After a hard drive crash a few months ago, I finally decided to invest in some backup insurance. I lost lots of data that I had spent a long time collecting, including a bunch of my old programming projects. When it’s something that you spent hours creating, you can’t just go and download the file again. And with the ever-increasing amount of digital pictures and videos that we’re accumulating as the family grows, the prospect of losing those irreplaceable files was beginning to worry me.

There are dozens if not hundreds of online backup companies out there who will help you take care of your data for you. I went searching for one that would work for me and wouldn’t break the bank. I found some that charged ridiculous amounts for their services. NovaStor charges $8,000 / year for 100 GB of backup space. Then there were other more reasonable options in the $200 / year range. That still seemed like a little more than I wanted to pay.

Luckily, I found Mozy. They offer several levels of service: MozyHome, MozyHome Free, and MozyPro. The free version offers you 2 GB of backup space, no strings attached. It’s a great option if you don’t have a large amount of data to backup. Maybe you want your tax returns, some Word documents, and a few spreadsheets backed up. MozyHome Free will work for you. And it’s free, which is a pretty good deal.

For me and my many files, 2 GB of space wasn’t enough. For $4.95 / month I signed up for Mozy Unlimited Backup. The rate is the same no matter how much data you use, though if you sign up for a year in advance, they knock the cost down a little bit. And there is no upper limit on your data size (I’m up to about 30 GB at this point). The data is encrypted so your information stays private because it’s only accessible by you.

All in all I’m very satisfied with the service. The most painful part is the initial uploading of all that data you’ve accumulated. Once that’s done, though, the updates are incremental and you can schedule them to run overnight so it doesn’t really impact you at all. At least, not until you lose a hard drive. I know I feel much safer knowing that my important files are backed up off-site.

Oh FYI, MozyPro is for businesses and the pricing scheme is higher. It’s not really for home users (unless you’re running Windows Server) though we are using that at work now, thanks to my satisfaction with Mozy at home.

UPDATE: Here are a couple of coupon codes that will get you a 10% discount for a Mozy Unlimited account. For a one- or two-year subscription, use OCTOBER.

For those of you who haven’t heard me talking about it for the last few months, Marty and I have launched our new Fantasy Sports site. It’s called FantasySportsFactory.com.

Currently, we’ve only got the football portion of the site up and running but there’s more to come shortly. In the mean time, here’s what you can do right now:

• Make a Free Helmet Image — Choose your team’s logo from our gallery of more than 8,000 images. Then customize your helmet by adding colors and stripes. You can resize the graphic to your needs and download it — all free of charge.
• Buy a Custom Mini Helmet — After you create your custom fantasy football helmet graphic you can bring your team to life by ordering an actual custom mini helmet.
• Buy a Custom Jersey — Once you have a team logo, you can use our online form to order a custom football jersey for your fantasy team. After you place the order, a member of our design team will email you a graphic mock-up of your jersey for your approval.
• Watch Videos — We go out and find a wide variety of fantasy sports videos and bring them to you — all in one convenient location. Check back regularly for new additions.
• Read Blogs — We bring you FREE fresh content from our expert bloggers.

So there it is. Call yourself a friend and do me a favor and check it out! Let me know what you think.

If there’s one thing about Windows that has vexed me since I began using it, it has to be the inability to easily rearrange the order of buttons in the task bar. I always open my programs in the same order: email, file manager, text editor, browser. In the past I always used to have mIRC open too. These four or five applications were always in the same place on the taskbar and it allowed me to not have to think about where I was moving my mouse when switching programs.

But, as Windows programs tend to do occasionally, one of these applications would crash. Or, more recently, Thunderbird would randomly disappear from my taskbar until I would Alt-Tab to it causing it to reappear… in the rightmost spot on the taskbar. Unacceptable!

Enter the greatest (IMO) utility in the history of free windows apps. It’s called Taskbar Shuffle and is 1000x easier to use than any other utility of the same nature that I have ever seen. You can just drag and drop the windows into the exact order you want. Check out the Taskbar Shuffle homepage.

It is completely free, though not open source. Still, it has made my computing experience much more bearable. Perhaps if you’re not into the whole “everything-has-to-be-how-I-want-it” computing experience like I am, it will have less impact. But then that’s your problem, not mine.

My laptop only has 512 MB of memory and I always have a lot of programs open. So, it’s always paging memory to the hard drive and it drives me crazy with how slow it goes! That damn hard drive light is always flashing at me. I had just assumed that my laptop hard drive wasn’t that fast. Well, I just stumbled across this link on Digg and thought I’d give it a try.

I went through all the steps and sure enough, my hard drive was set to PIO mode. How many months have I been cursing this thing because it’s so freakin’ slow? I followed the steps to change the mode back to Ultra DMA and everything worked. Although my drive only goes up to Ultra DMA 5, not Ultra DMA 6, I have already noticed a performance increase.

As always, make a backup of this branch of the registry before you begin working on it. Then give it a try; it worked for me.

http://neodon.blogspot.com/2006/07/little-known-tweak-to-boost-hard-drive.html

This video is a little old but I couldn’t resist posting it because it’s so freaking hilarious. It’s a clip of John Stewart injecting commentary into a Q&A session that Donald Rumsfeld held with some troops. The troops were really grilling him on why their equipment is so shoddy and he did a pretty miserable job of handling their questions.

Watch the video at YouTube.

Unless you’re aware of how this works, it’s possible that your GMail traffic is being sent over the internet in the clear. More worrying is the prospect that your boss or other company officials might be able to monitor your personal email communications at work. If this is something you’re interested in preventing, the solution is simple. Change your GMail bookmark to be https://mail.google.com/ instead of http://mail.google.com/. By doing this, GMail will continue to use the secure connection for your entire session, rather than just for the login page.

http://ffldlife.blogspot.com/2006/07/surf-secure.html

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, has a very insightful article about the current round of flag burning legislation being discussed in congress. It’s a short read, definitely worth two minutes of your life.

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2006/06/burning_flags.html