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Entry #714
 
 
 
 
 
 
Title: Throbbing biological urges
Date: 2008-09-05 12:05
Security: public
Mood: chipper chipper
And by way of examples of the new camera's performance, I'll start with a shot of one bun reapplying her head following thorough cleaning and ear maintenance, and finish with a brief (fifty seconds) video clip of similar. It is adorable, even allowing for the inevitable swaying of the camera, being held freehand during a stiff wind. (It'd been a rainy day, on and off, hence her somewhat damp appearance)


September 13 2008 sees Acorn's 30th anniversary, and to celebrate, quite a number of the original figures will be attending a 400-strong party in Cherry Hinton. ^_^ (About half the tickets had gone by last weekend)

I think I should take Red out and about at some point.. maybe EuroFurence next year, given that sounds like a fun event, and of a distinctly different nature to FC et al. Possibly the Bunny Jam?

Shiny furries in the future! What's not to love? Beautifully drawn, heavily manga-influenced: Xen.

You can download Big Finish's audio drama UNIT: The Coup, starring the (former, now General =:) Brigadier, for free. Dashed decent. ^_^ (But you need to register first? Ew)

A Best of Craigslist warning regarding fat-free Pringles. If you know what the warning they attach to "Olean" is, you know the low level of humor (as long as you're not the guy in question) involved. ^_^

Poll #1254096 Backups!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All. Participants: 46

Do you perform backups on your main computer?

View Answers
At least daily
11(23.9%)
Weekly
8(17.4%)
Occasionally
26(56.5%)
Never
1(2.2%)

How much of your data do you backup?

View Answers
Entire drive(s)
11(23.9%)
Most of it
16(34.8%)
Only a selection (eg email & music)
18(39.1%)
Bare minimum (eg contact info)
1(2.2%)
None
0(0.0%)

How much space do you use for backups?

View Answers
More than 1TB
2(4.4%)
500GB - 1TB
6(13.3%)
100GB - 499GB
13(28.9%)
10GB - 99GB
16(35.6%)
1GB-9GB
5(11.1%)
100MB - 999MB
0(0.0%)
Less than 100MB
3(6.7%)

What software do you use?

View Answers
Time Machine
4(9.1%)
Dantz Retrospect
0(0.0%)
SuperDuper
1(2.3%)
Homebrewed script
5(11.4%)
Drive manufacturer's (eg Maxtor OneTouch)
1(2.3%)
Toast
1(2.3%)
Nero
0(0.0%)
Other
23(52.3%)

Where does it all go?

View Answers
An external drive
16(34.8%)
A server on the LAN
5(10.9%)
Dedicated SAN device (eg NSLU2, Drobo)
1(2.2%)
WAN server (eg colo)
1(2.2%)
WAN cloud (eg Amazon EBS)
2(4.3%)
Blu-Ray recordable
0(0.0%)
DVD-R
3(6.5%)
CD-R
4(8.7%)
Magnetic tape
0(0.0%)
Paper tape
0(0.0%)

Seemed like a good time to get around to updating the PSP's firmware, and went for the latest homebrewed edition, 4.01M33-2, with added 1.50 goodness.

Plus points about the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus: case design makes it very easy to grip; quiet; backup/encryption/locking software supplied for OS X and Windows (including 64-bit). Bad point: the busy LED is bright white, and flashes when active. Also, the busy LED is bright white, and flashes when active. Now I realise that, technically speaking, that's only one flaw, but I thought it was such a big one it was worth mentioning twice.

Yay! Season 2 of the Sarah Jane Adventures starts airing in the UK on Monday, September 29. ^_^

Squee at the grooming bunny! In 720p HD! (50s, 20MB)
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Title: Untitled
Author: avon_deer
Date: 2008-09-05 11:15 (UTC)
Status:
Throbbing biological urges

We all know what happens when rabbits get those. ;)
:: Thread :: Reply
Title: Untitled
Author: porsupah
Date: 2008-09-05 11:29 (UTC)
Status:
Oh, I wish. =:)
:: Thread :: Parent :: Reply :: Expand
Title: Untitled
Author: rustyfox
Date: 2008-09-05 11:33 (UTC)
Status:
Other backup software: rsync / k3b
:: Thread :: Reply :: Expand
Title: Untitled
Author: porsupah
Date: 2008-09-05 11:46 (UTC)
Status:
Mm, rsync's a fantastically useful tool. I used to use it routinely to backup my email and a few other directories, when I had little spare space - now, it's easy to just let Time Machine keep a rolling backup of the whole shebang. I'll probably add a regular rsync-based script later on, when I move to some kind of basic server setup - either Ocelot or the Slug (Linksys NSLU2 - very handy little device, and cheap, which also means no gigabit ethernet support) plus a few drives similar to the new external Maxtor.

