After my laptop got a (non fatal) soaking due to a burst pipe, I have been looking at additional measures to backup some of my data¹.

Remembering a post by but she’s a girl, I duly downloaded and installed myself a copy of Dropbox. BSAG mentioned creating symlinks for folders rather than copying so that is what I tried since I didn’t really want to be dragging and moving things too much.

After creating a symlink/ alias with crtl+click, I dragged it to the dropbox folder where it was duly synced. The contents of the aliased folder however, were not. A few repeat & fails later a bit more searching brought me to this post that stated that this only works if you symlink out from the Dropbox directory.

So, as far as I can tell there are no GUI methods for this so it was off to Terminal for me:

Last login: Mon Dec 14 22:50:49 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
Ians-MacBook:~ ian$
Ians-MacBook:~ ian$ cd dropbox
Ians-MacBook:~/dropbox ian$ ln -s ~/WordPress/New\ Blog\ Backups "New Blog Backups"

That creates the symbolic link (ln -s) from the backup folder (~/WordPress/New\ Blog\ Backups) to the Dropbox-synced folder ("New Blog Backups").

Now whenever I backup my site via ftp & drop it into the normal folder, a copy gets pushed up to the remote server as well.

Since I only have one laptop at the moment, between-system syncing is not needed (though I am looking at either the MSI Wind or Lenovo S10 as a ultra-portable²).

Hopefully this system will serve me well & transparently to keep important documents safe from burst pipes.

Posted in MacBook | Tags: backup, OS X | 0 Comments

The Bicycle Film Festival was in Sydney at the weekend so I got to spent one and a half days at the cinema watching films that were all in someway related to cycling. Of the main features, Road to Roubaix was the standout with excellent cinematography and behind the scenes footage, although the (slightly too long¹) 6-Day Races was a close second with tons of interesting stories from a near-dead form of the sport.

There were also a good number of short films, on subjects from Kierin to spare parts races; one of my favourite and most endearing being a video for ‘Bat for lashes’:

There was also much enjoyment had from the two minute ‘King of Skitch’ with Felipe Robayo hitching a ride from a Lotus before destroying a pair of carbon wheels.

If you are fortunate to live in Melbourne, Milan or Portland the film festival is still yet to visit so go get your tickets!

Posted in Cycling, General | Tags: Cycling | 1 Comment

I recently upgraded iPod Touch to the lastest firmware (1.1.4), and the new version of Google maps includes a handy looking ‘locate me’ function where, after polling Skyhook’s database of wireless points, you get a nice target on the map showing where¹ you are.

Unfortunately, since the iPT is wireless only (as opposed to also having EDGE like the iPhone), there is one major flaw in the plan. Namely:

You can only find out where you are when you are connected to the internet.

At least in Sydney, open networks in the CBD are few and far between², and since I know where the open ones are, i don’t really need to use the locate me function there…

The iPT has plenty of space so even a couple of hundred Mb would not really be missed, and runs a version of OS X which is well capable of managing saved data. Two additions would of course be necessary to allow offline operation:

1. Allow caching of a set area - i.e. ‘what I can see on the screen, but at max zoom³
2. Cache the corresponding entries in the wireless node location database

Maps.app already caches mapping⁴ tiles (I scroll around collecting tiles at max zoom if I need to go somewhere new), but every once in a while they disappear so it would not seem to be difficult to add this functionality⁵.

Armed with these cache files, the iPT would become a viable ‘getting unlost’ tool (I don’t think it is accurate enough to call it navigation, but from my tests it gets it right with 200 - 300m). At the moment, the locate me feature is not a whole lot of use.

Posted in Technology | 1 Comment