tuxtina.de

Favorite Re-Invention No. 1: Hard Drive “Toaster”

If you are good about keeping backups or, simply have a large amount of digital data, you probably also have an extensive collection of external hard drive enclosures, and a power supply for each of them. And of course all of those power supplies are different, so getting your digital photo originals, or restoring a file from backup usually ends with all power supplies lined up on the floor to find the right one for a specific enclosure, and then yet another search for a USB or FireWire cable. Even worse, if you’re sick of this mess, and decide to simply swap out drives in a single enclosure, you’ll probably realize very soon that those enclosures simply are not made for constant drive swapping – pins bend and logic boards loosen.

The solution? A hard drive “toaster” (well, that’s what they look like, though I do hope none ever actually toasts a hard drive). These docking stations usually take 2.5″ and 3.5″ SATA hard drives and connect externally with USB 2.0, and, in some models, eSATA and/or FireWire. And drives can even be hot-swapped. They’re available from a variety of manufacturers such as Thermaltake and Vantec (Vantec also has a two-drive version).

Favorite Re-Invention No. 2: X-Shape Drying Rack

If you use a drying rack outdoors and indoors, you probably know the difficulties of carrying an unfolded rack full of laundry inside through narrow doors when it is starting to rain. I recently fell in love with TVÄTTA (from IKEA – where else would you find something with this name!). The TVÄTTA drying rack (IKEA catalogue) can be folded almost entirely with clothes still on it, so it fits through the narrowest of doors. It may not look like it, but it fits as many clothes as a regular metal/plastic drying rack. And it’s wooden, so it’s looks much nicer indoors:

Realized yesterday that there were still tickets available … I even managed to get a spot all the way to the front in the 2nd row. It was an awesome show

A rather funny incident was the security staff putting up “no fotos/videos/recording” signs on the entrances right before we were let in, but then being asked on the video walls during the show to correctly tag all Flickr/YouTube/Twitter posts with #remmunich so they can go on the tour website

I’ve uploaded full-size versions of some of my photos that make good desktop backgrounds. Click the download link in the sidebar next to each picture to download a full resolution version.

Enjoy

My updated key can be found here or on your favorite key server … same procedure as every year, I guess

After using WordPress for another site for a while, I moved my website to WordPress as well. Maybe I’m going to blog more often if I don’t have to locally generate and then upload my posts every time

At the same time, I decided to finally get rid of the old /archives/yyyy-mm-ddThh-mm-ss.html permalink structure. Of course, permalinks are … sort of … not meant to be changed. I didn’t want to pollute my .htaccess file any further by using individual redirects, and using mod_rewrite was not possible, since the new permalink URLs contain more information than the old URLs did. I ended up writing a shellscript to create an HTML file with a redirect for each of the old archive pages and put those files into the /archives directory.

The only thing that remains to be done is importing the comments from HaloScan. Oh … and apologies to everyone who just had a year’s worth of blog entries pop up in their news reader