Do you specially select any media, or just whatever's cheap and reasonable?
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Title: Untitled
Author: lovingboth
Date: 2008-09-05 12:29 (UTC)
Status:
If you have an unmetered net connection, I highly recommend doing offsite backups with it. Anyone with Windows (XP or Vista) who wants an extended trial of Carbonite, let me know. Effectively it gives you install and forget offsite backups of anything you want.

I also used it last weekend to get a file I needed on the home PC while I was away - transfer the account to a laptop for a few minutes, get the file from its backup, transfer it back.
:: Thread :: Reply
Title: Untitled
Author: porsupah
Date: 2008-09-05 12:53 (UTC)
Status:
A good point, indeed. I do have somewhere to put the data, thanks to timberwoof - I should be able to just mount an encrypted disc image on the server (for select directories only, of course, at least until South Korean style fiber comes along) and copy over to that on an automated basis.

Reminds me, I need to get around to switching over to Be - I'll be sorry to leave Zen, but the lure of 16Mbps in and 2Mbps out is powerful.

Mmm, remote access of data can be very helpful. A few times, I've set up an ssh tunnel and mounted a share or entered over VNC - quite amusing, controlling a computer remotely like that. ^_^ (But then, I am easily amused)

:: Thread :: Parent :: Reply :: Expand
Title: Untitled
Author: loganberrybunny
Date: 2008-09-05 13:10 (UTC)
Status:
Now I realise that, technically speaking, that's only one flaw, but I thought it was such a big one it was worth mentioning twice.

*sigh* I miss Red Dwarf. Though it did go horribly wrong in the last couple of seasons, so perhaps it was for the best that the film never got made.

Squee at the grooming bunny!

What, we have to be told to do that? *squees* Lovely to see - I just wish it would stop raining long enough for me to go out rabbiteering. *sigh*
:: Thread :: Reply
Title: Untitled
Author: porsupah
Date: 2008-09-05 13:19 (UTC)
Status:
Did you encounter this nugget recently, I wonder? ^_^ Would be nice to hear from official sources, but that does sound quite definitive, nonetheless.

*grin* It's that quick hand-wringing that absolutely gets me. ^_^

Mm, it's been rather wet lately.. yesterday was quite a surprise, really. Mostly raining, on and off, pausing long enough for a nice lunchtime stroll, only to find one bun happily engaged in some reasonably relaxed washing. (Keeping one's fur soft and lustrous takes effort, after all) No such luck today, though - coming down fairly solidly. =:P It'll be quite a nuisance once summer time ends, meaning I won't be out of the office before sunset. Still, I suppose there's always the weekends.

:: Thread :: Parent :: Reply
Title: Untitled
Author: freakylynx
Date: 2008-09-05 13:13 (UTC)
Status:
I really should back up my computer better, I lost a great deal of stuff a few years back when my laptop suddenly died. Instead I tend to use external hard drives as my main storage area. I have a lot of video files that take up a huge amount of space, it would be very expensive to have backups of most of that stuff.
:: Thread :: Reply
Title: Untitled
Author: porsupah
Date: 2008-09-05 13:29 (UTC)
Status:
Mm, that can take up a lot of space, whether DVD rips/transcodes, music video downloads, or raw DV footage from camcorders. And of course, once at that scale, it becomes fiddly to backup onto DVD-R, simply through the number of discs and need for constant manual intervention, compared to just letting two high capacity drives talk to each other.

Still, it's getting better all the time - 1TB externals seem to run around £99-140, or $140-250, depending on the interfaces and suchlike. Something with internal RAID for redundancy would be very nice for the truly irreplaceable media that's tedious to backup, and with striped RAID for speed, for Logic and Final Cut Pro.

:: Thread :: Parent :: Reply
Title: Untitled
Author: darac
Date: 2008-09-05 13:27 (UTC)
Status:
I use a SATA caddy and a 3ware controller (the nForce chipset wasn't happy enough hot-swapping at the time) along with 4x80Gb drives. I then have a script called sarab (can't remember where I found that) which calls dar to do the archiving.

Unfortunately, my main drive's 250Gb (though no-where near full) so I have to be fairly selective about what gets backed up.
:: Thread :: Reply
Title: Untitled
Author: porsupah
Date: 2008-09-05 13:46 (UTC)
Status:
Ook! Sounds like time to throw some money at Mr eBuyer.. this one was £103, though it seems to've bubbled upwards a little since then - I wanted FW400 as well, rather than just USB2 - FW800's wasted on a single drive, but would be the way to go for a striped pair, for Final Cut Pro, Logic, and Reason.

