The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a Computer Geek and his Wife…

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Entries Tagged as 'Tech'

Ammo and… backups?

November 26th, 2008 · 6 Comments · General

OK, just a few more words about my data backups.
Last week I ordered a few Army Surplus, 30 Caliber Ammo Cans, they arrived today.  What the heck are these for, you ask?

Well I thought they could make a great way to transport and store the hard drives I’m going to be rotating off-site.  So tonight I [...]

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iPhone

November 24th, 2008 · 6 Comments · General

My 2.5 year-long haitus from being connected on-the-go is over.  I finally took the plunge and switched from Sprint to AT&T and bought an iPhone (8GB).  Sprint has provided great service over the past 5+ years, but their phone selection has been lacking.  Sorry, Sprint, the HTC Touch Pro and/or Diamond just don’t compare.

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Backups and my first foray into PowerShell

November 18th, 2008 · 4 Comments · General

First, some background.
Last week I received the final pieces of my backup strategy, a pair of 500 GB hard drives that I will be rotating periodically to some undisclosed location that isn’t my house.  Right now, my fileserver makes backups and sticks them on a mirrored RAID array.  These drives are simply to hold extra [...]

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Heights and XM Radio

November 8th, 2008 · Comments Off · General

A couple of months ago I purchased a Terk XM6 XM Radio Antenna because the reception I have been getting in the office has been poor and unpredictable.   Due to some procrastination, the new antenna has been sitting in its packaging waiting to be installed ever since.
Until today.  This morning I decided it was time [...]

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Favorite Software?

October 22nd, 2008 · 3 Comments · General

Leaving development tools aside (ahem, Visual Studio, ahem), what are your favorite software titles?  You know, the ones you use daily, are truly useful, you couldn’t live without, and are just plain fun.  Here are mine, in no particular order:

Microsoft OneNote 2007 – This is such a little known piece of software, but one that [...]

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Lightroom 2.1

October 22nd, 2008 · 3 Comments · General

Adobe releaed the much awaited 2.1 update to Lightroom this evening.  I’ve been using version 2 for a couple months now, and found it to be head and shoulders above version 1.x.  There were definitely performance problems, but once I made a few performance tweaks, it was usable and worth the headache for the new [...]

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Photo Hosting

September 16th, 2008 · 1 Comment · General

I have hosted my own photo gallery for around 7 years now and have been perfectly happy with my arrangement.  I first started with a homegrown php photo album and used that for a year or two before moving to Gallery, which I have used since.  In addition to using Gallery to display and share [...]

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Internet Explorer 8 Beta

September 16th, 2008 · 2 Comments · General

Late this afternoon I decided to download and install the beta of IE8.  Total usage time since I’ve installed it has been maybe 5-10 minutes, and I’m going to uninstall it.
Why?  I downloaded a zip file, but when it completed it was deemed corrupt.  Tried 2 more times with the same result.  Fired up FireFox [...]

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