machines. This is ideal for most people and at just under $15 a month it is competitive to other back up services such as dropbox. It can be bit slow on my old tiger machine but on the more recent leopard one it is fine. Compared to Vstuff it is a cheetach as opposed to a 3 legged tortoise with a limp.
The best bit about Idrive is the new Idrive plugin for wordpress. This makes sure that all your files and the database are backed up regularly. It defaults to daily backups and is intelligent enough to backup only the files that have changed. It also dumps the contents of the database too so you have a complete snapshot of your blog which should make it easy to restore should the worst happen.
Luckily the worst hasn’t happened so I haven’t had to test out the restore capabilities beyond doing a quick check…
Do you want to increase the readership of your blog? Finding a way to promote within Facebook and your current network is a good way of doing just this. There is a great plugin called WPBook which allows you to connect your normal wordpress blog in such a way that it appears as regular Facebook content so you can easily share it with friends and gain fans. The adage in social media at the moment is ‘go where the people are’ and virtually everyone is on Facebook. Twitter is ok for blog promotion but it is great to find a way of having your blog appear to be within your network rather than external to it.
To set it up, the best way is to follow the ‘detailed’ instructions available with the plugin. In essence you want to create an application with Facebook first. Then you fill in the API keys and page name of the application within the plugin settings. Then you have to allow the plugin access to your profile and the application. This is the trickier bit. If you don’t get the right page name and profile id it won’t work. If you have the initial settings incorrect then the granting permissions part will not work properly so you won’t be able to find out the information you need as Facebook tends to throw you back a blank page. Some diagnostics would be useful here as if you are new to this then you are going to be scratching around trying to work out just where you have made a mistake.
It took me an hour or two after installing the plugin. Had I noticed the link to the ‘detailed’ instructions first I think I would have managed it much more quickly. But I played around with a few settings and found out several ways it wouldn’t work
Considering I had never built a Facebook application before this evening or even registered as a Developer it is quite amazing what you can do with only a small amount of knowledge.
This is a recent and cool feature from Amazon – the universal wish list button. You go to their page and just drag the button onto your browser bookmark bar. Simples!
I spent ages looking for a new phone. I had a faithful nokia e70 which did the job of being a phone and email device quite well. Battery life was decent and it would surf t’internet too. But it was a brick and a the camera was rubbish. So I decided I would change it for a new one.
I was torn between the N86 and the iphone. The iphone also had a rubbish camera so there would be little to gain. I also tried an LG phone with a touchscreen and found it such an annoying experience I wished to hurl it at the wall. Therefore I chose the N86…
First day of use didn’t go that well as the migration tool only works if you migrate from similar nokias so it seemed you couldn’t migrate data from an E series to an N series even though they both run symbian. Great. Luckily I just synced the old phone with isync then synced the new one with it too so all calendar and contacts were imported without problem. I spent a happy afternoon playing with all the settings on the phone. It was ok for the first few days then it crashed randomly requiring the battery to be removed to reset the phone. I’ve updated firmware,restored to factory , restarted it regularly and still this phone is the most unreliable phone I have ever used!
The bugs found so far: random freezing, new message indicator light stops working then you need to reset the phone entirely, randomly picture messages don’t send and hang about in the outbox and usually hang the phone, photos aren’t saved into the gallery but are there when you check the filesytem. You can’t use card memory as it makes the phone throw a wobbly. You can’t plug it in to a laptop to charge it as it switches new messages to phone memory from mass memory. Battery life is mad. One minute it has nearly full bars the next it is half power. Switching on and off loses several bars even though the battery usage must be minimal. Email program is abysmal. It hangs and locks and generally is barely fit to use.
Worst problem of all is the atrocious build quality. The charger connector is wobbly and the slider makes noises now and is loose. The slide out keypad also has the number keys slightly too high
It beats me how a company as large as Nokia can release a phone with beta quality software. I found all the problems within a few days of normal use. Why don’t their in house testers manage this??? I’m sure many nokia users would be happy to be lent a phone for a few weeks to iron out these issues if Nokia are unable or unwilling to pay people to actually test the phone. It must surely be more cost effective than releasing the product and receiving such negative publicity.
Networks are not innocent in this either. They will insist in beggaring about with the software and changing options. This practice should be stopped. The only difference between a sim free and networked phone should be the start up logo and connectivity settings. Leave the rest alone!
Yet another firmware release is imminent. Will it be third time lucky?
Apparently, yes! According to @Gadgets4nowt on twitter you can have free stuff sent to you just for referring a few people to join Freebiejeebies like me. All I had to do was to complete one offer and then start finding other people that want something for nothing! Sounds simple doesn’t it?
