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:

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

Enjoy

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

The new edition is fully compatible with the old one and its extensions, all the new rules are optional. The robots are plastic now, but they look very nice and finally have a clearly visible direction indicator. I am actually not sure if the boards themselves have changed since I’ve always played with the ‘Armed and Dangerous’ extension mixed in.

New rules and features:

• No more virtual robots at the beginning of a game: A dedicated ‘docking bay’ board is put next to the regular playing boards and has individual starting points for each robot.
• The last player still programming their robot gets a 30-second limit to finish programming (a sand timer comes with the game).
• There is a program sheet for each robot to hold its current program, damage tokens, life tokens and power down marker.

The whole thing comes with a new course manual that contains a selection of courses sorted by difficulty and length. While this is a great addition for the days you just don’t feel creative to design your own course, the manual itself looks a lot less robust than the old one and seems a bit chaotic. People who have never seen the game played before will probably have a harder time understanding how it works. So if you are planning to give the game to someone who has never played, be sure to play a game with them, or at least point them to the web site which includes tutorials. Same goes if you are a new player yourself.

Anyway, it’s really cool that Robo Rally is finally available again, so if you always wanted your own copy or are searching for the perfect geek game, go out and get it. Oh, and while you’re buying robot games, you might want to check out Ricochet Robots (online version here) as well.

from R. Perlman: An Algorithm for Distributed Computation of a Spanning Tree in an Extended LAN (PDF)

On that note: I passed my computer networks + mobile computing exam today … only two more exams and the diploma thesis left. Yay!

There’s still a huge backlog of emails and an even longer todo list. I’m sorry if you haven’t gotten a reply yet, I’m working on that. I also haven’t uploaded any more WWDC pictures (I will, I know some of you are waiting for them), and I haven’t had much time to try out some of the interesting stuff I learned at WWDC yet either. Working on that one, too