Replies

GBridge does look interesting — i’m definitely going to take a look at it. thanks for mentioning it here!

for free offsite backup i’ve been using CrashPlan — functions pretty much like Mozy, but you can backup to any internet-connected computer. so if you’ve got a friend who is willing to host an external drive for you and has the bandwidth to spare, you can just back up to their location. sounds like it has the same functionality as GBridge.

All I have to do is email a link and whomever is in.

BUT whomever must have GBridge installed, right? if so, that makes it functionally equivalent to the My Cloud drive.

after reading this article i bought a My Cloud drive, thinking it would make a good alternative to Dropbox — but i was sorely disappointed. one of the things i really like about Dropbox is that you can easily share files by simply creating a link and sending that link to someone, who can then just click on the link and immediately see the files within their browser. it’s an incredibly easy way to share files with other users, particularly people who are not all that computer literate. but you can’t do that with My Cloud. in order to share files, the user must install a windows application, which then allows them windows explorer type access to what you have on your My Cloud drive. plus, you also have to set them up with a user ID and password. and even after all that, they still can’t stream video apps like you can with Dropbox. so it’s really not even in the same ballpark as Dropbox when it comes to file sharing.

now to be fair, i should note that they do have smart phone apps which actually work quite well. you still have to sign in, but from there you can easily access the files, and the app also supports streaming. so sharing files via smartphone does match up with the functionality of Dropbox — but alas, i’m an old f*rt, and i and most of my friends are still pretty much desktop-centric.

also, there’s the obvious problem that when you use My Cloud for backup, what you get is really not an off-site backup, which is the whole idea behind backing up to the cloud. so there’s no real advantage there either.

bottom line, functionally this drive really isn’t all that different than your standard NAS drive, as @movershakr points out. in fact, you can pretty much accomplish most of what it does with just an external USB drive for that matter — and much simpler and cheaper.

saw where Cory Doctorow uses NewsBlur, so decided to give that a try — and so far, i think i like it best of all. very clean, simple interface that works exactly as you would expect. plus, it seems to have a bunch of other “social media” features that you can use if you like — but if you don’t, they stay out of the way and leave you with just a good old simple RSS reader. well designed.

also, even if you aren’t interested in NewsBlur, this account of what the developer went through in the first days after the Google announcement and NewsBlur was swamped with new users is interesting.

forgot to mention, that a downside to both Old Reader and igHome is that neither have a mobile app. although igHome does have a fairly nice mobile interface via the browser.

lee

Is there an alternative out there which does what Google Reader does, the way it does it?

take a look at The Old Reader. like you, i have no need for all the eye candy, or some application trying to figure out what i’m interested in and what i’m not. The Old Reader comes closer to duplicating the Google Reader interface than anything else i’ve found. be forewarned though, that apparently a lot of other people are moving to The Old Reader, and so it’s running pretty slow these days (to which they readily admit and claim they are working to improve things). so it will take a while to import your current list of feeds (although you can build a new list immediately if you prefer). and i’ve found that sometimes it is slow in updating items. but all in all, i’m quite happy with it.

another possible alternative is igHome. Google is also abandoning their personalized Home Page, so i switched to igHome a while back and have been pleased with it as an alternative. you can add RSS feeds as widgets, so what i’ve done is created a separate page for all my RSS feeds, and that’s worked out quite nicely — and they don’t seem to be having the performance issues that Old Reader is having. what i’m going to end up using at this point is up in the air — but both of these alternatives make nice replacements for Google Reader, particularly if all you are interested in is content.

lee

Blue Host does look interesting — they offer a spam filter called Postini for an extra $1/mo/mailbox, and it turns out Postini is owned by The Google, and after digging around some, it looks like Postini is in fact what GMail uses — so it would seem you can get GMail quality spam filtering for an additional $1 per month. if that’s the case, i’m thinking that’s a pretty decent solution.

