About Anything

Until about two years ago, I backed up important data only if I found myself waking up at night and then I didn’t do a very good job of it. Copying key folders to a file server or burning a DVD were parts of my haphazard solution. When I did need to recover a file, it was always hit-or-miss, digging through the various copies. For some projects, I did use a version control system (subversion), but the overhead and discipline required limited its use to software developments. Everything else, Office files, images, text files and email sat vulnerable to a mistake by me or a disk failure.

Then I installed Carbonite. It’s not free — it costs roughly $50 per year, but it’s so easy to use and provides so much peace of mind  that I don’t give the price a second thought.  It integrates with XP as if it came with it — actually as if someone other the Microsoft designed it. Right click a file or folder to back it up or remove it from the backup and you’re done. To restore a missing file open up the Carbonite directory and select the file — you can restore it, or a previous version.

Restoring a file is not instantaneous — it can take several minutes, or even longer for a big file, but it does come back, usually faster than searching through a bunch of DVD’s or directories on a server for the right copy.

Fortunately, I’ve not yet needed to recover the entire file system ,but I did buy a new laptop and used Carbonite to transfer most of my old files. This was remarkably easy — I uninstalled Carbonite from my old laptop, installed it on the new one, registered my new laptop and the Carbonite directory appeared. It took only a few minutes to select the files I wanted restored and by the end of the day, they were all there, along with easy access to their backups.

It’s available at www.carbonite.com

The earliest use of the tagline “all news is local” that I could find was as the title of an article by Peter Osnos of The Century Foundation. Osnos was writing about the closing of several local news bureaus in Rhode Island (www.tcf.org/list.asp?type=NC&pubid=1220). Osnos freely credits the line to Tip O’Neill who actually said “All politics is local”, pointing out “As Tip framed the notion, politicians and newspapers had best remember that their constituents care above all about what is happening in their lives; the big issues writ small.”

Google has since appropriated the line to describe their ability to customize news feeds based on location. In their words, “we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located” (googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/all-news-is-local.html). When I enter my zipcode on the Google News page, I do get a list of stories that are generally about my area. The problem is they are compiled by those same news organizations that, as Osnos points out, have closed their local bureaus and no longer actually report on anything local. Without real local news sources, how can news be local?

EveryBlock really is local. Their sources do include major newspapers but go far beyond them to include community weeklies, government sites listing building permits, crimes, and restaurant inspections as well as local specialty publications and local blogs and even further include sites like Yelp, Craigslist and Flickr. Led by Adrian Holovaty, who developed the ChicagoCrime (which is now part of EveryBlock) the team has integrated it all.

If you’ve ever walked by a work crew in your neighborhood and wondered “are they cutting into a gas line, removing a buried gas tank or or adding fiber?”, it’s here. Just check out the the street use permits. Crimes, photos, public housing, restaurant inspections can be quickly browsed, in map or list form and provide a real feel for what’s happening, where it matters most — in my neighborhood.

All this detail could be uselessly overwhelming if poorly presented. EveryBlock makes it easy to find what you want and fun to explore. One or two clicks click gets you a list of either what you want or where you want. But this is about “local” and “local” means maps. Zoom in to your neighborhood and pick a category — all of the relevant items are there, on the map ready to roll over and read.

There is a small problem, EveryBlock only covers Chicago, New York and San Francisco, so I can’t actually use it for anything that matters to me here in Boston. I eagerly anticipate it’s roll out in my fair city. For those of you in one of the three they currently cover it’s at www.everyblock.com.

Hiawatha Bray raved in the Boston Globe today about newsflashr, a site that ranks newsfeeds transparently. I tried it and left it up in a Firefox tab all day. It’s effectiveness is a direct result of it’s simplicity. Select one of the topics: world, business, elections 08, technology, science, health, showbiz or sports and you get a cloud of “hot news topics” where, according to Gal Arav, the company founder:

- the size of the hot news topics corresponds to the number of news headlines
- the color of the hot news topics corresponds to their freshness

At a glance, you can see what’s going on. Today, under politics, “prostitution ring” was growing larger and staying red. One click and I was reading all about Spitzer (aka Client 9).

