Take a picture. Don't get taken.

So our neighbor has just got back from a trip to France. And she had a whole bunch of photos on her new digital camera. Well, she had...

Thing about digital cameras is there's not often a lot of difference between "delete this one photo" and "delete all photos in the camera, leaving nothing but a black screen and my empty, broken heart". Even with all my mad tech skills, I've been caught before.

So as the friendly neighbourhood computer geek, I took it upon myself to see if I couldn't undelete those pictures off the memory stick. Apparently the people in the camera store would do it for, oh, about fifty bucks. But I figured there had to be some free utility out there on the Internet to do it, right?

Oh my.

A pox, a pox, I say on all those opportunistic bastards who will sell you an undelete utility when you're really stuck. I downloaded a couple. One didn't work at all. One showed me the photos, but wanted me to pay to actually retrieve them. Then when I uninstalled, left some nasty spyware on my computer so Internet Explorer is popping up with dodgy foreign exchange deals every ten minutes. I'll be killing that one soon.

For an hour, I got to feel what it's like out there in inexperienced userland, where the Internet is a cesspool of links and advertising and programs that just don't work and mess you up when they fail. It wasn't cool.

I figured there had to be an open source solution. Someone must have an open source undelete, right? And those camera memory sticks are just hard drives far as the computer is concerned.

Brothers and sisters, I have found the answer to your prayers.

PhotoRec is an open source app for Windows, Mac and Linux. No spyware and it works a treat. And it's free. Works so well in fact that I ended up getting a nice bottle of wine for my troubles.

A big d1sc0r0b0t goat throw to the PhotoRec team. This one's for you: \m/

Doppler effect not provided

And still the drive by blogging continues. But I thought it worth noting that, as of yesterday, the entire discorobot.com domain is now hosted by Google Apps. All the oher discorobots are still using mail.app on ther iMacs, but I've gone commando - from now on I'll be accessing my email via gmail only. No more Thunderbird for me.

Right back to writing and reading. Especially the reading. I'm just about to start the new Richard Morgan. Oh yeah.

More drive-by blogging

Still too busy reading and writing for serious bloggage, so in the meantime, some more random things:

Space Madness
The SFWA once again demonstrates that, for a bunch of science fiction authors, they're hell-bent on living in the past. I think this is the end of any interest I have in joining their ranks.

There's always room for another five-minute epic
Why was I not informed earlier about The Hold Steady?


The National is growing on me nicely

Obviously, both these albums can be found on the ever-awesome emusic.com

News of the obvious
So I took this test online and it turns out I'm a total nerd. But you already knew that, right? If you don't believe me, ask about how wrote some C# code last week that calls Java code in a Java VM that lives inside the .NET runtime. Well, I thought it was pretty cool, which may explain this result.

week of geek 4 - make it portable

I had to use Internet Explorer this week, the first time I've used the newest version. And it still sucks. What's with all the messages? I just stopped this page from downloading a file. Oooh, this looks like phishing. Did you know that if you post information on the Internet people can see it? Look how we're keeping you safe with all these patronising messages! Look at me! Look at me!. Sheesh. Internet Explorer is just so damn needy.

Which is why, when my computer was back in a vaguely usable state, one of the first things I wanted to install was Firefox, followed by Thunderbird, a decent text editor, PDF viewer, VLC... you can burn a great many hours downloading and installing the latest version of all this stuff. So when I rebuilt the computer, I did something different.

Take a look at www.portableapps.com. Special versions of software, designed to run from a memory stick. They don't take a lot of space and they're all self contained - they won't be copying files all over the hard driver or munting up the registry. But they're still full versions of the sofware packages. So instead of downloading and installing all these things separately, I now have a Portable Apps directory on my hard disk. This contains:
Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, Notepad++, Open Office, VLC media player, plus a bunch of games. The whole thing is taking about 280MB on my disk, and I can get a lot of work done with just those apps. Plus, there's a built in backup so you can move all your apps (and data) somewhere safe once in a while.

So - get yourself some portable apps, even if you don't use them in a particularly portable manner and save yourself the reinstallation marathon.

