Category: Web/Tech

Dipity

June 24, 2008 – Click on image for higher resolution version.

Dipity allows you to construct timelines about almost anything. It will also allow you to import images from Flickr, posts from your blog, and items from other online tools so that you can get a “stream” of your online activity. This is a snapshot of mine after I played around with it for a while.

Screwing Up

About a month ago, I moved the external drive I use to back up my machine to Jack’s computer. I was planning on backing up the data on my PC to his PC using an automatic job. Unfortunately, I had not yet gotten around to it when the disk on my PC suffered a catastrophic failure. The good news was that I had another hard-drive suitable for rebuilding the system. The bad news is I lost about a month’s worth of data. None of it was priceless, but I still felt very stupid. The first thing I did when I had a functioning system was order another external USB drive. (Once you have started using these, it is hard to go back to a more cumbersome system.) This drive is now attached to Jack’s PC with a full backup, and my PC is backed up to my external drive.

Have you implemented a backup plan for your PC?

Instapaper

I frequently find a long article while browsing the web for something else that interests me, but I just don’t have the time to read at that moment. Instapaper was designed for this problem. One nice feature is that you don’t even have to sign up to use it: it can keep track of your list of articles based on cookies in your browser. If you plan to use it from more than one browser, it is quick and easy to sign up for an userid. The developer of the site said he was motivated because he wants to encourage people to write longer articles for the web.

Keybr

The Flash application keybr.com just informed me that I type 57 words a minute. Since the words are nonsense words that don’t make grammatical sense, I assume that means I would type faster if the sample was in English.