I’ve been a fan of Google reader until now, but this wins hands down. The “newsflashr cloud” is a much higher bandwidth way to see what’s happening. For the traditionalists, they have a feeds view, but I can’t see why anyone would use it.
Their site is www.newsflashr.com

Weather’s important but I avoid using weather.com because of all the ads. Simple Weather is the way to go: www.simpleweather.com. A single page, crystal clear, shows the day and week in a glance. A search box gets you right to the forecast want, or you can add a “/zipcode” to the end of the url. Buttons, current conditions and forecast widgets can be made on the site and added to yours. A single ad is the only distraction — let’s hope they keep it that way.

There’s a wap 2.0/html version at: www.simpw.com.

For complex weather info (in the US anyway), I’ll stick with the National Weather Service (www.weather.gov). The Forecast Discussions show how the art mixes with the scienceto create those simple summary pages.

By the end of the day, I’ll have five or six PuTTY windows open, intermixed with other apps. Alt-tabbing between them is a minor hassle, but still annoying. The annoyance level crossed a threshold yesterday, so I went on a web search and found that someone else was driven came up with a solution: PuTTY Connection Manager. It corrals multiple PuTTY windows into a tabbed and paned frame. Arranging the separate instances is a simple drag and drop operation. In addition , it includes an encrytable data base to remember your connections, so that opening one and logging on is a single click operation. It’s downloadable from puttycm.free.fr.

To get encryption, you’ll need to download a separate dll and drop it into your putty connection manager directory. At the first start up, it asks you where PuTTY is, so make sure you’ve got it installed. Verson 0.6 is recommended. My first attempts to open PuTTY instances from the Connection Manager left them stuck in the task bar. There’s a timing tweak under Tools >> Options >> PuTTY. Setting it to 200 ms did the trick. Individual hosts also needed a bit of timing adjustment so that the username and password appeared were presented to the proper prompt. Right click on the connection and select configuration to adjust those.

I hate making icons. And I’m not very good at it — drawing something that looks professional on a 16 x 16 canvas is not a skill that I’m ever going to have. We needed some icons for a new web site recently and after a bit of searching found them — and more, almost 1,000 of them, available for free under Creative Commons.

They are available for download at: www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/

With a little command-line wizardry, helped if you’ve got Cygwin installed, you can rename a pile of files. Whenever I do a batch operation in Windows from the command line, I get nervous. I needed to rename several thousand files that came from a book publisher. They were filled with ampersands, parenthesis, spaces and other characters that can be unfriendly when transferred to a Linux-based web server. This little utility made renaming them easy. It’s now part of my can’t-do-without toolkit. I’ve only begun to exploit it’s full functionality.

It’s available for download at: cerebralsynergy.com/download.php?view.55

For years I’ve suffered through posting web content that was sent to me in MS Word format. A cut-and-paste from Word carried all of the Microsoft-supplied gunk that I’d then painfully edit out by hand. I eventually adopted the trick of cutting from the Word doc, pasting to Notepad, cutting from Notepad and then pasting one more time. It saved the cleanup steps, but was still a pain. I finally stumbled over Pure Text, a simple Windows app that removes text formatting from the clipboard. After I installed it, life got a little easier — and that’s what tools are for.

It’s free, available for download at: www.stevemiller.net/puretext/

After you install it, right click the tray icon, select “options” and check “Automatically run Pure Text each time I log on to windows.”

My collection of simple tools is growing. Most of the posts in this category are about techie tools that do only one or two things, but do them well. They’re specialized and make life at the keyboard easier, sometimes more fun and often less time-consuming. When I find a new one, after adding it to my own collection, I end up sending a few messages to friends and colleagues, but then I forget who I’ve informed and who I haven’t. So, I’ll start posting them here — along with a brief comment about why I like each.