OK all you gamers out there. I am thinking of getting a toy for Christmas, for me that is, I already have stuff for the kiddies 🙂 I am thinking of getting some kind of hand held video game system, and I have it pretty much narrowed down to two options. These options are the Nintendo DS (Lite) or the Sony PSP, are there any more nowadays? Having said that, I guess the real question is what are your experiences with these two units, which one do you prefer? I have read a lot about them, and it kind of seems like it’s a toss up, mostly decided by personal preference and gaming style/tastes. I wanted to get your opinions though, so jump in the forums and share your thoughts, ideas and experiences with these cool toys. Maybe you know of something other than one of these two that is better, I dunno. Tell me what is on your mind, and what you think!
PowerUp Your Shell With Your Profile
How about some neat-o shell tricks for everyone to play with? I figured out some neat things the other day while trying to add some functionality to my shell, specifically through scripts or the profile. What I found was that the magic is in the profile!
Have you ever wanted to have commands that performed certain functions from quick keystrokes rather than long command lines? Of course you have, that’s why we all set aliases in our profiles like ‘ll’ instead of ‘ls -al’ and the like. But what if you want or need more functionality than simple command shortening? That’s what I was after, more function in a smaller form. Some way to pass variables to aliases to get more out of them. Ah, but you can’t pass variables to aliases, so we are stuck right? Wrong, that’s where the functions come in to play.
Best Backup Tool For Budding Networks
One thing I have been doing for many years now, decades even, is backing up and restoring data. It’s easy to backup stuff at home, simply copy your valuable bits and bytes to an external hard drive or write them to a CD-R or DVD-R. This makes backups easy, though a bit cumbersome, especially as hard drives and data requirements get bigger and bigger. Think about all the digital content we have nowadays versus just a few years ago. Movies, music, games and more that get purchased and downloaded right off the net mean more and more gigabytes to backup.
Screenshot of BackupPC software
Still though, for saving the critical stuff like documents and pictures, CD’s and DVD’s are OK. But what about when you have more than one computer? With prices falling and computer technology getting more and more prevalent in the home, it’s not un-common for households to have at least two computers in the form of a desktop and laptop. However, I am seeing more and more households with computers for mom and dad, the kids, grandparents and then some laptops on top of all that! Whew! Now we are getting into one major pile of work to try and back all that up.
In the commercial world where you are backing up a data center full of servers and/or cubes laden with workstations, you buy commercial software like Veritas Backup Exec or NetBackup or Arcserve, etc. Throw your data onto tapes inside a robotic tape library and manage it all from one central console. Now, that’s all well and good, but it’s very expensive and doesn’t exactly fit in the average home very well.
So, where does that leave people like me and I am sure many of you out there that still have several computers to backup? We are caught in a kind of in between place. Well, I am going to share some good stuff that I have found, and actually have been very impressed with. Continue reading
Quick Update
Fallout 3 rocks, rocks big. It’s awesome. Between that and work, you see I haven’t posted much in the last few days. Keep the faith, I’ll be back soon, there is a long weekend coming up and I hope to get some new stuff up! Thanks 🙂
Fallout 3 – It finally runs!
Here we go! After a couple weeks of effort, and some of the most dimwitted tech support I have ever experienced, I finally managed to get Fallout 3 up and running. No thanks to Bethesda tech support by the way. Now, support issues aside, the game is nice, nice, nice. I don’t just mean the graphics, which are great, but the story and character interactions, the detail of the scenery and lots more. The character creation process is quite unique. The folk that made this game did a great job, lots of detail and extras and they give you a ton of freedom as to how to play the game. All in all, my initial reaction is that it’s been worth the effort to get it going. I have thoroughly enjoyed my first couple of hours with the game. I suggest you check it out if you like first person type games. This one is more than just an FPS, it has a grand story and lots more to do than just shooting. Enjoy!
Spam Goodness
Well, it appears as though we got hit by a metric ton of spam bots in the last few days on our forum site. We routinely get loads of spam comments here on the main Solarum website, but Akismet does a pretty good job of filtering them out. This time the bots were targeting our forums, and even going so far as to register accounts bypassing the CAPTCHA even. I say bypassing but really I guess they are smart enough now to read the images. Sounds like some advanced scripts just to dump some porn and viagra spam. I can’t imagine they get enough benefit out of it to justify all the work that must go into making the bots in the first place. But then again, they keep making these things (bots, worms, viruses, etc) so maybe I am wrong and they are making out like bandits. Either way, I upgraded the forums and set some tighter restrictions on user registration. Hopefully that will keep the bots out. Thanks for your patience!