March 2007 Archives

• Technology Review: Quantum Detection of Tooth Decay
  Taking dentistry into the 21st century, looking at how to detect decay before you get gaping holes.
  (tags: dentistry)
• Eldonia ludwigi
  privately funny, you need to have been to our house.
  (tags: humour)
• The universe is a string-net liquid - fundamentals - 15 March 2007 - New Scientist
  curious stuff
  (tags: string-net sf herbertsmithite)

Too many of my mac using friends surprise me by not being that hot on backups, having nearly lost my mac to ill-fortune a while back, I take backups more seriously now. However I spent a long time looking for the friction-less way of doing it, trying .Mac Backup and mirroring to local hard disks etc. I've now found what I think is a minimalist, but effective solution. This is one that will get you your important stuff back, but maybe not everything, I'll explain.

I use Strongspace and the recipe for iCal, Transmit and Automator. I then set my Documents folder to mirror sync using an iCal appointment running a script every work day at 11. It is advisable to do the first backup manually, as the script will fail if the sync hits problems. My Documents folder was a few gig and took a good while for the first copy across, but now the sync takes 10-15 minutes.

Strongspace has pretty much always been there when I've needed to sync stuff to it. I know that this is entirely possible using rsync, but iCal is a really friendly way to do this, I can shift a backup if I know I'm going to be busy, or skip them, without editing a script. I no longer need to worry about that part of my backup routine, pictures are next for the strongspace approach. Applications I have disks or can download, music I mostly have on CD, so could re-rip or copy to externals. I'd recommend giving stongspace a try.

I made a new gavinbell.com website last week. I've updated the site with details of the talks I've given over the past few years and refreshed my profile. I've also managed to pull all the writing I've done into one place too. It was a good experience building something afresh, skEdit and CSSEdit were a very helpful part of the process, with more to come. I feel enthused to make more stuff again.

Snow is a lovely book, it is a short tale of love, poetry and snow. Originally written in French by Maxence Fermine and translated wonderfully by Chris Mulhern . The writing is exquisite, simple short sparse prose with barely a word wasted. Each page invokes visual and emotional response, from the coldness of the mountains to loss and a vivid sense of colour. The story is of a young Japanese man finding his vocation as a haiku poet and the hard path he takes on the way. A perfect place to escape to on the way to work, though don't rush it, those 100 odd pages fast melt, like snow in a ditch.

• Why Apple is the best retailer in America
  Apple are now seen as a leading company in terms of retail design, taking leads from hotel experience and a focus on what people do, not what Apple sell. The Apple retail experience will be hard to replicate though. A good article.
  (tags: applestore apple retail)
• Sam Ruby: OpenID for non-SuperUsers
  How to make your own domain your openid and how to ensure it degrades gracefully, a really clear, well written article.
  (tags: openid yadis)
• L'Asie Exotique - Burmese Opium Weights
  Explaining the history of my "ducks" from my childhood, which now reside on the mantlepiece in our bedroom. They used to live on my Granny's mantlepiece, nice to read about them, thanks Dad.
  (tags: burma heirloom)

• Roofing tar to seal tree wounds? - not anymore
  Current advice on pruning trees is to leave the cut open to the air, we've got a dripping sycamore from me removing a branch and I was curious, so now I know.
  (tags: gardening)

• BBC: Baby animal love story
  Orang-utans and tigers, baby ones, deeply cute
• Hawk Wings » A faster way to speed up Mail.app
  running the vacuum sqlite3 command on your Mail databases really does speed things up a lot.
  (tags: mail sqlite3)