Things that go Wump in the Night..

Yes, you read that correctly. The HP series of All-in-One printers ( specifically the 6110 ) needs ink cartridges to be installed and working in order to scan or send a fax.

Now why would that be? For my convenience perhaps? I don’t think so.. Much more likely it’s part of HP ( and other printer manufacturers ) strategy to ensure that the inkjet printer you buy today doesn’t last as long as that 10 year old HP LaserJet that you still have that works flawlessly to this day.

Yes folks, if HP could build a 2 year and one day self destruct mechanism into your printer, they would - and some claim that such a device is actually built into their cartridges!

For me, I had the choice today of paying about $50 for ink in the HOPE that my mysterious “Remove and Check Cartridges” error would be solved, or spending $99.95 on a new All-in-One!

The 5610 is a cheaper version of it’s older brother, but hey, I only really use it as a glorified fax and for the occasional color photo, so who cares. The new machine including ( no doubt almost empty ) starter ink cartridges now sits taking up slightly less room than the 6110 did. What a waste though.. a machine more than capable of scanning and faxing is going to the scrap heap.

$99.95 at OfficeDepot. You can’t beat that - but no doubt in 2 years and a day, I’ll be smashing it with a hammer too.

Once in a while I panic about backups. As a web developer most of my creative is hosted somewhere, but what about all those pictures? Without an OFF SITE backup I risk loosing pretty much every photo of my kid that I have!

Back when I was a windows user, I solved the problem with a Carbonite account. Carbonite.com allows you unlimited online backup for under $50 / year. I’m sure there are other companies out there offering various services ( including my old buddy Joe at Tilana.com ) but NOBODY is doing a good job of marketing such a service to the home Linux user.

There are options of course. Amazon S3 storage is good one, although when talking about around 100gig between music and pictures, that can get pricey.

In the end, I realized that I could keep things VERY simple.

Having moved on to PCs with SATA drives, I have a surprising number of 250gig IDE drives kicking around. That coupled with the fact that I actually GO “off site” nearly every day to my office at The Fuel Team means that keeping it simple just got simpler.

The plan? To just do a nightly sync to external drives at my home and work machine, then switch them back and forth weekly. Voila! Worst case scenario, a weeks worth of stuff if the house burns down! Me likey. Not only does it give me good backup but it allows me to listen to my monster music collection at work.

Of course, it’s got to be a tidy solution as well as a simple one, so UPS have just delivered my new drive enclosures. I had two already, but one of them is a brick of a thing ( Coolmax NAS ), so I decided to buy two matching ones - then I don’t have to switch power supplies back and forth.

It’s running now - connected by firewire.

rsync is one killer command line file sync utility, and that’s what I’m using over here. I have a cron job as follows:

0 2 * * * /usr/bin/rsync -rtlzv --progress -l --exclude=.beagle/* --exclude=.local/share/Trash/* --exclude=.thumbnails/* /home/MYLOGIN/ /media/disk/MACHINENAME/

The easiest way to create a cronjob, and have it run as root is to type:

sudo cronttab -e

in a terminal, and add a line like you see above.

This one backs up everything in my home directory apart from useless stuff every night at 2am.

I’ve decided to stop shotgun blogging and consolidate all topics right here no it’s own domain.

The goal is two fold;

• Blog often in a place that can be perrmanent
• Be my own server admin on a site that isn’t critical

To that end, this blog comes to life on slicehost.com. I’d go into all the server setup, but that would just help you hack it - so I won’t. The blog itself is TYPO, a Ruby on Rails application.

If you use it, WATCH OUT, I’ve already found a bug. The screen to manage which plugins appear on the right is a bit out of control. My advice is to PUBLISH after every incremental change you made through drag and drop. If not, you might end up with a nasty NIL issue and the inability to change the sidebar further.