Recovering deleted files on an iPad

So I come home yesterday to a very, very dejected child. Apparently she somehow deleted all the slides for a school project due when she gets back from vacation. First off – iOS doesn’t have .Trash. Second, she hadn’t synced to iTunes in several months. Third, iCloud backup wasn’t turned on. Not expecting too much, I took her iPad and scoured the Internet to see what I could find that would act as an undelete tool for iOS.

Number of the Week: PCs Make Americans $500 Billion Richer – Real Time Economics – WSJ

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.

How to fix a broken Time Machine

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

WordPress update monitoring

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 That presents a problem, as I never get the nag from WordPress that my version is so out of date, my site has been taken over by Russian Yakuza using it to spy against the Chinese on behalf of Syria or something.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.

How to configure Netatalk on Ubuntu to be TimeMachine Server

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

iPhone, iPad and PCs

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.

January 28th, 1986

“Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you’ll get ten different answers, but there’s one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won’t just take us. It’ll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes…[and] all of this…all of this…was for nothing.

Reasons why the English language is so hard to learn:

The bandage was wound around the wound. The farm was used to produce produce. The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse. We must polish the Polish furniture. He could lead if he would get the lead out. The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert. Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.