Chris Farris

The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta did an analysis of how much annual benefit the average american get from their PC. $1700. $1,700: The annual benefit the average American derives from personal computers Despite all the wrenching change the computer age has brought, humanity is probably better off than it would have been if the PC had never been invented. Now, economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta have taken a stab at figuring out exactly how much better off we are.

Kid’s Mac’s TimeMachine backups were broken. “Time Machine completed a verification of your backups. To improve reliability, Time Machine must create a new backup for you.” Rather than starting from scratch, I found this: Fix Time Machine Sparsebundle NAS Based Backup Errors

If you’re reading this, you know I rarely visit my blogs. That presents a problem, as I never get the nag from WordPress that my version is so out of date, my site has been taken over by Russian Yakuza using it to spy against the Chinese on behalf of Syria or something. Below is a simple little script that can be thrown in cron and will bug you when WordPress releases a new version and you’ve not updated.

Seems Pretty Straight Forward: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install netatalk sudo apt-get install avahi-daemon Add: /huge/TimeMachine "TimeMachine" options:tm to /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default Create /etc/avahi/services/afpd.service with contents: <service-group><br /> <name replace-wildcards=”yes”>%h</name><br /> <service><br /> <type>_afpovertcp._tcp</type><br /> <port>548</port><br /> </service><br /> <service><br /> <type>_device-info._tcp</type><br /> <port>0</port><br /> <txt-record>model=Xserve</txt-record><br /> </service><br /> </service-group> Restart everything: sudo service netatalk restart && sudo service avahi-daemon restart

Encrypt files for safety | Utilities | Macworld. Useful for your macbook pro.

So Read-it-later is a webs service that allows you to book mark articles to read later. The did an interesting analysis of what people read when and on what devices. Their results compare pretty much to my usage profile for the iPhone and iPad. The iPad is a couch consumption device. I use it for reading email, quick email replies, reading facebook, surfing the web, and as an e-reader. I don’t find it good for creating content out side of the most basic snark-attacks on someone’s wall.

Useful guide to Mac troubleshooting. I wasn’t sure what the difference between the gray apple screen and the grey apple screen with the spinning gear. Mac 101: Whats happening when your Mac is starting up?.

I’m going to add this site to my blogroll. The author is one of VMWare’s R&D honchos. Interesting tid-bit on how to DOS Google if you’re so inclined. Some of the search queries can cause huge IO. One example Jeff gave is “circle of life” as one phase enclosed in double quotation marks. It could incur 30GB I/O before. As I just searched on Google, the phrase is now a song name.

I’ll admit, we use Netflix streaming and Netflix a lot. I just don’t see the NetFlix catalog as being big enough to encompass 20% of consumer bandwidth. Netflix streaming consumes 20pct of download throughput during weekday primetime hours via How Google TV Could Hand Netflix The Entire Streaming Universe | paidContent.

I find it fascinating what kind of electronic fingerprints are left by modern technology. From password guessing based on the intervals between packet transmission to detecting minute gaps in an analog conversation to determine a call originated in Nigeria and not New York. Voice-routing call fingerprint system fights ‘vishing’ • The Register.