thepedersons.net

For those of you already on facebook, you’ll probably agree with me.  It is addicting!  I got sucked in by a friend at work.  We were chatting one day about social networking sites and he sent me an invite to facebook.  I created an account out of curiosity, and within 10 min, I was hooked.  I got Deb interested, and she had the same experience.

It is a pretty remarkable site, however.  Within minutes, I was reconnecting with old friends from college as well as relatives that I’ve not seen in years.

I can see why it was such a sensation when it started up.

So, moving to this new server has taught us one thing… TimeMachine, the software that comes with OS X, is the way backup should work!

Deb has a lot of email folders that we had to move around to make the server switch. She ran into a minor problem (lost 2000+ emails) and so we had to recover from a backup. Thankfully, I have a 120gb drive (I know… not much space) hanging off of our new iMac and TimeMachine has been automatically backing up to it every hour for the past few months. Today was the first time we were glad we have it!

Deb fired up TimeMachine, clicked on 12:20pm today and recovered the entire folder of emails. We imported the emails and all is good!

Kudos to Apple. Their stuff “just works”.

We’re paying a monthly fee for hosting this web site (and 1 other).  The hosting provider (site5) has been running into a lot of reliability problems lately.  Most of the issues are with email.  For example, right now, nobody with a thepedersons.net email address can connect to the server because it is having problems.  This is about the 5th problem we’ve had in the past month.  Up until then, things have been pretty stable, except for some emails being blocked by spam blockers.

Given all the problems, we’re looking at migrating our site(s) to another hosting provider.  I’ve found one, but the process of moving stuff is a little daunting.  There are 5 email accounts (with LOTS of data), 2 web sites (one with 2 web applications) which also have a lot of data on them.  It is going to be a process, but I think it is going to be worth it in the long run.

A while back, I posted about a new way to handle logging into websites. That new method is called OpenID and is starting to gain traction on the internet. Yahoo, Microsoft and Google have recently started OpenID initiatives. That is great news! The next version of Firefox is also going to include OpenID integration, which will make it even easier to manage logins.

Hopefully we’ll start seeing more web sites which take OpenID for logging in. The more that do, the fewer userid/password combinations we’ll have to remember.

There is a chance that you already have an OpenID account!  Check out this site for more information on how to get an OpenID login.

We’ve had the same internet and phone setup for almost as long as we’ve owned the house.  Inn 1998, I ordered DSL and phone service through TDS Metrocom.  At the time, it was pretty darn good.  We’ve had a few issues along the way, mostly because TDS has to lease the phone lines from AT&T (SBC).  When things broke, TDS would blame AT&T, AT&T would blame TDS and so on.  That is all going to end soon!

We’re upgrading our internet connection to wireless (WIMAX) which TDS just announced that they are rolling out in Madison.  The big plus is, our phone service will be wireless too, which means no more battles between AT&T and TDS if something goes wrong.   Another big improvement will be the internet speed.  We’re going to have a 2mb connection now, which is a big improvement over our 640kb connection we have now.  What does that mean?  Now when we are on video iChat sessions with family members, our picture won’t be so grainy.

Ahhh…. the geek in me is SO pleased.

I just found out that the service that provides the TV listings for our PVR is going to be discontinued!  That was the only free source of US TV listings.  There are a LOT of people who depend on that service and are trying to figure out a solution.  I hope they do soon.  We have until Sept 1st to find a solution.

As part of the effort to reduce our energy use, I’ve been trying to find a way to reduce the number of computers we have running at any given time.  We currently have 4 computers, 3 of which are always on:

• K9 - K9 is the work horse of the house… or was.  He was where thepedersons.net used to be housed, until I got tired of trying to manage it
• Marvin - Marvin is our personal pc (iMac) which I spend most of my time on
• Taz - Taz is our other personal pc (iBook) which Deb spends most of her time on
• Gossamer - Gossamer is our PVR server which records TV for us

The other day I was digging around trying to find out how to either eliminate one of those machines or at least replace it with something that won’t consume a bunch of power.  I encountered this project which turns one of these into a super small, very low power consumption, server.  It is the perfect replacement for K9, which is a big Dell box that isn’t really doing anything.

This is my latest geek fix.  For my fellow geeks out there (you know who you are) this is a GREAT little project that will take a few days of tinkering to get working, but in the end, you’ll slow down that electric meter.