I’m trying out a new App called ‘Day One’ which has Mac and iPhone support.

The key feature I love is that it uses Dropbox to sync.  So you’re always up to date and have online copies of your memories.  I had a quick poke in the database and it looks like the database it keeps are simple flat file XML.

<dict> <key>Creation Date</key>
<date>2011-03-11T00:48:07Z</date> <key>Entry Text</key>
<string>The 11th of March and I’m going to attempt to try and journal….</string>

The plainer the text the better the application in my opinion.  Especially when it comes to things like Journals and information you want to keep longer then a year.

I hope the author will include picture support in future.

Now I have decided it’s purpose, and that’s to be a repository of knowledge for all my SysAdmin related junk.  I’m going to update it as frequently as I find new and interesting tidbits of info to share with the world.

So no more personal info, no more soppy posts, just hardcore sysadmin junk.

Now here is a photo of my dog looking very, very interested in what’s happening above.

There are a couple a ways that are quite simple, like plugging a hose on the tap (with no pump); turning on the flow and then hold the hose up until the water stops flowing.

Or if it’s a metal tank you can sometimes feel on a hot day where it is cool and guestimate where there water is. Even shock horror, climb up the tank and stick your head in to see where the water level is.

All of these methods are boring and don’t involve enough electricity. So I took it upon myself on a wet Sunday afternoon to electrify the tank.

I swear there is nothing in this world that a little bit of CAT5 and a lot of luck won’t solve.

Thanks to all for your support for the ShadyJames appeal!

With over $820 of smasher support we managed to build him a much needed new gaming rig.  Last night Mastercyl, SlapperJoe and myself went over to the de Vries household to deliver the new rig.

Shady was in good spirits!  He now has a long road of recovery ahead to rebuild his Six-pack-of doom.

In other news the scares left from the surgery are big enough to make any girl appreciate them!

All that’s missing from the machine is an official LanSmash case badge!  We’ll be placing one on the machine come SantaSmash in December.  For those that donated to the machine we’ll be offering people to sign his case as well.

Shady was very appreciative and wanted to send out a message of thanks to everyone who’s been wishing him well.  Although now he won’t be able to blame his gaming rig on his TF2 performance.

(JB and ShadyJames – just before JB pulled a knife out to stab him spy style)

And for those that care about the tech, here’s what we managed to cobble together.

- XFX Radeon HD5770 graphics card 1gig 
- Corsair 4GB DDR3 RAM 
- AMD Phenom II X4 965
- Gigabyte GA-880GM-USB3 motherboard 
- 500GB hdd
- Antec 300 Case
- Thermaltake 600W PSU
- Samsung DVDRW drive

and… 1 x official Windows 7 64bit Home Premium that LanSmash kicked in another $120 for bringing the total cost to $971.

Thanks to our generous donators to make this happen.

Contributed smashers:
- Blade
- Misscara 
- pcmattman
-Sensator
- Slapper Joe
- Wilko
- MasterCy
- Stackboy
- RatboyXL
- Lexi
- Plastic
- BunBun
- Scythe
- stoOds
- Pandan
- Yang
- dohzer
- chris actworth
- Graham Reynolds

The harddrive gods however had other plans.

As I was moving documents around my Macbook Pro the system gave me the ‘Spinning Wheel of Death’ and after much waiting I discovered in the console that I was receiving I/O errors.

Oh dear, so when I got home I thought I might try a disk repair to see if it was filesystem related instead of disk drive.

Disk drive failure! I didn’t have the AppleCare disk scanning tools to confirm it but was 99% sure. So I checked it in to a AppleCare repair shop near my house.

I wasn’t too concerned with my work, as majority of my work related files are on the cloud. I use Google Documents for office related documents, I use DropBox for everything else. E-mail is with Gmail, and my contacts/calendar are sync’d as well. A few other bits and pieces were on my iPhone.

Then thought to myself in horror that the all my personal photo’s/documents/movies are stored on one place, my Macbook Pro.

I do have a daily time machine backup run that backups up to an external USB disk drive.

Crazily, my life’s ‘stuff’ was now sitting on one signal disk drive and I just had to hope it had backed up things correctly.

Luckily it had, and the restore did work (quite easily with Time Machine). Now I’m going to look in investing in something like a Drobo to have at least some type of secondary redundancy in case the backup drive dies in the future.

Friends of mine will always hear me preach “Harddrive’s suck, backup your data”. Redundancy is not a backup either. You got to have multiple copies. It’s not a question of if, but when your harddrive will fail. Plan accordingly.

So now I have my precious irreplaceable data back, such as this shot from Wilko from a trip in 2004.

Or this shot with MasterCyl and our LanSmash bulk buy of Battlefield 1942 back in 2003.

Or this shot of Dan helping me assemble a Mini-ITX chassis from scratch with aluminium.

Or this shot of myself and my brother going to StarWars Episode 2 launch in the Brisbane cinema back in 2003.

you get the drift.

Youtube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-2u48dD2EI

Way back in August 2006 I wanted to play in a MoltenCore raid with my then friend Cara. I had about an hour or so to jump in the raid, and I wasn’t ‘attuned’ for the quest.

The process is simple, you have to touch a rock at the end of an instance. Problem is that I didn’t have the time to assemble a team of 5 to do the run before the raid. So I scoured the web and founds some forum posts of players who had been able to do it as a Druid using invisibility stealth and tough bear resilience.

I thought hrmph, maybe I could use an invisibility potion instead of stealth and give it a shot.

At the time though, I had never actually even -finished- that instance ever before. So I was going in kind of blind! I had no time though, so all I had was some forum posts and guild chat to get me through.

Turns out it was a success, and to document my travels I Fraps’d it. After the (failed mind you) Molten Core run that night I quickly cut together something simple on my Powerbook and uploaded it to youtube to show my guildies.

Since then, it’s had over 35,000 views, and to my knowledge one of the first Molten Core Solo attunement run videos. It’s not even titled right, as I used ‘MC’ instead of ‘Molten Core’, so I guess it’s mainly people linking it to each other.

People still comment on it today, mainly people with level 80/70 characters that breeze through it.

One day it will die and become irrelevant, but until then it’s nice to know that some gamers are still being helped out by my hack video.