Wayne Schuller’s Blog

Doing some yearly IT maintenance over January. Upgraded my main hard drive from 200 gig to 500 gig (it was getting full). This contains all my photos, 18 years of email (includng gmail backup), steam games, all my documents etc.

I do two backups. One to a second hdd within the desktop (every midnight). The other to an external hdd enclosure I bring in every couple of weeks from home. The backup is of the entire system using ‘rsync’.

The only problem with the USB enclosure is that it is very slow. So I bought an esata pci card and connect via that instead. This increased my speed from about 1MB/sec over USB2 to 57MB/sec over esata. That is an increase of 50 times!

I also noticed that my internal hard drive is much faster than a few years ago. Old notes suggest I was getting about 54MB/sec in 2003, but the newer hard drives are giving me 96MB/sec.

The sustained write speeds are slower than hdparm. The external esata actually rsyncs at about 30-40MB/sec  (not 57MB/sec). But now I can update the backup in minutes, not hours.

All measurements are using hdparm under linux.

Example:

root@homoousion:/home/schuller# hdparm -t /dev/sdc1

/dev/sdc1: Timing buffered disk reads:  290 MB in  3.01 seconds =  96.22 MB/sec

In summary: if you are using external hard drive enclosures, make sure you connect via esata.

What about NAS? They are great in theory, but very expensive compared to a generic esata/usb enclosure.

Have been using opendns for dns content filtering for a few weeks now.

I highly recommend it. All you have to do is put their dns servers on your computer or router. You can get an account to get more fine grained control on what to filter.

Not intended to be foolproof, but does a good initial job of stopping me even accidentally drifting into seedy websites.

The other thing I would recommend to make your web experience less seedy, is to run an adblocker plugin to your web browser.

Gmail just gets better. New improvements to labels will make those using GTD within gmail even more productive.

I use GTD in Gmail labels according to this article on Davidco. It requires no extra plugins.

(I only follow the task labels, I don’t keep project lists in gmail)

A surprising intersection of two of my interests – classical education and technology….

The Benefits of a Classical Education – O’Reilly Radar.

My Mum’s Dell laptop is 3 months old.

When Windows update tried to install service pack 1, it died horribly. Every time we booted there was a “blue screen of death” (I have photos). Safe mode, repair mode, nothing worked. Ruined a day off.

Dell support were hopeless, the only concrete suggestion was to restore the PC to it’s original state. And they kept insulting my Mum for installing such haxor 3rd party software (such as Firefox) and peripherals (such as a USB mouse) that caused running Windows updates to kill it.

I downloaded the latest Ubuntu Linux (9.04). Booted from the live CD. Backed up the documents. Installed Ubuntu. Restored the documents.

The machine now runs much faster than Vista did.

Does anyone actually click on “I am new here” links? I see lots of church web sites copying Mars Hill in this way.

Charlie is right. Except what he doesn’t add is that MS Windows is also your proprietary Fisher-Price activity centre.

Use an open source (free software) operating system if you really want to use your computer. My choice is Ubuntu Linux. Don’t get bullied around by Bill or Steve.

I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.

via Charlie Brooker on why he hates Apple Macintosh computers | Comment is free | The Guardian.

ADSL2+ is sweet. This is how the net ought to be at the end of the first decade of the new millennium.

Except the latency – it makes the web feel a bit ’sticky’. Maybe I’m just getting greedy.

Google have fixed my number 3 gmail bug.

If only they could fix the other two major flaws of gmail:

1. The gmail search sucks (cf normal google web search)

2. Gmail doesn’t understand attachments from Mac Mail.App (the suffixes are missing)

Now if you’re reading a conversation that had unread messages when you opened it and you mark it unread, Gmail will only mark those messages that were unread when you opened the conversation in the first place. It’s a small change, but it’s the little things that can make a UI feel right or wrong, and we hope this makes Gmail a little bit more right.

via Official Gmail Blog: A small (but helpful) change to ‘mark as unread’.

I’m now twittering. I’m using it as a kind of public ministry diary. I’ll probably give up soon.

I love Gmail. It is clearly the best email client bar none.

But Google Calendar is awful. Cumbersome. Slow. The event edit page is slow and ugly. I currently put reminders in it to be emailed to myself – it is a way of keeping my action lists from being drowned.

What Gmail really needs is an incubate feature. “Incubate this email for the next 1/7/n days” (ie: archive it for that time, then put it back in my inbox)

I could use a third party calendar site or some other todo list like service. I’m sure there are some great services out there, I’ve tried a few. But they rarely have streamlined user interfaces. When I am juggling lists and tasks, all these “workflow processing” type of actions need to be very very quick – two or three clicks away. Four clicks and it won’t happen. Ideally it happens from the keyboard with zero mouse interaction.

Thats why I hope it can all be done within gmail one day.