It's nice to just be able to plug the drive in, have it wake up automagically, and let Time Machine update the backup. So perfectly effortless. The way computing should be. ^_^

Presumably you have sarab automatically executing every hour/day? I always found I'd skip the odd few days now and then, when invoking my old script manually - ultimately guaranteed to skip the occasion when you'd most have liked a recent backup..

:: Thread :: Parent :: Reply :: Expand
Title: Untitled
Author: spaceroo
Date: 2008-09-05 15:14 (UTC)
Status:
Yay! Season 2 of the Sarah Jane Adventures starts airing in the UK on Monday, September 29.

It *is* a kids show, you know, right? ;^)

Not that it stops my wife and I from watching it, or anything. We do find it amusing how when a given "scary monster" from the Dr. Who universe makes a guest appearance in almost every case instead of being rendered with bad computer animation (as is usually the case for "modern" Dr. Who) it takes form as a bad rubber costume.

Apparently latex is less nightmare-inducing then polygons. (At this point I find it somewhat hard to believe there's still a substantial production cost advantage to making a costume vs. computer rendering.) ;^)
:: Thread :: Reply
Title: Untitled
Author: porsupah
Date: 2008-09-05 15:29 (UTC)
Status:
Oh, some of the best writing's in children's books - certainly amongst the most imaginative, short of literate visionaries like Vernor Vinge (eg Rainbow's End, which I'm early on in reading). And certainly amongst the most fun - Stellaluna and Animalia, to take but two examples. ^_^ Or, indeed, the Narnia series.

Although, we shouldn't forget just how much of a role good ole latex (or probably, various synthetic versions) still have in DW itself - witness the wonders they recently crafted for Davros' return, or the heavy-looking Cybermen (yay!). Seems bad CG's more Torchwood's domain, along with occasionally even worse scripts, as in the regrettable Cyberwoman episode, or season two's finale. (Mercifully, Chris Chibnall's moved on to other things, vacating his seat as chief writer)

Oh, my.. this mocha is good. Just made one up using some Co-op instant hot chocolate powder (ie including milk powder) with milk rather than water, and using espresso from Rwandan ground coffee. Not especially strong, just exceptionally well balanced and pleasingly rich.

I read something along those lines in someone's LJ review of the new Star Wars CG show - teaches/looks after learning-disabled children, some of whom couldn't take the lack of expressivity in the rendered characters, despite their love of SW. (Mind you, said entry also panned Thunderbirds, which is clearly crazy talk)

:: Thread :: Parent :: Reply :: Expand
Title: Untitled
Author: discopanda
Date: 2008-09-05 15:44 (UTC)
Status:
Yeah, I know, I /should/ do backups. Or at least get a second drive and mirror them.

Usually the closest to a 'backup' I have is files that happen to be in more than one place (desktop, laptop thumbdrive, etc.)

Although I suppose I could probably back up my entire laptop drive onto the desktop, just image the (almost full) 20GB drive and save the image file to the 200GB desktop drive somewhere.
:: Thread :: Reply
Title: Untitled
Author: porsupah
Date: 2008-09-05 17:31 (UTC)
Status:
Yipe! 20GB? But then, as I recall, the laptop isn't your primary system. (For me, at present, it's the only one. Hopefully to be joined by another in the coming months, and quite likely by Ocelot as well, my previous TiBook. Its backlight doesn't work, but it's otherwise still a ferpectly good system for leaving as a home server - given it's a laptop, its running power consumption's quite modest)

'Course, with Flash drive capacities now, you could even get a thumb drive of greater capacity.. one of the best I've seen is basically smaller than the USB A-plug it connects through, hanging off a lanyard, clear encapsulation. Very cute. I've resisted thus far, given the PSP and camera can act as handy drives anyway, and they're each at 8GB now. At £13 for the SD card (and £25 for the Memory Stick =:P), there wasn't much to be saved in going for anything smaller. This way, the PSP can carry all the games I have at the same time, and the camera can hold 1600 9MP images, or about 8 mins of HD video. (Unfortunately, it doesn't perform any nifty compression like H.264 - just plain MJPEG, 25Mbits/s, but that's fair enough)

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Title: Untitled
Author: rabitguy
Date: 2008-09-05 15:53 (UTC)
Status:
It's not exactly state of the art but upon my network gateway machine sits a DDS4 jukebox that holds 6 tapes (120gb uncompressed). I use XFS for my filesystem on all my Linux machines and it has it's own terrific backup utility (xfsdump) which performs on-line and incremental backups. I also have a couple of DLT drives which backup 40gb uncompressed per tape, very extremely but also very loud while DDS4 is virtually silent. Also, extracting a mangled DLT cartridge is tedious, as I had to do once.