And now - the most dangerous episode of The Goodies ever. People have died watching this. Other people have named albums after the Lancastrian martial art. Be careful.

week of geek 3 - get off that computer and on to the Internet

Browser-based apps have come a long way in recent years. With projects such as Google Gears, they're going to get even better. Obviously, if you are using online applications, there's nothing to install, so you can continue working on any old computer, assuming you have access to an Internet connection and a browser.

Some of the online applications I use:
del.icio.us
Allows you to store your Internet bookmarks online. If you are using the bookmark functionality in your browser, you'll lost them if your computer goes away. del.icio.us provides extensions for both Firefox and IE which work pretty much the same way as browser bookmarks. Only you access your bookmarks from any computer at any time. An interesting feature of del.icio.us is that your bookmarks are made public by default and you can see the bookmark collections of other people with similar interests.


Google Reader
Have an RSS reader? Do you have a backup OPML file so you can get all your feeds back when your computer goes away? Google Reader lets you read all your RSS feeds online. There are a number of other online RSS readers around - you might prefer Newsgator.

Google Notebook isn't pretty, but it is a pretty good notebook. I use this as a giant todo list, using the Getting Things Done methodology. Information about using GTD with Google Notebook can be found here.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets
I know, this is all becoming a giant Google love-fest. Google Docs gives you a place to put your important documents and spreadsheets and lets you update them online. You can also share them with others and the collaboration works very well. Mozy is a great backup tool, but it's no good if you can't restore to your computer. If you store a backup of your documents in Google Docs, you can edit them from any computer. This has proved extremely handy for me over the past couple of days.

Google Calendar
It's a calendar. It's online. Big whoop. But this is a really good calendar, with a few handy features such as the ability to send alerts to your mobile phone for free. You can also integrate with public calendars. I have both the NZ and US public holidays showing in mine.

iGoogle
OK, I promise this is the last Google reference. iGoogle lets you personalise your home page. It's basically a dashboard that you can fill with whatever's useful for you. In my case I have:
* My gmail inbox
* My calendar
* A world clock
* The most recent feeds from my RSS reader
* My next todo items in my notebook
* My most recent documents and spreadsheets
* my del.icio.us links.

From one page I can get to nearly all of my stuff, and of course I can access it from any computer.

Right! That's enough boring computer stuff for now. Tomorrow - iTunes, portable apps and virtualisation. But for now:

More Goodies:

week of geek 2- gmail, seriously

How much email do you have stored on your computer? Use Outlook? Exchange? Thunderbird? If so, then there's a pretty good chance you're storing your emails on your hard drive. Which is fine, but you probably don't want to rely on it. If you set up a gmail account, you can use this as an online email backup. You can set your mail program to automatically forward any incoming email somewhere else. If you're more technically inclined, you can forward mail to your new gmail backup from the server, before it even hits your local inbox. If you're even more technically inclined, you can alter your domain's MX records and let gmail handle all your mail, then reconfigure your local mail to retrieve from there.

Did I lose you with that last sentence? That's probably the high water mark for technical this week, so don't feel too bad.

Of course, there are other benefits to duplicating your email into gmail. Like being able to read your email over any Internet connection. Or search your emails way, way faster than your local email program can manage. You can configure gmail to send messages as if they were from your primary account. What's more, if you use gmail's SMTP server, you'll get a backup of your sent messages too.

You've probably figured out by now that I really like gmail. But you may be able to achieve the same thing with Yahoo, Hotmail, or any of the other web-based mail apps out there.

Of course, after a while you might decide that you like web-based email more than your usual mail program. I'll talk about living without local apps in the next post.

week of geek 1 - I like big backups and I cannot lie

Sooner or later, your computer will explode. Or implode. Or melt. And when it does, you want to know that your important files are safe.

There are various services that will back up your files over the Internet. Some of them are free. I use Mozy. It works for both Mac and PC and there's a free version for personal use. OK, the free version only gives you 2GB of space, but if you're only backing up your essential files, you probably won't need nearly that much. No, your shaky handicam pirate video of the latest Hollywood blockbuster is not an essential file. I'm talking about your documents, spreadsheets - stuff you'd cry about if it was lost.