For the past 6 months we have enjoyed a whiteboard in our house.

We highly recommend the prices and service of Mr Whiteboards. We got a 1800×1200mm vitreous board. Basically I wanted to get something as good as you would have in a normal classroom or conference room, except it is in our dining room. The boards you would buy at Officeworks are mostly expensive junk. After a year or so they will be full of ugly streaks from pens that don’t rub out perfectly. Kind of like the cheap whiteboards that churches always buy.

The service of Mr Whiteboards was fantastic – we weren’t happy with the mounting, and they came and installed a replacement board which was mounted much more firmly without wobble. I think we even had Mr Whiteboard himself in our house come to install it.

It is a great help with the homeschooling, but we have also enjoyed using it for family devotions, and even the odd family brainstorm. It’s great for making temporary lists, such as “things to do before going on holiday”. It also functions as a intercessions reminder wall.

Now we’re going to have to ask for one in every house we live in.

As seen on an Amazon review of an audio bible:

The best and most real to life reading of the Bible I’ve ever heard.
It is easy to listen even the most tedious sections of the Bible such as Leviticus for example because of talented readers and sound effects which bring the Word to life without a religious tone.

I’ve used Google image search for many years to look for clipart. Now you can actually search for clip-art only or line-drawings. Just in time for those Christmas newsletters.

This looks like an interesting site for sourcing best prices for books in Australia from international and local retailers.

A few test examples confirms what I already knew, the cheapest place to buy books is the Book Depository. We’ve been using them for over 12 months – there is no cost for freight, the prices are cheap, and they arrive quickly. It was even better when the AU dollar was stronger.

Booko is a site with a very simple goal – to find the cheapest place to buy books in Australia. This site started out as a personal itch and has slowly grown into a very handy site, slowly adding more shops for comparison and more features to make it easier to use.

Compare book prices in Australia with Booko

I’m still dreaming about the 2180 Nikon 50mm f/1.4G AF-S Auto Focus Nikkor Lens that was announced back in September.

Doesn’t seem to be on sale yet in the USA. Can I justify getting one? It is cheaper than the Nikon wide angle lens.

Whilst on holiday we took our Christmas family photo – was surprisingly painless to get all four kids looking in the right direction and it came out very well. Shooting on a DSLR was easy and fun.

Also realised that the reason my 4 gig SD card didn’t work on linux was not to do with “proprietary vs free” but simply that old card readers can’t read the new bigger cards.

The best way to promote any electronic media is to give it away free with no strings attached.

If you require money or even just subscription/password details, people are always going to go for the unconditionally free electronic media every time. Even if your content is 100x better than the unconditionally free stuff.

I’m sure this move by “Grace to You” will result in a long term increase interest Macarthur book sales and interest in his ministry.

At HTD we offer all our sermons for free download under a Creative Commons license. People can repost them, and spread them as much as they like. Our CC license we have chosen precludes commercial reselling or editing, but even this I have no personal problem with.

I’m told that starting next Wednesday, November 5 (the day after the election), Grace to You will announce a new policy, effective immediately, that all of their mp3 downloads of John MacArthur’s sermons will be completely free.

That’s 3500 sermons for free–with no strings (like required registration) attached.

Between Two Worlds: Free John MacArthur!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moof

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Treat

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_27#Births (list of people who share my birthday – Emperor Constantine, John Steinbeck!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adages_named_after_people

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcat

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_run

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Long_Tan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteboard

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_planning

See also:

Interesting Wikipedia Articles

I have really enjoyed immersing myself in Ken Rockwell’s amazing Nikon web site. I know some of the Nikonarati think Ken is lame, but I’ve found his site a great source of info.

And as much as I wanted a D80 or even a D90, I got at D40 kit from JB Hifi for $593 – if you look in the latest Dick Smith catalogue you will see they are only $540 or so. This is great value. The ebay 2nd hand prices were getting upwards of $450.

Having taken over 1000 shots with the camera in over 2 weeks, it is amazing how much better a DSLR is than a compact digital. And given my wife is an old-school Nikon fan, it is good to make her happy. I only hope I can improve my skill at photography now, it is a very enjoyable hobby.

Hey – hold on – the price of the brand-new D40 and 18-55mm kit has dropped to $449.95. Wheeee!

The Nikon D90 is the new best camera for most serious photographers like most of you folks reading this, but costs over double what the D40 does. The D90 is twice as good if you know what you’re doing, but for my mom, the D40 is still the camera to get.

Ken Rockwell’s Updates

I like it!

The D90 is a trophy of a middleweight camera, with the D-movie HD video mode tagging on an extra medal or two. No other DSLR in the world has a video feature to match; which no doubt opens up a whole new world of possibilities.

Nikon D90 and 18-105mm VR kit lens: Review – ThinkCamera News