Another vote for Spam Assassin, but you need to let it learn and preferably use the white list and black list features. Another server side becoming popular is Spam Experts. Seems to work well, has a pretty interface but not as intuitive as SpamAss to understand.

in my experience, black lists are worthless. for them to work, the spammer must always use roughly the same from address. all the “bad spammers” know this, and so continually change that info. yes, there are a lot of “legitimate spammers” (aka direct marketers) who always use the same from address, but those folks will always honor an opt-out request — so there’s really no need to black list them. if they don’t honor an opt-out, they will know all the tricks to getting around black lists.

what you need is an email CLIENT with white/black/gray/unknown list options
(although just white/black works good enough that gray option is a big plus)
it quickly learns what is good mail and what is okay mail you may want to read later but not go straight to your end box. a little goes to an unknown box until you mark it white/gray/black.
after a few days of training there is very little spam to actually make a decision about and often that is actually good mail from someone new you do want to get email from.

i know there are a lot of good client-side solutions, but the problem there is that the spam still hits your smart phone. in fact, if it were not for the phone problems, i could probably get most of my clients to live with that type of solution. but alas, it’s when the spam hits the phone where it becomes a MAJOR PROBLEM — and only way to avoid that is with server-side filtering (well, i guess a good client-side phone app would also work, but i’m not aware of any of those).

SpamAssassin has been around a long time but it doesnt mean it is no good. I suggest you take the time to learn it and configure it to your own needs. You wont be disappointed, then. Having said that, if you use GoDaddy or one of their affiliates or resellers, it is more than possible that good email will be filtered out by them before it even gets to your anti spam software so if you use SpamAssassin through them, it may all be pointless at that point.

can you expand on exactly how you have configured SpamAssassin to make it that accurate? with my current host, the configuration options i have are rather limited. i can alter the “required score”, but in my experience that creates more problems than it solves (i use the default value of 5). now i can also modify the scoring system by assigning specific values to specific tests, and i’ve looked at that some — but from the analysis i’ve done, that might be able to catch an additional 10-15% of the spam, which is not near enough to make SA worthwhile. and of course any solution that requires continual monitoring to adjust the rules is pretty much a non-solution as far as i’m concerned. i’m looking for a system that is a one-time setup with no ongoing monitoring (be it rules or white lists or black lists) that is 95%+ effective. i just don’t see how SA meets those criteria.

thanks for the iPage link — i’ve never heard of them, but that doesn’t mean anything. did a quick search on their “premium spam filter” and came up empty, but i’m not sure that means anything either. did notice they are “green certified” and use 100% wind powered, and that DOES mean something to this dirty old hippie! might be worth a couple of months fees to check them out.

lee

Third-party app conflicts with System Restore

Fred’s having a hard time with Windows System Restore — he swung at and missed this one a couple of months ago, and he’s missed it again. the question was about System Restore, but his answer talks about Windows Backup and Restore — two totally different animals. the question doesn’t tell us what version of Windows is being used, but i’m guessing it’s Windows 7 — in which case the answer is that Windows 7 changed the behavior of System Restore. in earlier versions, Windows did indeed create a restore point every 24 hours. but in Windows 7, a scheduled restore point is only created if no other restore points have been created in the last seven days. for more info, see:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa378910%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

my system restore task also seems to work like Erik and Jon describe, and not as Fred writes. Fred’s article seems a bit confused — he talks about “task manager” but i think he’s actually referring to “task scheduler”. and the Microsoft help page he links to is for Vista, not Windows 7.

i did some digging around the internets and came up with what i think is the answer at:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/wn/w7itprogeneral/thread/03bd9fe3-0a87-470f-b0d2-79699009dcf4

apparently in Vista and XP you indeed do get a restore point every 24 hours, but in Windows 7 you get a restore point only “if no other restore points have been created in the last 7 days”. which is why you see a “successful” system restore task run every night. it runs, sees a restore point within the last 7 days, and immediately exits. there’s a VB script posted there that you can use if you want to always get a new restore point created, regardless of what points already exist.

lee

one of the best features of Picasa that i rarely see mentioned is that it leaves your original files untouched, so that if you ever want to see what the picture looked like exactly as you took it, you can just open the file with a different viewer and voila, there it is. all the editing, cropping, re-touching, etc. info is kept in a .INI file and it’s just applied as you view the picture in Picasa. every other photo editor that i’ve seen applies your changes directly to the file you are editing — the only way to save the original as well as the edited photo is to keep two copies, which can be a messy procedure. Picasa does that automatically for you transparently and with no hassles.