Backup your Blog the easy way with BlogBackupOnline

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I have a fellow blogging friend that has had an issue with his WordPress blog, turns out a plugin totally messed up 2 years of posts and things went down hard.  The backup plugin was a gonner, so was the other backup program (it had stopped backing up month before).  We spent many of hours trying to recover his site, and eventually returned his site close to what he had before.  The whole ordeal had me thinking that maybe another external backup wouldn’t be so bad for my own site.  So I went searching and found BlogBackupOnline.  Their site is deceivingly simple and can backup everything from posts, pictures, comments, and code.  It does a daily backup of your content for free as long as you are lighter than 50mb.  Its secure and better still a remote backup, so if something goes awry with you backup solution you can lean on BlogBackupOnline.

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June 26, 2007 | Filed Under Web and Blog traffic tips | 1 Comment 

Fileswap like a StumbleUpon for files, or a slot machine for content.

This one is hardly useful but there is something entirely addicting about fileswap.  Its really simple, you upload a file, and you get one completely random file back.  Almost like a StumbleUpon for files, or a slot machine for content.  You have the ability to vote on the content you receive, this keeps the music or pictures fresh and high quality.

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June 26, 2007 | Filed Under Web 2.0 | Leave a Comment 

Get back to your roots with Etchy the Web 2.0 Etch-A-Sketch

Long for simpler days, no Adobe PhotoShop just a couple of white wheels and your ability to take straight lines and make them into something?  Its hard to imagine but some of the concepts involving modern computer graphics came from plotters which a Etch-A-Sketch is based off of.  Well now you can play with a virtual Etch-A-Sketch online. For more fun check out this hack a day hack that allows a mouse to draw on a Etch-A-Sketch.

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June 26, 2007 | Filed Under Cool, General | 1 Comment 

Resurrect your PS2, XBOX, or PC DVD or CD drives

DVD, DVD-R, CD-R, and CD Drives will fail its only a matter of time, each drive has a predetermined amount of reads and writes engineered by the manufacturer.  Whether it is a Playstation (PS1, PS2, or PS3), an XBox 360 or regular XBox, your PC’s DVD drive, your DVD Player, or even car stereo CD player each one of these devices will eventually error out and stop working.  There are several reasons from weak lasers to laser tracking being off for a optical drive to fail.  Many burners and Playstations have been tossed for not working because the drive appears to go bad.

There is one more popular reason that drives fail and it is one that is fixable, its dust.  Yes regular old dust can get sucked in from regular air circulation or forced in by PC or Playstation fans.  The simple fix is to buy a CD/DVD laser lens cleaner.  If you can read a audio CD at all this CD will clean the laser lens of any of that troublesome dust.  If you are unable to get an audio CD to start try firing a little compressed air with the drive door open (Be sure not to spray compressed air upside down when spraying in there as you can cause more damage).  The little bit of air you spray in there may dislodge enough dust to get a read from the audio CD.  Sometimes changing the way a drive sits can help you get a decent read also.  I have heard of people setting their PC or Playstations on their side to get the drive to read. 

Not every drive can be resurrected this way, but if you have a dead PC drive, Xbox, or Playstation drive it cannot hurt to try.  I was able to resurrect a PS2 a couple of weekends ago this way.  If you burn quite a few DVD-Rs or CD-Rs like I do you may be interested in this article that lists off the most reliable drives make.  In any event dust and contamination will likely end your optical drive’s life early and like changing the oil on your car I prefer to keep my equipment clean with regular maintenance. 

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June 25, 2007 | Filed Under General | Leave a Comment 

Microsoft infringing on one of Apple Patents?

Is Microsoft infringing on one of Apple’s patents?  Its no secret Microsoft uses transparent windows in its new Vista operating system, and while no one thought they came up with idea, no one looked to find out exactly who did. During one of my searches of Google’s Patent search they have I found a interesting patent by Apple.  The patent describes a situation where a window that covers another would allow a certain transparency when you move the window over another.  In their words:

“displaying a base image on said display screen of said computer system; and
displaying a translucent image on said display screen which covers at least a portion of said base image, wherein said covered portions of said base image are at least partially visible through said translucent image simultaneously with said translucent image, the translucent image being always non-reactive thereby precluding user performance of image operations with the translucent image and permitting user performance of image operations with said base image without regard to the overlying translucent image.”
Keep in mind I am not a patent researcher, and I am sure Apple is not going to sue Microsoft for abusing one of their patents, but it does at least look like Microsoft is abusing this patent. 

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June 22, 2007 | Filed Under Apple, Microsoft | 6 Comments 

Get your freshly squeezed AlarmD screensaver

After reading a pretty interesting article on Lifehacker about a really cool web alarm clock called AlarmD my very first thought was how cool, it should be a icon on my desktop or a screensaver.  So after a few minutes of thought I was off coding.  This is the first second (0.2) release of my AlarmD screensaver.  I am off to test it and shall be back with improvements. Checked on my Vista test machine and we are Vista compatible. 

Next to do on my list is to email the author of AlarmD (for now the link back will have to do).

This version is just the EXE application that you can launch from anywhere.

For now it is Windows only but I will make a Mac version if someone wants me to.

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June 22, 2007 | Filed Under Lifehacker, Software | 1 Comment 

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