Brian @ Wongside

If you ever open an Acrobat document and the orientation is all wrong, here’s how you fix it:Permanently Rotate Pages in Adobe Acrobat.

If your Firefox Smart Bookmarks Folders ever appear to become corrrupted, or don’t work, try the recommendations on this page in order to Restore the default Smart Bookmarks Folders.

If you use Dropbox and share folders, you need to read this article on Dropbox Etiquette.  Great article, great recommendations.

A fascinating look at non-Windows, non-Linux, non-OS X operating systems from PC World.  I had no idea there were so many alternative Operating Systems out there.  I think the one that interests me the most is SkyOS, mostly because the developer went so far against the grain of tradition.

A fascinating look at the behind-the-scenes story of how Microsoft went public:

http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.heaton/teaching/35000/msft.htm

As any good IT professional will tell you, it’s extremely important to perform backups on a regular basis.  Until this point, I’ve used a combination of network backup to Charlene’s computer and online backup with Mozy.  Until this point.

On Monday, Mozy announced the discontinuation of their $4.95/month unlimited backup plan. It’s being replaced with a new set of backup plans that will make it significantly more expensive for me to do business with them.  I’m talking a price increase of nearly 900%.  This is simply unacceptable to me.

Needless to say, I’m on the hunt for a new backup provider. At this point, I’m seriously considering either Backblaze or CrashPlan.

I don’t know either company personally, but I do know the persona Backblaze portrays on their blog, and I like what I see.  They seem like a very genuine and sincere company. I like the fact that they’re very open about a lot of things, including their infrastructure and a bit about their encryption strategy for keeping data safe. They were even community-oriented enough to ask their users/readers for input on their new offices. I like it!

CrashPlan is a bit more of an enigma to me.  They do have a blog, but it’s nothing special.  They do seem to be getting rave reviews on Twitter, so that’s a good sign.

PC Magazine points out that neither company is very old, though CrashPlan is more established than BackBlaze.

I guess we’ll see what happens. I’ve gotta do some more digging before I make a decision.  I really hope this is the last time I have to re-backup my files.  Backing up 400+GB over the internet isn’t very fun.

Charlene and I don’t have free text messaging, so instead we’ve tried a few of the various free texting apps out there.  The key for us is that they have to be cross-platform because I have an Android phone, and she has an iPhone.  To date, we’ve tried both PingChat! and Kik Messenger.  Of the two, Kik Messenger has been far better and more reliable with one caveat: Charlene was never notified when I had kik’d her.  She had to actually open Kik in order to get my message.

What’s up with that?

But tonight I resolved the issue. And if you’re having the same problem, here’s how you can too.

(Keep in mind that Charlene has the original iPhone 3G with iOS 4.1.  If you’re on a different setup, your mileage may vary.)

1. Open Settings
2. Select Notifications
3. Select Kik
4. Turn on Sounds, Alerts, Badges.

That’s it!

Now, whenever I kik Charlene, she gets a nice audible notification as well as a popup message on her phone, and a little badge on the Kik icon.  Ta Da!

We use Outlook for our e-mail and calendaring at work. If you use it, you might be happy to know that there’s a way to prevent recipients of your e-mail from hitting the “Reply to All” and “Forward” buttons if they’re Outlook users. The best thing is that you’re not running code on their machine so there’s no need to worry about being called a malicious hacker. It just works.

We’re all one step closer to having the kind of control we’d like to have over our e-mails. Of course, the caveat is that this does not work for other mail clients including Gmail. Bummer.

Someone at Microsoft needs to be fired.  Microsoft Outlook 2007 cannot import Excel 2007 files. Now who’s the idiot who decided (or neglected to consider) that when a product is as mature as Outlook, it should be able to import other files from the same release of Office?

Now is this a catastrophic end of the world? No, of course not! Granted saving an Excel 2007 file as a 2003 or earlier file isn’t the end of the world. But it seems like a pretty big oversight to me. And it seems like a lack of foresight on the part of the product manager that this doesn’t work seamlessly.

I’m just grateful that someone decided to let us know that this doesn’t work, and then they provided a work around.

I’m in the market for an online backup solution. Historically, I’ve backed up my stuff to CD and DVD. But since I now have over 100GB of photos, it’s getting a bit unwieldy. The 1TB hard drive likely won’t help the situation either.

I’m looking at a few solutions, namely:

• Backblaze
• Carbonite
• Mozy

Backblaze is probably the newcomer to the group. I first heard about them on my favorite tech news site: Arstechnica. I think the thing I like about them is tye keep it stupid simple, and have a pretty nifty restore function no one else has: if your computer dies, (for a fee) they’ll mail you a DVD or USB hard drive full of your data. The one concern I have about Backblaze is the very fact that they are young. They seem to have an all-star team of leaders, but they’re such a young company, it’s hard to tell what their future is. I did find at least one user who switched from Mozy to Backblaze. Backblaze costs $5/month or $50/year

Carbonite seems pretty similar on the backup side, but doesn’t seem to offer a similar restore process. I think the one thing that concerns me about them is that they lost a bunch of their customers’ data earlier this year. Carbonite costs $54.95/year.

Mozy seems like a decent company. I think the one thing they have going for them is that they’re a part of storage and infrastucture giant EMC. That means they’ve got some serious backing, and likely won’t disappear anytime soon. I also like the fact that between Mozy and Carbonite, Walt Mossberg prefers Mozy.  The downside is that someone else found that it was a pain to restore from them. The fact that they give 2GB of free space is nice, but I’ve got almost 200GB I’ll need to backup, so that’s really immaterial to me. Mozy costs $4.95/month or $54.45/year.

There are a few downsides to doing online backup, and they certainly deserve special consideration:

1. Uploading takes forever. I’ve got a 6mbps DSL line, and Speakeasy says my upload is only 650kbps, meaning I could upload about 6GB per day. (Speedtest.net generally confirms this.) If I have to upload 200GB of data, that’s 33 days straight.
2. These services are subject to failure. I don’t worry about security as all of these solutions do proper encryption. But as noted above, Carbonite lost the data of 7,500 customers. I don’t think Backblaze was even in existence yet, but their data center of choice had a power outage in 2007. I’ve yet to hear of any problems at Mozy. Fortunately, neither of these issues is ultimately catastrophic to the data (the issue of credibility is entirely different). Since these are backup services, Carbonite customers should have been able to do a re-upload or “re-backup” and have their information be safe once again. Assuming they were in existence, Backblaze customers merely would have needed to wait for the servers to come back up in order to continue a backup or restore–no data was lost.
3. What happens if the companies disappear? Upline was a backup service provided by tech giant Hewlett-Packard. It shut its doors earlier this year, proving that even Mozy–as a part of EMC–might not be immune to being shutdown by it’s corporate backers.  Backblaze might not have to worry about the corporate bueracracy, yet. But what if they aren’t profitable, or run out of funding before hitting the black? They could very well shut their doors as well. And if they get bought by another company, their policies might change to the detriment of consumers, or their new overlords might shut them down for whatever reason.

All in all, I think an online backup service will serve as a secondary or tertiary backup solution around here. I’ll likely keep backing up to DVDs (or Blu Ray when I can get my hands on a burner) and to Charlene’s computer, and have an online, continuous backup solution in the cloud.

I’ll keep you posted as I find more, and when I make my decision.