I'm a bit nostalgic in my affection for magnetic tape storage, but the more practical approach really seems to be using hard drives as backup medium, since 250gb drives are selling under $50 and 1tb is about $130. Then you buy one or more of these cute drive docking stations:

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(Deleted comment)
Title: Untitled
Author: deffox
Date: 2008-09-05 16:49 (UTC)
Status:
I find that I do backups less frequently since I made the data drive RAID 1. My monthly off-site DVD+R backups have gone from monthly to every three months or more.

The 700GB or so of data on the computer makes doing a full DVD backup is too media and time consuming. So I have different systems and schedules for different types of data. From documents getting frequent backups to photos being left alone after the initial backup. I also prefer the files on the DVDs to be easily readable (as loose files or zip file) rather than in a proprietary archive file.
:: Thread :: Reply
Title: Untitled
Author: porsupah
Date: 2008-09-05 17:51 (UTC)
Status:
Indeed - and the demand for ever greater backup capacities isn't going to vanish any time soon. That's surely hurt optical media in that regard, given even a dual-layer BD-R is only (only!) 50GB - who wants to wait around for a 1TB drive to get spread across twenty discs? (Even aside from the cost of the media, for now)

Similarly, I'll backup larger chunks like the music collection periodically onto a few DVD-Rs, and write out other material as it comes in onto DVD-R, only (for now) keeping a small subset online. Ultimately, though, I'd like to have an array of drives sufficient to keep everything online, with redundancy. At that point, I might forego routine optical writing, keeping that for just essential and easily written material - but even there, unless the volume were into the gigabytes, it's as easy to just leave a couple copies around online. (Hmm. Wonder if Gdrive still exists..)

Plus, of course, an eternal problem with DVD-R backups is simply reliability - some dyes are definitely better than others, and unscrupulous manufacturers are faking the codes of good ones, as Taiyo Yuden can attest. Branding, unsurprisingly, is only partially useful - Verbatim retain a very good reputation, but Memorex seems to appear on anyone's packages, as long as they pay the required fee.

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Title: Untitled
Author: cozycabbage
Date: 2008-09-05 17:03 (UTC)
Status:
I back up every half-year or so.
I seem to work from my flash drives a lot, so I try to keep those backed up on my computer's hard-drive.
I've never had a whole crash before, but I HAVE had to quickly shove a gig of my best stuff onto a card before I got my hard-drive wiped. I think I had lost most of my music, then, but I got everything else.

Considering that I still have a bunch of files and programs from high-school, I'm not doing bad.
:: Thread :: Reply
Title: Untitled
Author: porsupah
Date: 2008-09-06 10:40 (UTC)
Status:
Heh! Sort of an inverted backup - from Flash to HD. I suppose that counts.. ^_^

Eep! How'd that happen?

True, thankfully - drives don't fail completely very often. I think the only time I've had one go completely bad was a year or so ago, when the Travelstar 14GS in Bunny seized up. At that point, it was about seven years old, and Bunny was no longer my primary machine, having been displaced by the somewhat speedier Hyzenthlay, so I didn't really lose anything, though there may've been the odd file I hadn't copied across.

Nastier was the drive corruption I experienced on H's drive not long after purchase, which I put down to repeatedly (inadvertently!) zapping the poor thing - every time I came back into my office at the last gig, I wound up sending a hefty static charge into Hyzenthlay. Eventually, disc errors started making themselves known, so I ran a disc surface scan, which uncovered not the few dozen errors one might expect, but somewhere around 120,000 bad sectors. Cue evacuation of the contents, and a full reformat, so the drive and controller could build up a bad sector table.. after that, it carried on working fine for another year, until I swapped it out for a larger drive, and put it into an external case as a backup device (ironic, yes =:).

Oh, that's good going. ^_^ I wish I still had my early files, but they were all floppy-bound, and that collection got lost in San Diego. =:P (Along with my life-size standup of Gex the Gecko)
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(Deleted comment)
Title: Untitled
Author: porsupah
Date: 2008-09-06 10:50 (UTC)
Status:
Ah, a complete affair! Jolly good show, what?

I suppose I should work out what's most important, and set up some kind of script to push that across to somewhere(s) on the net. All comes down to the old test of "if this drive stopped working today, what data would I really miss/be unable to replace?" - though, I suppose having a complete backup by my bed provides the main reassurance, but given it's so easy to push megs around, it'd be silly not to have a few copies of things like contact information in different places.