So. Mozy. Install it, point it at the files you care about and you're done. You can configure it to only use a small amount of your bandwidth, so it won't hammer your Internet connection. Only caveat is you might want to make sure you don't have a low usage cap or worse, get charged more after a certain amount of traffic.

Remember how I said your important documents will be considerably less than 2GB? There's one exception to that, if you've been online for a while - email. Mozy can back up your email no problem, but if you've got too much... see the next post.

Presenting - the week of geek

One of the things I really like about the d1sc0r0b0t is that it's not too technical. I write about books, television, music, zombies occasionally, but not a lot really about computers and junk. Because really, if you want computer info, there's plenty out there - it's what the Internet's made of. Well, that and pictures of people's cats.

But I'm going to break my own rule. This week my hard drive died. I didn't lose a single file. What's more, while I was rebuilding my computer, I was still able to keep working armed with nothing more than a web browser. And I figured that there might be some people out there who would like to know how to set up their computer so they don't lose important data on the Day Of Destruction.

So I'm declaring this the week of geek. There'll be a post or two every day about things like backups, online apps, and moving your data around. It's not going to be particularly technical, so it will be easy to follow. And even if you think it's boring, you might want to have a look. Unless you're OK with that novel you've been working on for the last ten years getting its ones where its zeros should be.

Normal, non-technical service will return in a week. Hey, it might only be three days. And just to sweeten the deal:

The Goodies

Me and Google, sitting in a tree

It's the little things.

Like, Gmail has context-sensitive ads. And when I go into my spam folder I get:

Spam Vegetable Strudel - Bake 20 minutes or until golden, serve with soy sauce

In other Gmail love news, I'm now using Gmail exclusively for day job email. Discorobot mail will move later in the year. And at that point, I'm pretty sure I'll undelete Thunderbird and access my mail from the web exclusively.

I know - this could be viewed as a violation of the 'no technical stuff' rule. But the thing is, I was all ready to make the best LOLCat photo ever (Moe was sitting in a box eating a toy zebra like some kind of Godzilla lion), but the battery on the camera went flat, which could have been a sign.

Google love again

Today I exported my RSS feeds from Sharpreader (all 104) into an OPML file. Logged into Google Reader and imported them. Problems=0. Now my unread feeds are sitting in the middle of my iGoogle page and one more piece of my life is moved into a single web page.

Also, I created a new notebook for something I was doing for the day job and shared it so my colleagues could 1: see what I was doing and 2: jump in and make suggestions or corrections while I was doing it. I'm sure Sharepoint can do this too, but I've never managed to figure it out.

It's not all beer and skittles: I was reminded this evening that Google docs isn't supported on Safari - yet. Well, some reports say it can be made to work, but I'm not messing around with user agents. But it seems like every day this week my iGoogle experience has gotten better.

I realise this blog has gotten far to technical of late. By way of apology, LOLTrek

In which Google eats the sun. Well, my data, anyway.

I've had a gmail account since ages ago. And to be honest, I don't know if I've quite given it the respect it deserves. I've basically used it as a backup to my main discorobot.com mail server: all my discorobot mail is copied to the gmail account, which I have in the past pretty much ignored. But recently I've been taking a look at gmail, along with other Google apps. Thanks to this bloke, my day job is thinking of moving from Exchange/Sharepoint/whatever to Google Apps. Being a willing test subject, I've started using my gmail rather than Thunderbird. I've set up iGoogle to show me my gmail, calendar, world clock, my google notebook entries, my most recently used google docs and my del.icio.us links.

Over the past couple of days I've tried creating and editing documents entirely with Google docs and it's not nearly as painful as you'd think it should be. This evening I started a new story with it and it was great. I even did a little squee when I found the word count option. And I don't just squee for anything.

Now I'm contemplating the next logical step: moving the whole discorobot kit & caboodle to Google. Theoretically, all the information I care about would then be available from any computer.

My recent google experience has been really good. And as I migrate my domain over I'll blog what happens. I think it's going to be fun. In a suitably geeky way, of course.

In the meantime, some useful links:
Getting Things Done with Google Notebook
Livin' la Vida Google: A Month-Long Dive Into Web-Based Apps
iGoogle it is!