External Hard Drive

December 12th, 2007 No Comments »

If you are like me, you probably have a few gigabytes of pictures and a some important documents lying around on your computer. And you probably have a whole bunch of stuff that you know you will never use again, but you just can’t get rid of them.

Back in the day, I used to backup my stuff on a CD-R. But like everyone else, I didn’t do it really often. Then as my data grew larger and larger, I changed the media for a DVD. But now with multi megapixel cameras, it’s not unsual to shoot a gigabyte of photos in a few days.

So today I bought myself an external hard drive enclosure. Since I have a few hard disks laying around, I simply needed the enclosure and not the drive itself. They are really cheap now — I paid mine $21. I plugged a 80GB drive in and it worked right out of the box as expected. The drive is formatted in EXT3, so I guess sometime I’ll have to reformat it in FAT32 if I want to use it on a Windows machine.

The reason why I never did frequent backups was because it was too much trouble to find out which files were updated, so I always ended up backing up everything from scratch. It would just require too much time to do it all over each time. So I wrote a simple rsync script so now I only have to plug the drive in, double-click on my script file, and everything is going to be synchronised with the hard drive. Easy as 1-2-3, quick and I don’t have to do anything!

At the price they sell these drives now, I think it’s worth getting one. I know my photos are worth more than $21!

Garmin StreetPilot c550

December 5th, 2007 Comments Off on Garmin StreetPilot c550

A few days ago, my girlfriend and I planned to go on a small trip to MontrĂ©al. I had only been there a few times, and only had to drive there twice. I’ve never had a chance to play with a GPS, so I thought it would be cool to create myself a need (!) and ask my boss if I could borrow his. The next day, I had his Garmin StreetPilot c550 on my desk.

It’s a little big compared to the new units, but it’s been out for a while now. It has a very nice touch screen display and was perfectly readable in the sun, which impressed me. I just read in the specs that it is supposed to speak street names, but it never did while I used it.

I plugged it in my car on the way home and I found myself laughing all alone in my car just hearing that little machine talking to me and telling me where to turn. It found my address without any problem, but it gave me the directions of the shortest road, not the quickest one. As soon as it noticed I was not taking the suggested road, it recalculated another path based on my new location and direction. It recalculated a new path a few times since I kept driving on my favorite road. I was afraid it would just say “alright, if you don’t want to listen to me, I’ll just shut down”, but fortunately it didn’t.

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