Hardware glitches….. well, shall we start with the dying hard disk? One drive in my external firewire box decided to die last week – of course it’s the one with all my photo’s on, and where all the music is ripped to (490 Albums at last count) so you can imagine my horror when it wouldn’t come back online – it’s been giving me problems for a couple of weeks – just dropping off and requiring a reboot of the PC and the Array to get it back….

Luckily I have some good backup software and I keep two copies of all that sort of data – wasteful in some ways – but disk space is cheap!! I found out how cheap disk space is with a bit of digging around for a replacement drive – I have a spare that was dropped in – but now I need a new spare!! I’ve not decided if I should start a round of upgrades to 250Gb drives from 120’s or just be cheap for the time being and get another 120 as a like for like replacement. I’ll keep you posted of what I find / decide on…

Whilst I was searching I found a Fujitsu 80Gb Laptop drive on E-Bay (brand spanking new, for £88 delivered to my door the following morning) this will allow me to do a load of juggling of disks amonst the laptops here and improve the data redundancy somewhat. At present I have a pair of 30Gb drives in my Laptop (a Compaq Evo N600c) but I have to use the MultiBay slot – so I have no optical drive most of the time…. just a little frustrating :-)  I intend to upgrade this to have the 80Gb drive in it and drop the pair of 30’s into Becca’s Armada M700 (along with a RAM upgrade also found on E-Bay) to turn that into a useful machine at long last (there’s minimal chance that she’ll need an optical drive - I hope!!)

Once all this is completed and I get sign-off from Becca, I’ll probably upgrade the PC to run SBS 2003 and have a domain in the house – central storage and offline files, combined with Foldershare for additional redundancy and music / photo syncronisation across multiple machines, we should be on to a winner! I then just need to find somewhere to “hide” the PC as it’s pretty noisy – and I’d like to get it out of the study and into a cupboard (understairs stylee) of some description – run it headless and use remote desktop as required to do admin….. but we shall see…

Hopefully this post will work… my first attempt failed for no obvious reason – but I suspect it may have something to do with the abomination that is Internet Explorer 7… it’s like IE 4 – but more horrible (remember the active desktop?) the Beta 2 preview release is a crock, and will be coming off tonight…. I’ll have to wait a bit longer for a version that works properly with SpamKarma (the one saving grace of IE7 is that the previews of captured spam work as they should… like they do in Firefox….)

An update from IE6 is badly needed – but please give up with the RSS integration (FeedDemon works just fine thanks), and put the buttons back where they were…. and what’s with the Blue Boobs?

 Anyway enough of a rant… WordPress 2.0.1 is now available…so I guess I should upgrade that as well…. at least it’s not BETA!! Why oh why didn’t I wait a day or two more before upgrading??

Well, I’ve done it and finally upgraded to WordPress 2, and I have to say it was stupidly easy!! Apart from some hardware problems (my laptop freezing twice as I was uploading the new files) it was utterly painless.  I’ve also upgraded to Spam-Karma 2.1 – to ensure that the junk stays out of my comments….

The new interface is lovely – just a bit cleaner and “nicer” that the previous version, the editing tools are superb as well…. the preview is massively improved from previous versions (create a post and click ‘Save and Continue Editing’ then scroll down to see what I mean…) 

I know I promised to post more, and I will – a new role beckons working in telecoms (on the web hosting side of things) so it should start getting interesting…. I’ve got to have a medical and get my references checked… and a “security check” but it’s all OK!!

More updates to follow as things progress……

Invites available – i’m looking for MEANINGINGFUL comments – not the usual pleading….. impress me – show me some GOOD new software – show me something funny – give me a reason to give you an invite…..

The oppourtunity is there – PLEASE take it!!

We all know the feeling don’t we….. you’ve typed up that important documentation / cv / proposal over the weekend on you home PC, and got to work for the presentation on the Monday morning – and realised that you’ve not e-mailed it to yourself, or brought it on your pen-drive, or it was too big for your mailserver so it was rejected… but you never saw the NDR. That sinking feeling – that feeling of panic….. well no more!!

Foldershare (recently bought by Microsoft) is a superb piece of software that gives you a number of options for getting hold of your files….

As Reeves Little puts it:

FolderShare is perfect for individuals. FolderShare offers both free and for-pay versions of their service. The free version of the service limits the number of files and sub-folders which can be shared as well as the speed of the file sync. I’ve been able to stick to just using the free service by keeping a sub-folder in my documents folder where I put the items I want to share (typically my current work) and moving them out when I’m done.

…

Yep, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… I’m cheap.

You can syncronize your files (up to 2Gb per file) between machines, in a nice (read quick), secure, encrypted manner – it’s 30 seconds to install and configure it. Install the client, create a username and password and then select the directories you want to sync. Foldershare calls each of these a library – and each library can contain up to 10,000 files! You can then invite other foldershare users to your libraries, or just install the client on other machines – et voila! your files are available to you.

Alternatively, once you have the client installed on a PC – you can sign-in to the website from any web browser, and look at the contents of your PC(s) – any drive or folder – regardless of wether or not it forms part of a library.

So, as you can see – the days of “….. Oh Shit! I left the (very important) document at home!” panic are over….. and the very best bit…..the price:

FREE FREE FREE!!!

try it – you might like it, Omar does!!

I should probably point out that I value Omar’s opinion more than some – as he and his team gave me a Kahuna Invite!! So I’m a little biased 🙂

One final little note – the Mac version is available again now I see – so rejoice ye Zealots!!

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well, it finally happened! I got a mail from Omar last night, my account has been moved over to one of the Kahuna servers!! I’ve only had time for a very brief look – but so far, I’m VERY impressed!

The look and feel is really good – it’s clean and intuative – and the drag and drop functionality gives it the edge over GMail – on the “ease of organisation” side of things anyway…..

I’ll post more and in more detail once I’ve played some more – for now I just need to get some mail to it!!

I’ve got one!!

Following my post here a couple of days ago….. Imran Qureshi has kindly picked me for an invite to the new Hotmail Beta – codename Kahuna!! So he’ll be getting a mail in a moment from me (slimboyfat at gmail.com) to confirm what I need to do etc – this is proof of who I am as much as anything!!

I can’t wait – maybe it’ll be the final thing to move me away from GMail – but I might have to wait until GTalk can talk to MSN Messenger 🙂

Edit – < note to self > Spell check things before you post!! < /note to self > Cheers Grasshoppermind!!

Edit II – FOR CRYING OUT LOUD PEOPLE – please pay attention to what I’m actually writing…. I DO NOT HAVE ANY INVITES TO GIVE OUT and if I did, I’d be offering them to people I know – or with something worthwhile to offer in return. If you want to try and get an invite read my post here for more info.