Being a natural sceptic I obviously assume that it won’t work so I am going to conduct an experiment to see if it does indeed work just as it says. I need a new puter as mine is rather long in the tooth so I thought a shiny 27″ imac would be just the ticket and rather usefully such a thing is listed in the available free gifts. All I need to do is to persuade enough people to sign up to gadgets for nowt and complete one of the offers, many of which are also free! The beauty of this scheme is once you have signed up and completed an offer you help someone on their way to their free stuff and can start getting your own. Win win all round.
So if you want to be part of my live experiment and help then click here and sign up!
Blip.fm is my new favourite toy. This service is to music what twitter is to words. Tweets are called ‘blips’ and can either be audio tracks or video from youtube. You have listeners rather than followers and favourites rather than being a follower. There is also an ability to give ‘props’ which are rewards to someone for playing music that you like. You can also ‘re-blip’ other people’s songs. The re-blip system is a great way of sharing music.
I spent many a happy hour just listening to music I hadn’t heard in ages and music I had never heard before. It is much better than the majority of music stations which have a narrow band of played music. No annoying DJs to contend with wittering over the intros. No adverts. Bliss. Normal commercial radio also lacks the ease with which a listener can buy a particular song or even know what is playing at any one moment. Many of us have wondered ‘what is this’ and have never had the answer as the song was announced before we started listening or something else dragged us away from the radio at the crucial moment. With blip.fm you can always scroll back and replay any track you liked or go find it in iTunes or on Amazon. These inbuilt links to iTunes and Amazon also offer great commercial potential to support the site and its users. It makes you want to listen to more music and discover new artists which you then are more tempted to buy than if you were bombarded with pop ups or other infuriating advertising.
Via last.fm you can send your currently playing iTunes track to blip.fm using the wonderfully named audioscrobbler. I have yet to try this out but it sounds marvellous. Edit: I now have tried this and it seems you can send tracks from iTunes to last.fm but those tracks don’t go to blip.fm even if you have linked in your blip.fm account. Ideally I’d like to send tracks straight to blip.fm like you can using TwitTunes to twitter. I have already got my blip.fm account linked to twitter so I could update both at the same time. If it worked… which it doesn’t seem to.
What I would really like to see is something like the Naim HDX/Logitech Squeezebox having blip.fm support so you can listen to streaming music from others easily and also blip what you are playing. I you already had a track should have the option to play your version as not all the music has the best audio quality.
There are loads of open source and paid for content management systems out there. I like to try out as many as possible to find out which ones will be suitable but downloading and installing them all is time consuming. Luckily you don’ t have to as there is this superb site called opensourcecms.com
On this site there are demo installations of just about every good cms, blogging, groupware and community software system you can think of. You can spend literally hours and hours trying them all out, fiddling with settings, changing themes and generally getting a feel which ones might fit the project you have in mind for them. Once you have had a good explore then you can short list the few that you think might fit the best and install them in your own webspace and have a more thorough tinker.
Motor Codes Limited is the body responsible for the self regulation of the motor industry through consumer codes of practice. Supported by government, consumer organisations and the motor industry we aim to raise standards and increase consumer protection for motorists. Our Codes cover garages, vehicle manufacturers and extended warranty administrators.
This is the aim of the new body. Let’s hope they achieve this aim as there are so many second and third rate garages out there that continue to rip off the less than car savvy consumer.
This is such a cool concept! The possibilities are almost endless. It would also work really well with jewellery and watch stores where you could get an idea of how a product would look when worn on your wrist. Hopefully the next version will let you poke your webcam out of the window so you can see how the new Astra would look on your driveway.
More on the new Astra can be found on the community hub Torqueastra.
Cheap stuff is great but it can have a cost all of its own. I found some cheap end of line showers. Bargain at £50 each instead of the usual £100 or so similar showers were costing. I thought they were a decent make and would therefore last. Both were fitted in two separate properties.
Roll on to just over a year later. One shower is working fine. The other the button has fallen clean off. Strangely the shower manufacturer doesn’t have spares and the model number on said shower is missing off the unit so no-one knows what it is. You can’t buy the button separately. You can only buy the entire front. This cheap shower at £50 has now cost electrician’s call out plus cost of replacement shower as the old one is uneconomic to repair. Which brings it to a grand total of a whole lot more than £100 of a comparable shower.
Along the way I have also learned: Indesit make utter rubbish. New World are nearly as cheap but seemingly much better screwed together. Cheap paint is cheap and works but you need to use much more and have more coats so it costs the same in the end. Decorators caulk is the most useful substance in the world. Fills small cracks much better than polyfilla cracked and patchy walls gloop. Removing wallpaper is horrible. Everytime you buy somewhere there is always something else that needs mending when a tenant moves in. They always find the broken knob, weak hinge or other niggly problem you hoped they wouldn’t notice. Much better to get it right from the beginning and attend to the niggles.
