I use CrashPlan to back up my computer.  They’ve been my backup solution of choice for about the past 2 years.  I love them!  They’re great, relatively inexpensive, and super easy to use.

There’s just one recent problem: my uploads to their service are deathly slow, like 150Kbps slow! I used to easily get 2Mbps, over 14 times faster.  Now, I’m lucky if I can even get 200Kbps.

So what about the 24 GB I have to upload?  CrashPlan says it will take 15 days. Aye Ya!

I did an internet speedtest, and was able to consistently get 20Mbps down, and 4Mbps up.  I ran the tests again while uploading to CrashPlan, and the results were the same.

Not happy with the performance, I logged a ticket with their support. Here’s what I got back:

Hello Brian,

Thanks for contacting CrashPlan Support.

We are aware of recent issues that some of our CrashPlan+ users are seeing with lowered upload performance. We are looking into the scope of this issue, and pursuing all available avenues to improve performance for affected users. Unfortunately, I do not have more details to provide at this time. Support is receiving updates, and will inform you as soon as we know more and can provide further information.

Regards,
~Jon

Well, at least I know it’s not just me. I’ll update if I hear anything further.

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.

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.

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.