What I Learnt Today

There are two kinds of computer users – those who have lost data in a crash, and those who are about to.

It appears that a blackout in town this morning corrupted the database of our software program – which caused a problem when the server was restarted.

Bloody rain.

Some measures you can take may prevent this from happening to you.

These include

– having an Uninterruptable Power Supply (or backup battery), that can ‘order’ your server to shut down in an orderly fashion if the mains power is interrupted.

– a RAID system (where data is copied to two drives at the same time) is a godsend when you have a hard drive crash.

But neither of these prevented our database from becoming corrupted.

When you have a ‘mission dependent’ failure at work, as a cold sweat breaks out on your forehead, you may find yourself willing to pay anything for a timely backup, 

And now that all your photos, movies and music live on your hard drive, you need a reliable plan at home also.

Remember that taking a backup is half the work. You need to regularly perform a check restore of a backup to make sure that is working, and complete!!!!!!!

In the spirit of New Year’s resolutions, many sites have recently posted good advice about backing up your data.

What I Learnt On 11th January in other years

11th January 2016 Look up here I’m in heaven – Vale David Bowie

Our family motto is ‘If it Ain’t Broke, it Ain’t Ours’.
It has also been very wet up here in the Northern Rivers this last month.

These two facts are bad news for mobile phones – we have acquired some expertise in drying them out.

Water is the natural enemy of electronic devices, and will generally void any warranty. (The manufactures put moisture detectors in the devices – they change colour when they get wet. This is the first thing a repairman will check, and will go no further if it shows a colour change).

Alex’s phone spent yesterday enjoying the summer rain. (Pant’s pockets in the washing machine have also been a good source for our experiments)

If your phone or ipod gets wet, Will the ‘electronic genius’ suggests you follow the same steps he does.

1. Turn it off immediately. If it is off, do not turn it on to see if it works.Sometimes the phone will work when it first gets wet, but the moisture insidiously damages the insides over the next few days. 
2. Open the case, remove the battery, if you can (which you can’t on an iPod or iPhone) 
3. Blow the air from a hot hair dryer over the phone, battery and cover till there are no signs of moisture, and then some extra. This takes 10-15 minutes. 
4. Make a ‘phone paella’. Put some dry, uncooked rice in a bowl and bury your phone and battery under the rice. (Rice is hygroscopic – which if I remember my chemistry correctly means it absorbs moisture from the surroundings)  
5. Leave in the rice overnight, and check it all in the morning. 

Hopefully you won’t need this advice. Some phones will be so wet that they are unsalvageable. Others will take quite a bit of water without damage. There will be some ‘in-between’ occasions when this treatment may make a difference.

Have you any experience of wet phones? Let us know in the comments.

What I Learnt On 10th January in other years

10th January 2016 Cricket bats in the wild

Today I finally defeated the God King – freeing mankind from our struggle against repression, and securing the Infinity Blade for the forces of good!

What I Learnt On 9th January in other years

9th January 2016 Meraesthesia Aphonia – that phantom phone in pocket feeling

9th January 2012 TUAW Best of 2011 Awards

The shiny, brand new Mac App store was officially ‘opened’ today.

The new App store does for Macintosh applications what the iTunes App Store does for iPhone and iPad apps. Well – that’s the hope.

For Mac users, it becomes much easier to find ‘niche’ applications, including games.

It gives developers the chance to have their applications displayed before a much wider audience – at the cost of 30% of revenue to Apple.

To access the Mac App store, you will need to upgrade your Mac operating system to 10.6.6.
This is a free upgrade to Snow Leopard users.
Open the ‘Software Update’ app, or select Apple Menu>Software Update.
After the upgrade, the App Store Icon will be on the left side of your Dock (next to Finder), as well as in the Apple Menu.

The first apps on offer were new versions of the Apple iWork suite – Pages, Keynote and Numbers.
These applications can replace Word, Powerpoint, and Excel respectively.
I have used them since the first iWork version and strongly recommend them all. For the first time, they are now available separately.

I’ve downloaded the free utility ‘Alfred’ which is a replacement for the venerable Quicksilver.
First testing suggests it is excellent. I’ll comment more in a subsequent post.

Have you downloaded anything from the new App Store?

What I Learnt On 7th January in other years

7th January 2016 The Hold – Soothe any random crying baby