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Ars Technica published an interesting article yesterday talking about how the internet works, how is in how your computer connected to your ISP is able to connect to machines (websites) anywhere else in the world connected to the internet.

Interesting read, not too technical.

How the ‘Net works: an introduction to peering and transit

A company in my parents’ town was throwing out some old gear - my Mom saved it all from the dumpster. She was going to dismantle it to use in art pieces - until I found out what she had.

Pictured above is a g4 400 mhz powermac which I got working. I had to put a hard drive and some memory in there. I also got a broken dual 500 g4 and a g3 powermac (below), along with some other old parts.

I had to take these pics using my phone, I left the Pentax at work in my bag.

They say that there are two types of people in this world - those who back up their data regularly, and those who’ve not yet lost anything important due to misconfiguration, mistakes, or hardware failure.

This week I was asked to help somebody whose hard drive failed, they had a ton of pictures that were important to them. The drive was dead - no luck. The only way that they can possibly get their data back now would be to send it to a data recovery place.

Backing up is not a hard thing to do, all it really involves is copying important files to a device that’s not always attached to your computer. Here’s what I recommend (for home users):

• Don’t get yourself into a situation where you cannot re-install the operating system on your computer. This means to keep the operating system install discs, any program installation disc, or to know how to download any software to install again (and don’t pirate software, that’s just wrong).
• Buy an external USB drive. The only one that I would buy for myself is a LaCie.
• Once every week (on a schedule), copy documents, pictures, Quicken files, etc to this hard drive.
• Take the hard drive somewhere safe, such as your workplace or a firebox.
• Be comfortable that your protected against fire, drive failure, or accidentally erasing your data.

This is simplified, but the point is if you have any data that is important to you you should never have it stored in one place.

Funny!

Thanks Matt for pointing this video out to me (although not on youtube).

One thing I love about Linux these days is that it is ahead of the times. A couple of years ago a project named Compiz came out, which is a desktop effect/window manager. Then came Beryl, which was a fork of Compiz. They’ve now merged back together, the result being called Compiz Fusion.

I installed this on my home PC tonight, excited about a lot of the new features. One of the things I’d never seen before is a feature called ‘Expo’, which is a very nice desktop switcher (better than the cube). Had to take a screenshot for others to see:

(Click image for larger version on my flickr)

EDIT: Remembered a great YouTube Video on that:

Nice.