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In January, my iBook died; a week ago, my friend Iqram's MacBook died after an OS X Security Update; two days ago my friend Dave's iBook hard drive failed. Iqram and I managed to recover our data; Dave did not. At the moment, I don't have the greatest faith in Apple products, so I decided to backup all my data.

I used to use an external USB hard drive for backups, but my 160 GB external has been acting up of late and sometimes needs to be restarted 2 or 3 times before my computer recognizes it, so about 2 months ago I started playing with Amazon S3 and JungleDisk.

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is basically an infinite hard drive you can by on a pay per usage basis, and JungleDisk is a utility that allows you to mount S3 as a hard drive on any OS. JungleDisk has a backup tool built in, but right now the tool does not provide mirroring--ie, if you backup a folder on your computer and then delete some stuff locally, that stuff will not be deleted remotely. So if you start moving stuff around, you'll end up with duplicate copies of your data. Redundant data annoys me, so I decided to finally learn how to use the rsync command line utility to mirror folders. Here's how I setup a backup of my home directory using Amazon S3, JungleDisk, and rsync.

Get Amazon S3

Signup for Amazon Simple Storage Service. Here's how the pricing works, according to Amazon's website:

Yesterday I downloaded the Better Gmail Firefox Extension from Lifehacker and I have to say, it’s sweet.

My sis and I have each gotten the Snapz Pro screen capturing software, and I’ve just started playing with screencasting. Today, I’m giving a presentation at Philly Emerging Tech Conference. I’ll be speaking on Market Tracking with Ruby on Rails and Google Analytics.

Well it’s time for the second wallpaper post! This time we have a widescreen wallpaper that I threw together in about ten minutes. Enjoy!

I watch a lot of videos on various sites including youtube, google video, etc., and one of my main gripes with the sites is that video does not make your mac think it is busy so it constantly falls asleep while playing a single clip.

After being under constant pressure from my brother I just started using delicious about a month ago. The best way to describe the site is an online bookmark management catalog; instead of saving your bookmarks (favorites) directly to your browser and onto your computer’s hard drive you tag your favorites and save them online.

I have been using iChat for about a month. Although it’s a great program and has the ability to be used with most of the major chat interfaces I got frustrated with the lack of built in customizable features very quickly. I never took the time to download a new client or find a way to add features to iChat itself, but the other day I was reading a forum that mentioned Chax.

Yesterday, I wasn’t getting frustrated because a bunch of the songs in my iTunes Music Library were broken links to songs on an external hard drive that I know longer use. My fix was to remove all the songs from my Library in iTunes, then to just add my whole music folder back to the iTunes Library.