What's the LAN running on, btw? Seems gigabit kit's well down into commodity territory now. (Though as with Firewire and USB interfacing, there's often a reason cheap gear is cheap =:)

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Untitled by Anonymous :: Expand
Title: Untitled
Author: tiggerfox
Date: 2008-09-05 18:08 (UTC)
Status:
Yea bunnies!

backups are a necessary evil..

main drive is a 140GB raid 0
this is backed up daily to a 3tb Raid 5
data from that is archived to external drives.

I use ghost to back up my c drive as it allows me to completely duplicate my main windows box. I have two other boxes that are running images from my main box. They are more utilitarian in purpose and are essentially disposable. If something happens to them I just re-image them.

I use windows, pain in the ass, and software raid 5, even bigger pain in the ass.. I'll get a hardware raid 5 controller someday.

1tb drives are so cheap now it's not a big deal to use them like tape. Fill one up and put it on the shelf.
:: Thread :: Reply
Title: Untitled
Author: porsupah
Date: 2008-09-06 11:22 (UTC)
Status:
^_^ I was quite surprised to see any lapine activity that lunchtime, given the grotty weather then.. but to be able to watch all that was a special treat. I've got quite a few photos of it all, of course - it's just a matter of getting around to sorting out a few of the best. (And, indeed, from a week or two back as well, where two buns seemed to know each other, in quite adorable fashion)

Wow. That's a pretty comprehensive approach! RAID 0 - what's the reasoning behind the striping? Music or video work, maybe? I'm looking at something like that in a few months, basically for Logic/Reason/FCP, given the high disk bandwidth requirements a complex project in any of them can impose - a pair of high capacity drives with a RAID 0 controller in a Firewire 800 case would be just the ticket.

I still love thinking back to the big Auspex storage server we had back at Trilobyte, in 1995/1996 - a man-sized rack of drives, coming to a total of about 500GB. ^_^ 'Course, in another decade, we'll be looking back on these single-digit terabyte drives with similar nostalgia.. =:D Would be nice if some new tech came along to replace rapidly spinning discs, though - maybe Flash, if it eventually passes HDs in GB/currency unit, which Samsung seems hell bent on achieving.. !

:: Thread :: Parent :: Reply :: Expand
Title: Untitled
Author: enteirah
Date: 2008-09-05 19:26 (UTC)
Status:
I see bunnies. Everyone needs more bunnies! ^^

As for backups... er... I knew there was something I needed to get onto. =:P
:: Thread :: Reply
Title: Untitled
Author: porsupah
Date: 2008-09-05 21:31 (UTC)
Status:
Even if I can't give a home to a couple buns here (I checked the etymology of the word "bunny" earlier today, and was mildly amused =:), I can still take occasional photos and share them with the world, spreading the good word. ^_^ (I do take quite a few photos, in all, but they're mostly relatively long shots, where they're often just quietly munching, or enjoying the breeze and keeping an eye out. Yesterday was a bit different. ^_^ And, come to that, I've got a nice little set from the other week to collate and crop, of a pair of buns that, at the risk of anthropomorphising, seemed to be a couple. Or maybe just good friends =:)

Now, if only the (surely an eternal misnomer) chestnut "first one's free" held true for 1TB drives.. just something so nifty about holding a ziggurat concave brick with four times the capacity of the drive in Hyzenthlay. Enough for a complete backup and many incrementals, all the audio libraries, and still leaving plenty of space for semi-temporary video storage. But to bring it all online would mean another three drives, then another four for complete RAID 1.. ah well. Eventually. First, though, a shiny new MacBook Pro, hopefully in the next month or two, as and when they're announced. Would be nice to have a very shiny GPU in them, but even the current ones' 512MB Nvidia 8600M would be a bit of a step up from H's 128MB Radeon 9700M.. ^_^;

(Still a wonderful laptop, though, even three years on. Just got to love that display, and it's about as robust as they come, short of military ruggedised kit =:)

:: Thread :: Parent :: Reply
Title: Untitled
Author: palabrajot
Date: 2008-09-06 01:00 (UTC)
Status:
That rabbit up top looks like he's trying to get out of his suit.

Terribly unprofessional, not choosing a headless lounge for it!
:: Thread :: Reply
Title: Untitled
Author: porsupah
Date: 2008-09-06 11:25 (UTC)
Status:
*giggle* It's clear to see she'd have a far easier time putting the head on first, then the paws. ^_^

Still, looks like very good quality fur.

:: Thread :: Parent :: Reply
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